Antonio Banderas: The Real Don Juan

"Everything here in Los Angeles is masks, metaphors, unreality," Banderas continues. "