And why not? Cruz would be the first to acknowledge that Almodóvar made her — or at least she made the acknowledgment yesterday. “I was almost a little girl when I met him,” she added in her first comments to the crowd. “I was 17. I was too young for the part he was [casting] then, for Kika. He told me he would write something for me in the future, and he did. We worked together for the first time in Live Flesh [in 1997]. And of course he has changed. I have changed. Our relationship has changed and is constantly changing. We’ve gone a through a lot of years together. I can’t compare what I have with Pedro to what I have working on another movie. I’m not not just there working; I’m going through another adventure, and I’m sharing it with somebody who has been present for the most important times of my life. I was a kid in Live Flesh.”

For his part, Almodóvar — who turned 60 last month — has grown undoubtedly more introspective since that first collaboration. Broken Embraces is the director’s most self-referential film in a career full of them: When we meet one-time filmmaker Mateo Blanco (Lluís Homar), he has changed his name to Harry Caine after an accident that claimed his lover’s life and left him blind. Mateo/Harry is confronted by a bundle of elements from his past that may or may not allow for the completion of his final film, which was butchered by a jealous producer whose lover Magdalena (Cruz) had moved on as the leading lady in both the film and Mateo’s life.

“The truth is I wanted to write a fantasy,” Almodóvar explained in the press conference. “To make a film about a director who, during the course of the film, lost one of his senses. And the crew, taking vengeance out on the guy, will then finish the film however they want. But then the film would then turn out to be a great success. That would really be a film about the vanity of directors. But in reality, the origin of this film came from somewhere else. This really comes from something much more simple and direct.”

To elaborate on those roots would probably be to give too much away, particularly because there are too many inspirations informing Broken Embraces. In detailing the nature of creation, the economy of secrets, the cynicism of the film business, and the messy collision of emotion and sensuality, it’s more than even a gifted craftsman like Almodóvar can shape. Story threads interweave clumsily or go nowhere at all, poisoning the melodrama with a discomfiting tidiness. Led by Cruz, whose secretary-turned-actress roils with ambition and lust, Embraces still glows in Almodóvar’s sincere tradition. It just doesn’t shine.

Which doesn’t not make it a must-see, particularly for the autobiographical quips that reveal increasingly more of Almodóvar as Embraces goes on. “I thought you said no sequels, remakes or biopics,” Mateo’s agent mentions when he contemplates writing a script about Arthur Miller’s abandoned son. I asked afterward if that was indeed Almodóvar’s own philosophy toward storytelling.

“Yes, that’s right,” he replied immediately. “I have to say that I have no interest in remakes, nor making sequels nor prequels nor heroic films nor anti-heroic films or superhero films. Everything else, though, is OK.”

Source: Movieline

Film history has given us a myriad of directors who play favorites, who channel their visions through an actor, using them as their vessel: Think John Ford and John Wayne, Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro, Tim Burton and Johnny Depp. In the case of beloved Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar, his inspiration is, beyond a shred of doubt, the lovely Penelope Cruz.

“Our relationship keeps changing and evolving,” says the actress. “It gets to the point where we often know what the other one is thinking. We really have a strong friendship, but it doesn’t mean I get less nervous when I’m around him on set because he’s so honest. And that’s what I love about working with him — his honesty.”

The latest collaboration for the pair is the multilayered romantic tragedy/film noir Broken Embraces, in which Cruz plays Lena, a failed actress who is manipulated into marrying a lecherous millionaire before she is “rescued” by a dashing film director (Lluis Homar). When their professional relationship slips into a passionate sexual and emotional love affair, jealousy and eventually murder rear their hideous heads.

This is easily Cruz’s best performance to date, and it’s a given that she’d work for her director again — and again — at a moment’s notice. “He’s had me as a whore giving birth on a bus, as a nun who gets pregnant from a transsexual. He’s a genius, and when he calls, I drop everything for him. It’s a natural fit.”

Source: Metro

Some years ago, when Penélope Cruz was still on her way up the movie-star ladder, I had a behind-the-scenes adventure with her that gave me a chance to see what the Spanish actress is made of. I had arranged for her to do a cover shoot for Interview, the magazine I then edited, and on the day of the shoot I got a call from the photographer, who was freaking out. She had planned a bunch of fun setups, but the day hadn’t even begun yet and now Cruz’s minders were demanding that the photographer make it snappy: there wasn’t time to do anything but a few basic shots. The huffs and snits were about to spoil the shoot, so I headed over to the location, a nightclub on 14th Street, to see if I could fix things. I quickly sussed out the real reason Cruz’s people were trying to cut the shoot short: she had been summoned for a meeting later that same day with the other Cruise, as in Tom, who back then, in 2000, was still considered Mr. It. I got nowhere with her Spanish rep—apparently our rinky-dink photo shoot was chopped liver in comparison with a meeting with Hollywood’s top gun—so I marched into hair and makeup, where the actress was getting spiffed up for the first picture, and pleaded our case directly. She looked horrified that we’d been made to feel rushed and small, and asked me to tell our photographer that she was honored to be working with her and was committed to posing for all the images she wanted.

The shoot proceeded and the Cruz team backed off till many hours later, when they just couldn’t stand by anymore. “Penélope is very late for her meeting,” one of them complained, explaining that it was to be at the Carlyle hotel, all the way uptown. “Just one more picture,” begged our photographer. This was to be the money shot—an image of Cruz in a tart-yellow Cadillac convertible. Cruz’s people had had it. But still game, and in an effort to keep everyone happy, the actress suggested a bit of multi-tasking: she’d do the photo in the car while it was being driven uptown for her appointment. Perfect solution!

We all rushed outside, only to discover that the vehicle was a mere prop—it didn’t have an engine. (Our budgets were tight, so the photo editor had rented the cheapest Caddy possible.) Someone had the brain wave to put the car back up on the flatbed that had brought it there and drive the whole Rube Goldberg contraption up to the Carlyle. Anybody on Madison Avenue that evening would have caught the hilarious sight of Cruz languishing in a hot-pink Versace dress in the backseat of a car that had been jacked up on the flatbed, surrounded by flashes popping like fireworks. Some of us followed in a car.

The truck pulled up to the Carlyle and Cruz was set free. She flew through the revolving door and into the elevator—at which point I screamed, “You still have the Versace on—we need to give it back!” Penélope jumped out of the elevator and into the ladies’ room off the hotel’s lobby. There, in record time, she did a quick change into her own clothes, handed over the dress, and was back in the elevator with her agent, going up to the floor where her now historic meeting awaited. The whole scene was worthy of a film by her greatest director, Pedro Almodóvar.

Since then I’d run into Cruz a few times (even watched a flirty moment between her and Prince at an awards dinner in L.A.), but we hadn’t really had a chance to talk until we got together for this article. I reminded her of our crazy escapade together and asked her what happened that evening at the Carlyle when she finally opened the door and met Tom Cruise. Not that there was a direct cause-and-effect, but as anybody who follows the real-estate market in Los Angeles will recall, it wasn’t long before Tom was packing up his pj’s and the then Mrs. Cruise, Nicole Kidman, had the family house to herself; soon after that, Tom and Penélope were going in and out of their own driveway. Cruz already had a few American films on her résumé—she’d turned heads as a coked-up sexpot in Blow, opposite Johnny Depp—but the romance with Cruise made her something of a household name in America and put a whole different spin on her image. So I’d long pictured any number of scenarios unfolding on that first evening. Dim the lights. Music, please. Tom seducing Penélope with an invitation to race go-carts or learn how to pilot his plane? Penélope sliding the do not disturb sign on the suite’s front door and throwing Tom onto that big cushy Carlyle bed? Scientology honchos landing on the roof of the Carlyle with their e-meters to measure Penélope’s aura before anybody got any big ideas?

If only it were that interesting. But nope—it seems it was just another night of deal-making. “Tom and Cameron Crowe and, I think, Paula Wagner were there,” says Cruz, remembering a triumvirate of actor, director, and producer. “That evening was when they told me they wanted me to do Vanilla Sky. I was very happy to hear it because I had done Open Your Eyes“—the 1997 Spanish film upon which Vanilla Sky is based—“and I really wanted to do the movie and do it with them.”

It’s funny how things work out. At the time this high-profile job may have seemed like a coup for Cruz, but let’s be honest: I’d rather have gum surgery—even by Cruz, one of whose big lines in the film was “Truthfully, I also work mornings as a dental assistant”—than see that creepy excuse for a film again, a rare misstep for Crowe. It was hardly a move up for Cruz, who was widely panned, not that the script gave her much of a chance. Then again, at least in terms of ambition, Vanilla Sky was something of a peak in Cruz’s early Hollywood career, which also included the likes of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Gothika, All the Pretty Horses, Sahara, and Bandidas. Some of her American films may have looked good on paper, with impressive talent attached, but to varying degrees they just didn’t have it, even though Cruz never disses them. Hollywood, in the view of one director, “didn’t know what to do with her.”

From today’s perspective—when Cruz is at the top of her game, in demand in Europe and the States, both critically respected and, increasingly, a box-office draw—the disappointing days seem long ago indeed. With phenomenal performances in some recent winners, including last year’s Woody Allen gem, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, thanks to which she now has an Oscar on her mantel, Cruz is poised to become a new member of the tiny firmament of actresses who began their careers in a language other than English and went on to become truly international stars: the Marlene Dietrichs, Greta Garbos, Ingrid Bergmans, Sophia Lorens, Anouk Aimées, Catherine Deneuves, Jeanne Moreaus, and Liv Ullmanns. Like some of those actresses, Cruz isn’t cookie-cutter pretty—she even has a bit of a schnoz—but her unusual features come together in a memorable aria of real beauty. As Woody Allen says, “I don’t like to look at Penélope directly. It is too overwhelming.”

This month, he’ll have to work hard at ducking her. Cruz will be showing off her talents in two highly anticipated films, one European, one American, very different in tone but which share a theme: Pedro Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces, a love letter to the art (versus commerce) of filmmaking, which represents her fourth collaboration with the Spanish director; and Rob Marshall’s all-star singing, dancing, showstopping Nine, a tale about a film director’s artistic crises and his refound passion for making movies. This twofer—continued respect in her own country and ever rising stardom in the States—is big news for Spanish performers. In the past only Spanish-American Rita Hayworth (born Margarita Carmen Cansino) got anywhere near stardom in Hollywood, and changing her name was just the beginning of what she had to do.

Such a rarefied, coveted position in the entertainment world would have seemed way beyond her reach when Penélope was a little girl growing up in the 1970s and 80s in Alcobendas, just outside Madrid, watching her parents break their backs trying to provide the basics for the family. There were three kids, Penélope, then Mónica, and eventually Eduardo. Both parents worked six days a week—her dad, Eduardo, in the family hardware store; her mother, Encarna, at her own hair salon. Penélope was very much “on watch” at the salon, where she and Mónica hung out every day. She says, “It was my first acting school. I would pretend to be doing my homework, but I was really observing the women. I found their behavior mesmerizing—what they were hiding, how they left feeling a little different after they’d been helped to become a little more like whom they wanted to look like. They treated the place a little bit like a psychologist’s office. They would share all their secrets.”

It sounds like Penélope herself was always something of a performer. When I asked Mónica if there was any incident from their childhood that might have foreshadowed what her sister would become, she replied, “Now, when we watch videos from when we were little we fall about laughing because it was so obvious. Whenever Penélope appeared in front of the camera she was acting or singing or dancing or all of them at once.”

By the time Cruz entered high school, in 1987, she was taking the bus or metro into the city at night to go to ballet classes. Sometimes she’d figure out how to finagle a ticket to whatever movie was showing at the nearby cinema (at 13 she was still too young to be allowed to see some of them officially). She was already an Almodóvar fan, having watched his earlier movies over and over on the family Betamax—“the darker they were, the more interested I was”—and one night in 1990 she caught his Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, a loony kidnapping/love story/sex-and-bondage caper starring Victoria Abril. That was it. Epiphany time. “That was the day I decided to be an actress,” Cruz says. “I fell in love. I’d found what I wanted to do. I really didn’t want to have to be in an office. I was a good student, but not happy. I thought, I have nobody in my family and no friends who can make a living out of anything related to an artistic profession, but I want to try. I decided to look for an agent.”

Hound an agent is more like it. Apparently she was and is still a bit of a bossy thing—“In our family,” Mónica says, “all the women have a little sergeant in them.” Penélope did her research and looked up Katrina Bayonas, who remains her agent to this day. But after her first audition, Bayonas turned her away for the simple reason that Cruz was too young. “She said, ‘Go home and come back in a few years,’” remembers Cruz with a laugh. “I came back the next week and auditioned again.” A third try, not long after, did the trick.

Her first two movies, both released in 1992, were Belle Epoque, a costume drama, and Bigas Luna’s Jamón, Jamón (variously translated as A Tale of Ham and Passion; Ham, Ham; and, my favorite, Salami, Salami). The latter was a jaw-dropper—a wild and crazy concoction of camp, kitsch, melodrama, humor, class politics, and a whole lot of sex, starring a decidedly studly Javier Bardem and a va-va-va-voom Cruz, who turned 17 during the filming, having lied about her age to the producers to get the part, and lied again to her parents about the nature of the picture to win their approval. In the film, she and Bardem make the phrase “on-screen chemistry” seem mild. Call the fire brigade! (The heat seems to sizzle offscreen too: Cruz and Bardem are now very much a couple.) Her bold, unself-conscious embrace of a role that required her to show a lot of skin and schnog or schtup more than her fair share of the film’s men surprised a lot of people, including her idol, Almodóvar, who made a congratulatory call and brought her in to read for his 1993 film Kika. Cruz says she was very nervous auditioning a scene in the director’s kitchen, but that didn’t stop her from characteristically trying to convince him she was old enough to play the main character, who was supposed to be more than twice her real age. Almodóvar, no monkey, didn’t buy it, but made it plain he wanted to work with her in the future.

The next four years saw Cruz acting in a dozen European movies as well as spending a couple of years in New York City taking ballet classes, going to the gym, shopping at D’Agostinos (which she still loves), and taking English lessons. She had her eye on making it on the bigger American stage, but at the same time her anonymity in Manhattan must have been a relief after half of Spain had seen her nipples in Jamón, Jamón. Besides, how could anyone miss the charms of New York living opposite an old-time gay bar in the West Village called Two Potato, as Cruz did? Perfect training for the next Almodóvar call.

In 1996, when the director handed her a role in Live Flesh—a young prostitute with a big personality who gives noisy, painful, primal birth on a public bus on the way to the hospital—the result was unforgettable, and the beginning of a collaboration as essential to movie history as the hookup between George Cukor and Katharine Hepburn or Woody Allen and Diane Keaton. Cruz’s knockout performance—so vulnerable and visceral and sad—takes up the first eight minutes or so of Live Flesh, and then she is gone, but she stays in the mind. Even Almodóvar got more than he was counting on. “She had a kind of strength that was earthy and eternal—surprising in someone so young,” he says. “Many people have told me that they called her after that because they were so impressed by those eight minutes. Eight minutes of real talent is a lot. Judi Dench won an Oscar for those eight minutes in Shakespeare in Love.”

This collaboration came to full flower in her next Almodóvar project, 1999’s All About My Mother, the director’s highly personal, contemporary version of an old-fashioned “women’s film.” Cruz’s ability to carry off the wild twists of plot and tone—the mark of any Almodóvar film—is absolutely convincing. She shows a perfect ear for comedy, but when her character, a young nun in training who is pregnant with the child of a sexed-up transvestite, weeps as she finds out that the oaf has made her H.I.V.-positive, it breaks your heart.

And then came her first foray into Hollywood, though it’s not as if Cruz turned her back on Europe. She remembers, “When I did my first movie in America, I already had my return ticket to Spain.” But the American films were a kind of test of how big a traditional Hollywood star Cruz could be. Whatever else they lacked, what those films did have were major leading men, which led to a sequence of major liaisons, reportedly including Matt Damon, Nicolas Cage, Matthew McConaughey, as well as Tom Cruise. The notion began to circulate around L.A. that she wasn’t safe with any leading man—or was it the other way around? She also struck up an enduring friendship with Salma Hayek; attempts by the industry to pit these two “spitfires” against each other for parts only strengthened their bond.

I asked Almodóvar what he thinks went wrong during her period of blah American films. While he’d rather not appear to be taking potshots at American filmmakers, many of whom he admires, he is a truth teller. He said, “It was bad luck for Penélope, because some of the movies were very ambitious, but this happens. They only saw her as a beautiful girl. It is the problem with the market, the agents, the studios, the film industry as a whole that labels actors in a way that is not very subtle at all. The problem is that it happened with 10 or 12 movies for Penélope, and it could have been the end.” Then he laughed: “But I was there to save her. I’m joking now.”

He may be joking, but in fact it was Almodóvar’s 2006 Volver that relaunched Cruz as an actress, not just a movie star. He has described his connection to Cruz during a movie’s shooting as if they “were bound together by a catheter.” Her performance as Raimunda—a daughter who is alienated from her mother and who, by the by, helps cover up her own daughter’s act of murder—was full of gravitas, humor, and surprises. Almodóvar even gave Cruz a prosthetic rear end, which was as transformative as the fake nose that Stephen Daldry gave Nicole Kidman when she played Virginia Woolf in The Hours. Volver earned Cruz a best-actress Oscar nomination—the first ever for a Spanish actress—and it also made other directors sit up and take notice, including Woody Allen, who wrote the part in Vicky Cristina Barcelona for her after seeing Volver. Cruz’s character in Allen’s film, Maria Elena, a painter who is a loose cannon as well as an irresistible temptress—she seduces her ex (Bardem; ah, him again) and then beds his new girlfriend (Scarlett Johansson)—really gave the actress room to show her stuff. She certainly did not hold back on the pheromones. Regarding her famous make-out session with Johansson, I asked who was better: Scarlett or Charlize Theron, whom Cruz smooched in the 2004 film Head in the Clouds. Cruz just laughed. “No matter how I answer that I will be in trouble. Both were pretty beautiful partners.”

Not only is Allen effusive in his assessment of Cruz’s ability, he also seems to have liked the woman herself, after his fashion: “I never thought about her as a person, because when I work I’m not interested in the person except as a performer. When she turned out to be lovely, that was nice, but I would have been O.K. if she had been a bitch.” Perhaps most consequential to Cruz’s career is the fact that Allen tuned in not just to her fieriness but to her fine comedic talent as well—the first American director to do so successfully. “She has a natural sense of humor,” he says. Because of Cruz’s looks and the fact that the camera loves her as much as it does, her comedic flair has often been left untapped. But she could just be the great 21st-century screwball talent, the Jean Harlow or Carole Lombard of our time.

Almodóvar uses this ability very much in his own way, in combination with her strengths as a dramatic actress. One sees Cruz walk a tightrope of emotions in Broken Embraces. Her character, Lena, is the girlfriend of a controlling bully with big bucks. She dreams of becoming an actress, so boyfriend finances a film for her. The only catch: she takes up with the director—with tragic consequences. Cruz plays Lena with a pitch-perfect combination of high drama and understated camp; it is one of the most demanding roles she has taken on. She says, “Pedro would push me to the limit. He really knows how to press all my buttons. You can only go into something like that when it’s somebody you really trust. I always feel like he’s my safety net. Like I can fly and go far, because he’s going to catch me. The biggest [panic] attack I had during the movie was the scene where, for the first time, Lena makes the decision to try to become an actress. I don’t know what happened to me that day, but before and after we filmed I could not breathe.” I wonder who she reminded herself of?

Cruz says the role she has always coveted is Carmen. I think of the moment in the opera when Carmen appears and the men ask her when she will love them. She replies, “Love is a rebellious bird that no one can tame.” It may be Cruz’s refrain, too. No one has yet stepped up to the plate to let Cruz have a go at her favorite heroine, but when Rob Marshall’s Nine comes out, in November, audiences will have a chance to witness Cruz’s skills as a hoofer and gauge her gifts as a vocalist when she belts out the number “A Call from the Vatican.” The film, an adaptation of the 1982 Broadway musical, is a distant relative of Federico Fellini’s film 81?2—same story, very different feel. The company Cruz keeps in this mostly female cast is nothing to sneeze at: Sophia Loren, Nicole Kidman, Judi Dench, Marion Cotillard, Fergie, and Kate Hudson, with Daniel Day-Lewis holding it all together as the film director played by Marcello Mastroianni in Fellini’s semi-autobiographical original.

By all accounts Cruz fit right in with the international sisterhood that evolved during the shoot at Shepperton Studios, just outside London. In addition to bonding on set, the cast had its own evolving version of a sorority house—let’s call it Phi Beta Actress—with Loren, Cotillard, Fergie, and Cruz all shacking up in the same apartment building. Loren, for her part, is unstinting in her praise for Cruz. She says, “Penélope is very accurate in her work. She wants to be very precise about what the director wants. And she takes her career very seriously, which she should. I think she loves what she does and it shows on the screen. She has become a real friend. We talked a lot about life and our careers. I talked about De Sica, she talked about Almodóvar. When it was my last day she came to my dressing room. She was crying, and I was crying. This is the first time that I have left a film crying because we got so upset about leaving each other.”

Marshall says he considered Cruz for each of the female parts because of her range, but eventually he and she focused on Carla, the mistress—touching, loving, and a bit of a nutjob. Cruz seems to have wanted the filming to go on forever. Marshall remembers, “She’d be the last one in that soundstage working, and I’d have to say, ‘Penélope, it’s over.’ The day we were shooting her big song, ‘A Call from the Vatican,’ she was out there working so hard. In the middle of the number she does all this work with ropes—she was swinging on them and it was scary and she had formed calluses and her hands were bleeding. Daniel was screaming to her from the back of the soundstage that she is a warrior. We had told her she should wear gloves, but she was like, ‘No, no, no—I have to feel it.’ There’s this huge sheath of pink satin that she slides down on. When we finished the number she had disappeared behind the satin and was in tears. I said, ‘Are you unhappy with what you did?’ She said, ‘No, no. It’s that it is over, and I loved every second. I want to install ropes in my bedroom so I don’t have to let go of it.’?” The blisters were worth it. Cruz takes what could have been a generic tits-and-torch number and turns it into a highly personal tour de force.

‘Penélope was born to be an actress,” says Almodóvar, who knows her better than anyone in the business. “She is someone who is extremely emotional, and if she was not an actress it could be a problem for her. It’s luck she has chosen a profession that allows her to express something that would be too much for a normal person. Otherwise she would suffer a lot. And even now maybe she suffers too much.” Apparently this tendency goes way back. “I’ve always been a worrier,” says Cruz. “Since I was a little girl I’ve always felt that if I had a moment of peace I’d wonder: Are you sure you can afford to feel like this?”

This anxiety is fascinating, coming from someone who is so fearless on-screen. One senses it in the way she clams up when asked about Bardem. I knew she’d been mum about her high-profile assignations for years, so I was expecting her to forget her very good English when I went anywhere near the Pratesis. Still, I was surprised by her mantra-like response: We can’t go there …we can’t go there … It’s not that she pretends the relationship doesn’t exist—one can’t really do that successfully these days, not when everything ends up on the Internet, true and false. It’s more that she is protective of her privacy to a point that is striking, even for performers who don’t like to kiss and tell. (Her wariness of the press may date in part from the early notoriety she earned for Jamón, Jamón.) Her discipline about not even confirming what she knew I already knew—and what I knew that she knew I knew—was both touching and almost comic. There were long pauses and big eyes. (She slipped up only once. I brought up a U2 concert that she and Bardem had attended in Paris, mentioning that I’d heard she was playing air guitar during some of the songs. She squealed with delight, saying, “Javier is even better at air guitar!”) My most nosey Parker question—one that I felt it was my duty as a reporter to ask—was whether the widespread rumors that there was a wee Cruz-Bardem on the way were true. (The blogs have been a riot with their speculation about baby bumps and “strategically placed pleats.”) Here, unlike before, there was no telling silence from Cruz. Instead she answered in the negative but in a rather baroque, roundabout way, detailing how Almodóvar had tried, to no avail, to put that rumor to rest when a journalist asked him about it recently on a red carpet.

She and Bardem, who is famously private, are probably Spain’s two greatest living actors and they’re spicy, which makes them fodder for many a paparazzo’s long-range lens; they seem to be trying hard to figure out how to have a lasting relationship with each other, and not with the world as the third party, as so many Hollywood couples do now. But that doesn’t mean Cruz locks herself up in a tower. For our talks for this piece, she suggested we meet at the Boathouse in Central Park, a very public venue. I imagined her being pursued by tourists and us having to get in a boat to be able to talk in private. So instead, we ended up sitting in my back garden in Greenwich Village. But the boat capsizing would have been a perfectly Almodóvar-esque sequel to our adventure years ago with the flatbed. Penélope making a splash yet again.

Source: VF.com

The picture, Almodovar’s fourth collaboration with Cruz, which is in competition at the Cannes film festival, recalls “films noirs,” classic comedies and screen sirens of the past.

It includes a scene from Roberto Rossellini’s Viaggio In Italia starring Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders and the film-within-a-film revisits Almodovar’s 1988 hit Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown.
“I fully believe that cinema can make life more perfect,” the Oscar winner told reporters recently after Broken Embraces was warmly applauded at a press screening.

Cruz plays Lena, a secretary, who ends up in a relationship with her wealthy boss Ernesto. Also an aspiring actress, she is spotted by the charismatic director Mateo Blanco with whom she quickly falls in love.

When Mateo loses his sight in a car accident, he adopts his pseudonym Harry Caine and reinvents himself completely in order to avoid the painful memories of the past.

Almodovar likened his character’s experience to that of his home country, saying Spain rightly buried its past after the end of fascism in the 1970s.

“At that time, it was necessary to forget the past. Spain has been a democratic country for over 30 years now… Things have changed a great deal. The time has come to recover these memories from the past. It is even indispensable to do so.”

ACTING CHALLENGE

Cruz said playing Lena as well as Lena’s character in the film-within-a-film was a test of her acting skills.

“The film in the film wasn’t easier, I’d say quite the opposite, it was even more difficult,” said the 35-year-old, who has been battling a bout of ’flu in Cannes.

“Playing the same scene several times, once well and being a good actress and then playing it badly, is extremely subtle, very tricky,” added the star, who won a best supporting actress Oscar for Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona. “Sometimes on the same day I had to go from one character to another … so it was all a little bit confused.”

Asked to compare working with Almodovar and Allen, she said, “They could not be more different … With Pedro, we always rehearse for a long time before. Woody doesn’t like to rehearse. He really likes everybody to improvise. It’s really a very, very different way of approaching things.”

Almodovar is best known for strong female roles and he again paid tribute to the women who raised him. But the director, a favourite in Cannes, who has yet to win the Palme d’Or, said men would have more prominence from now on.

“So far my male characters intimidated me somewhat because for a male character, I had to take myself as a reference, but now I feel less and less intimidated and so you are going to find more and more male characters in my films.” Almodovar said he did not expect to win Cannes this year.

“I am going to be leaving Cannes on Friday so I don’t get the impression that I am waiting for an award,” he said, before adding: “But I am quite prepared to come back on Sunday even if it’s to get an award for the best actor or the best director.”

Also featuring in Cannes recently was Italian competition entry Vincere, directed by Marco Bellocchio. The film, based on the true story of a mistress cast aside by Benito Mussolini, offers a different perspective on the Italian fascist leader.

Source: Screen India

The star shot Broken Embraces with fellow Spaniard Pedro Almodovar at the same time as making Vicky Cristina Barcelona with Woody Allen.

She said: “It was good to be able to pass each of them messages – they seem to like each other very much.”

Penelope, who has made four films with Almodovar, said the two directors’ approaches could not be more different.

While Almodovar gets his actors to rehearse scenes thoroughly and likes to re-shoot sequences in different ways, she said, Allen prefers having virtually no rehearsal or preparation, and encourages improvisation.

“It’s a very very different way of approaching film,” she said.

Broken Embraces, which tells the story of a film-maker who goes blind after an accident, and his struggle to re-engage with life, is in competition for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

Source: The Press Association

That’s what the Oscars nominee told Gold Derby tonight when I called her in Madrid to ask her what she’d do next Sunday when this derby race is done, the victor is known and, win or lose, she can finally catch her breath.

Penelope Cruz has four extra tickets to the ceremony, so she’ll be at the Academy Awards with her brother, sister, mom (dad got to go to Golden Globes and BAFTA) “and one of my best friends from Spain from when I was a little girl,” she said. “I want my family to have a good night. To win, it would be an amazing thing! But I want to enjoy the night and the people around me.”

But tonight she coped with the pre-Oscars jitters by drinking herbal tea as we gabbed on the phone. She leaves Madrid in the morning to head to L.A. and begin her exciting week.

Penelope Cruz shared such thoughts with us plus the details of her schedule for the week ahead in L.A. She’s got lots of fittings scheduled to pick out the right dress for her march up the Oscars’ red carpet plus such work-related gigs as a photo shoot for her upcoming movie, Nine, directed by Rob Marshall (Chicago), based on the Tony Award-winning musical.

“For me this has already been bigger than anything I could ever dream of,” she told us. “I started working in Spain when I was 16. To be in this situation twice, with the other nomination for Volver, I am the first person to be surprised and overwhelmed . . . . Whatever happens, it’s been a great adventure from the making of Vicky Cristina Barcelona to the great surprises that came with it and after.”

Oh, yeah, and by the way, Penelope Cruz proves she has great cyber-taste. “I am a big fan of your website,” she says. “I do look at the The Envelope, but I try not to read about myself… ”

Source: LA Times

The Vicky Cristina Barcelona star has revealed she has had two breakdowns, the first when she was just 17.

She said: “I’ve worked myself to exhaustion in the past but now my life feels more balanced. Once my life was all about work, yet now I do take time for myself.

“It was a hard lesson to learn that sometimes it is so much healthier to say no even to a role that you like.”

The 34-year-old actress had her second mental breakdown in 2002, after back-to-back film shoots for Woman on Top, All The Pretty Horses, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and Blow.

Now, she only accepts roles that really challenge her acting skills.

Her latest performance – she play the volatile and self-destructive Maria Elena, a woman who is locked in a complicated love triangle with Javier Bardem and Scarlet Johansson in Woody Allen’s latest comedy – is no exception.

She adds: “I think that type of fear is what I am always looking for as an actress. The more distance there is between the character and myself the better.

“I never need to be like my characters, to agree with them ever, I just need to understand them.”

Source: My Park Mag & Showbiz Now

For the issue, actors were photographed with little make-up and hairstyling and with candid imagery. Cruz was photographed on the set of Nine, she’s seen rehearsing a dance number for the very first time! She’s also snapped back in New York before what would become her Gotham Award win. The images are stunning; just candid and gorgeous!

Other celebrities featured include Kate Winslet (honored for The Reader and Revolutionary Road), Robert Downey Jr. (Tropic Thunder and Iron Man), Kat Dennings (Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist), Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler), Sean Penn (Milk), Brad Pitt (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) and Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon). Winslet is on the cover.

The Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s Outstanding Performer of the Year Award for 2009 goes to Penélope Cruz, in all the grace of her countenance’s exquisite thematic harmony. A classic beauty whose dark good looks and luminous brown eyes recall the Golden Age of Hollywood, the Spanish-born actress is in her mid thirties now, and both her career and her appeal have matured. The sensual excitement of her early years is still very much in evidence, but Cruz’s recent work is that of someone who knows not only that she is beautiful, but also what that can mean in a world where beauty is not the only important thing.

In the last three years, Cruz has gone from being a thinking man’s pin-up to something much less common: a world-class movie star. Her two films from 2008, Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Elegy, have together brought her new accolades such as this one, along with a nomination for best supporting actress at the Golden Globes, and a shot at another nomination for the Academy Award, for which she was already nominated once, in the category of Best Actress for her 2007 role as Raimunda in Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver.

Cruz is a hard worker, known to directors and fellow actors alike for her intensity and perfectionism. Adaptable to a wide range of styles, she acts with equal effectiveness in Spanish and in English, and handles fast-paced shooting schedules and demanding leading roles with extraordinary artistic control and vision. Contemporary film acting is hardly a homogenous experience for someone operating on her level and traveling in these professional circles. Directors frequently take radically different approaches to the filmmaking process, and, as a result, comparable assignments don’t necessarily resemble one another.

For instance, compare Volver and Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Almodóvar rehearses for weeks or even months before shooting, whereas Allen often doesn’t rehearse his actors at all. Cruz is in nearly every scene of Volver, which runs just longer than two hours, and was required by Almodóvar to submit to an exacting set of rehearsals. On Vicky Cristina Barcelona, in which she plays Maria Elena—a gorgeous, romantic, and emotionally unstable Spanish artist—Cruz auditioned for the film by speaking with Allen for what she claims was “no more than 40 seconds.” She then waited a few weeks before receiving a script, which she studied on her own for several months before arriving on the set in Spain.

The intelligence and honor with which she invests Maria Elena is due to the power of the interpretation of the character that Cruz brought to the film. As the ex-wife of Javier Bardem’s character, the painter Juan Antonio, Cruz’s Maria Elena enters the story at the halfway point and still manages to steal every scene she’s in from the two formidable younger actresses who have been playing the leads from the start—Scarlett Johansson as Cristina and Rebecca Hall as Vicky. Johansson does a great job, but even Cruz’s silent reaction shots are more likely to elicit laughter than Johansson’s lines of dialogue.

At the film’s heart are two dazzling performances by Cruz and Bardem that put the English language to a fearsome test of mettle against its seemingly more expressive rival, Spanish. In the scenes at Juan Antonio’s studio when Maria Elena first arrives, she keeps speaking Spanish in front of Cristina, even though Juan Antonio expressly forbids her to speak anything but English out of politeness to his lover. The result is an intricate and amazing dance of words, with both Spanish characters crossing in and out of their native tongue in such elegant and unpredictable ways that the viewer is drawn ever deeper into their emotional world.

In Elegy, Cruz plays Consuela Castillo, a young Cuban woman who has an affair with her professor at Columbia, played by Ben Kingsley. Critics have been less unanimous in their praise for Elegy, but the growing consensus is that Cruz shows up Kingsley. Although the timely release of several trailers that indicated how willing Cruz remains to get naked in front of the camera may have had something to do with its gaining distribution in this country, in the end what people are buzzing about in relation to this picture is not Cruz’s nudity but her naturalism.

In fact, the fascinating thing about her recent roles is how lit up they are from within by Penélope Cruz’s singular talent. Perhaps it was something that happened when she absorbed the joyfully absurd aesthetic of her mentor Almodóvar, or maybe it is something that would have arrived on its own, but Cruz has begun to play these rather traditional roles in a way that is very special and that feels new. Constantly playing against any tendency to caricature her subjects, she describes her method as “defending what the character values and preserving her reality.” In the process of taking these women’s dilemmas to heart, Cruz melds drama and comedy into a complex and indivisible unity.

Her recent performances are exemplary of a development in genre that will only become more prevalent as film grows into the 21st century—movies acted as drama, but that play as subtle comedy. For directors like Almodóvar and Allen, this confluence of genre reflects a profound appreciation for the ways that human beings fail to achieve clarity about the most central issues in their lives.

A concern for the suffering of people who are confused by life and sex and love is something that Cruz shares with her directors, and her feeling for it informs her acting in both of the pictures being honored here in Santa Barbara. But what constitutes suffering in the life of one of the world’s most glamorous and successful women? One word—the Oscars. Being nominated two years ago was both the high point of Cruz’s career thus far and her most exhaustingly emotional ordeal as a celebrity. What with all the tension, and the chance that her nomination would remain just that—a nomination and not a statuette—there was only one thing for the nervous actress to do. On the way to the Academy Awards, already in her gown and jewels, Penélope Cruz stopped at In-n-Out and ordered a double-double. It’s that kind of carefree attitude that we can’t wait to share when she arrives in Santa Barbara for her tribute at the Arlington.

Penélope Cruz was be honored at SBIFF 2009 with the Outstanding Performer of the Year Award on Saturday, January 24, at the Arlington Theatre.

Source: SBIFF

I spoke to Cruz over the weekend. She was calling from somewhere in the hills of Los Angeles, on a cell-phone. At first, the signal died, and I thought, oh well, modern technology! But Penelope didn’t give up. She got to a landline. Cruz has the sort of vital personality that leaps right off the screen, and right through phone wires too. She pulls you in. (When I met her in the flesh a few years back, I was blown away by her good looks, her lively intelligence and her energy.) It’s hard to believe this vibrant star was thought to be something of a “flop” in American films, with the early disappointments of All The Pretty Horses and Vanilla Sky. Also hard to believe she was ever involved with Tom Cruise. That friendship, which blossomed in the wake of his divorce from Nicole Kidman, was tabloid fodder only nine years ago, but it seems like 20, somehow. She says she is thrilled to have been nominated again. (Her first bid for Oscar was 2006′s Volver, directed by her old friend and mentor, Pedro Almodovar.) “Although, I have to call my family everyday, in Spain, to calm them down, so they don’t get too hopeful.” When I remark that “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” wasn’t a “typical” Woody Allen movie, and that he seems quite the revitalized auteur over the past couple of years, Penelope protests. “Really? I think he’s always re-inventing himself, over and over. He can do anything. Compare, ‘Scoop’ to ‘Purple Rose of Cairo’ or to ‘Hannah and Her Sisters’ or ‘Bullets Over Broadway’”… Penelope gives such a compelling dissertation on the work of Woody Allen, I finally concede, lamely, “Well, I guess it’s that he’s changed locale. Most of his movies used to be set in New York. Now he’s gone European.” Penelope allows that yes, I’m right on that one.

The actress speaks English perfectly, though with a strong, charming, accent. She recalls with horror her first adventures in American moviemaking (she was already a great star in Spain.) “I’d studied French for years. But I had no English, nothing, zero. It was terrible not to be able to really understand your director or your co-stars. I took a crash course, and luckily I picked it up quickly.” Cruz took ballet for nine years at Spain’s National Academy. With that training, has she ever played a dancer? “No, I haven’t. But I did get to dance and sing and a lot else in ‘Nine.’ I do the number ‘A Phone Call to the Vatican’ which has me performing with ropes. I hadn’t danced at all in 14 years. I practiced that number every day, five hours a day from August to November. When we finally shot it, I was so sad when it was all over. It had become part of my life. Now I’m thinking of hanging some ropes around my house, just to remind me of the joy I had with that.” Penelope laughs heartily when I say ropes hanging from her ceiling might alarm first-time visitors!

Of the filming itself she says, “It was an incredible experience, because I am in a blinding spotlight, and I couldn’t see beyond it. It was all darkness, and I’m performing on a mirrored platform. All I could think was, I’m never going to do this again, which made me unhappy, I’m terrified and the fear is kind of beautiful, and I so don’t want to disappoint Rob Marshall, the director.”

The movie Nine, an adaptation of Tommy Tune’s Broadway hit ( based on Fellini’s famous film “8½”) also stars Sophia Loren, Judi Dench, Nicole Kidman, Marion Cotillard, Stacy Ferguson and Kate Hudson. It is one of 2009′s most eagerly awaited events. And it is another Weinstein Company effort. Ah, yes, the world is breathing easier!

I said to Penelope that I’d always thought a dance background — no matter what you eventually end up doing — improves discipline in general. “You are right! A dancer’s life is hard. And so is an actor’s, though most people don’t see it that way. They only see the glamour. But that discipline helps when I have to work 17 hours a day, or it’s cold, or hot or horribly uncomfortable in some way. Or just boring, which fimmaking often is. I feel I am more prepared to face an on set adversity.”

Up Next for Penelope is Broken Embraces, once again paired with Pedro Almodovar. She raves over her friend, “He is a genius. He writes the most incredible roles for women. In this one, ‘Broken Embraces,’ I am an actress playing two roles, one comedy, one drama, one real-life, one the movie she is making. A movie-within-a-movie. It’s complex, mind-blowing. I am so lucky to have him in my life.

“He is ITAL already ITAL writing another screenplay. He never stops. And he never compromises. He is totally honest. I think he would give his life for his movies; he is that passionate. He loves all movies, and sees everything. We are ITAL both ITAL obsessed with movies, actually.”

I ask if, in her passion for movies she can still lose herself in them? Forget that she herself is an actress?

“Oh, yes I can. I don’t think I will ever lose that. Especially if the movie is good. Then I never think about the technique or the camera or lighting or I wonder how many takes ITAL that ITAL took, or why wasn’t this a close-up or long-shot. I become an ordinary audience.”

But, what if the movie isn’t good? Penelope laughs, “Oh, God. Then I totally exhaust myself picking it apart. I leave the theater feeling I’d just come off that set, on a bad day. It’s much easier for me when the movie is good!”

I congratulate Penelope again on her nomination. I ask, because it’s the tiresome but necessary question, if it ITAL really ITAL matters to her if she wins? “Hmmm…what can I say? It’s not a lie that it is an honor to be nominated, and if I don’t win, I won’t be any less honored, but…look, ask anyone who is nominated. No matter what you think you feel about awards, when you’re there, sitting in that seat, with those people, all dressed up–ITAL of course ITAl you want to win!”

Source: Variety

Spanish beauty Penelope revealed that the director was so concerned about a mark that had mysteriously appeared on his hand that he left the set to go to see a dermatologist.

The director had been filming a scene between Penelope and co-star Scarlett where they kiss in a darkroom for the film Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which premiered last night at London Film Festival’s Sky Movies HD Gala.

“Everyone’s been talking about this kiss between me and Scarlett but on the day all the attention was on Woody and the stain on his hand,” she said.

“Even when we resumed filming he was still looking at it!”

Meanwhile, the director was forced to skip the premiere because it clashed with his children’s half-term.

A source told Metro: “Usually he brings his whole family with him when he gooes to premieres but because it clashed with half-term he had to miss it.”

None of the film’s other stars Scarlett, Javier Bardem, and Rebecca Hall attended the premiere.

Source: Metro.co.uk

The movie, which also stars Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall, is showing as part of the BFI 52nd London Film Festival. It concerns the tangled love lives of Americans abroad in Barcelona.

Cruz plays Maria, the tempestuous ex-wife of a free-spirited artist in the film, which is directed by Woody Allen and was shown at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year.

Cruz, wearing a black L’Wren dress, said: “I fell in love with the character.”

She added that it was “amazing” to work with Allen.

The Sky Gala screening in London’s Leicester Square was being followed by a Sky Gala party in West London.

Source: Press Association

Penélope Cruz doesn’t like talking about her personal life, and blames the internet. “I have a big reluctance to talk about anything that might later be misconstrued,” she says.

“I was not worried before, but since the internet, every time you do an interview, three hundred other people are going to take that story and turn it into something else. I wish I could be more relaxed and funnier in interviews but I can’t because I always regret it afterwards. I take my work very seriously and I don’t want it to be manipulated into something else.”

Another reason for her reluctance is probably her aversion to being asked about her becoming romantically involved with some of her leading men. To her irritation, reports of that aspect of her life have often taken prominence over discussions of her acting, and she has always denied suggestions that she has deliberately set her sights on her male co-stars.

For the past year, the 34-year-old actress has been in a settled relationship with her most recent leading man, Javier Bardem, 39, her fellow Spaniard and multi-award-winning actor whom she first met when she was 16 when they worked together in the film Jamón, jamón and who co-stars in her new movie, Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

In between, they have appeared in three other films together, and while they are reluctant to talk about their relationship, friends of the couple say this could be the one that lasts.
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When they have finished promoting Vicky Cristina Barcelona, they plan to take a house together in London, where Cruz will spend five months rehearsing and filming the musical Nine, with a cast that includes Nicole Kidman, Daniel Day-Lewis, Judi Dench, Sophia Loren and Marion Cotillard.

Cruz, who studied classical ballet for 10 years, auditioned four times for one of three roles in the movie before director Rob Marshall cast her as Carla, the sexy mistress. Rehearsals begin later this month and will continue until shooting begins in October.

“I can’t wait to start – I’m so excited,” she says. “It will be hours of dancing, hours of singing and I can’t wait to have my feet bleeding again, like when I was a dancer, because I know that feeling.”

We meet in Los Angeles a few hours before she and her co-stars, Bardem, Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall, are due to meet up with Woody Allen on the red carpet for the premiere of Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which many critics say is one of Allen’s best movies for a long time.

The petite actress did not learn English until she was 19, and she talks quickly with a strong accent.

“I wanted to be able to work in other places, not just in my country, so I learned English late and when I was 23 I got my first movie in English, Hi-Lo Country with Stephen Frears and I learned my lines phonetically,” she says.

“I didn’t have any command of the language and it was very painful because I didn’t know what people were saying. I was just thinking what I had to say and concentrating on being clear and understood.

“It was very frustrating and that pushed me to spend a lot of time studying with different teachers.

So now when I am on the set and working in English I feel happy that I don’t have to be thinking about the words because when I do that, it takes away a lot of the freedom and the pleasure of acting. I’m happy that nobody complains about the accent any more and I worked hard for that and I’m still working on it.”

Cruz grew up in Alcobendas, a working-class suburb on the outskirts of Madrid. Her father, a car mechanic, is divorced from her beautician mother but she remains close to them both. After studying ballet, she auditioned at 15 for a talent agent, who signed her immediately.

At 18, she went to New York to continue her dance studies in the East Village and burst on to the international scene in 1992 in the sexy art-house hit Jamón, jamón.

It was in Pedro Almodóvar’s 1999 Oscar-winning All About My Mother that she caught Hollywood’s attention, since when she has skilfully divided her time between big-budget blockbusters that pay the bills and art house-style films (Volver, Non ti muovere) that continue to build her reputation as an actress.

On film sets she has established a reputation for sweetness banded with steely professionalism. She has starred with a remarkable crop of leading men – Nicolas Cage in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Matt Damon in All the Pretty Horses, and, most famously, Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky.

Cruz went on to have a three-year relationship with Cruise, and then dated Matthew McConaughey, her co-star in Sahara. “I’ve never fallen in love with someone I’m working with,” she has claimed. “It’s always been afterwards. If something becomes friendship, then maybe months later it becomes something else, but you can never know. It’s always a mystery. You can’t plan those things.”

She fell in love with Bardem while playing his fiery and tempestuous ex-wife in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Woody Allen recalls that during the filming in Barcelona, Cruz and Bardem often spoke passionately to each other in Spanish, and he had no idea what they were saying, although he is full of praise for Cruz.

“She has everything,” he says. “She’s very sexy, is very, very beautiful and she’s also a great actress who can get a laugh if you need a laugh or be tempestuous if that’s what you need. There are no limits on her career.”

After Vicky Cristina Barcelona wrapped, Cruz remained in Spain to star for her old friend and mentor Almodóvar in the noir thriller Broken Embraces. “I think it is the most complex and most demanding of his movies. I love working with him. It is always a very intense experience.

“Pedro and Woody – what they have in common is so much talent that sometimes I cry on the set just from seeing how somebody can be so good at what they do and how they are touched by something that is so difficult to put into words.”

In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, as in many of her films, she plays a woman searching for happiness, which is something she can relate to.

“In the end we are all looking for the same thing, no? We all want to be happy and we all have different ways of looking for it and finding it. I guess that’s why we’re all here.”

Vicky Cristina Barcelona will be released later this year.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk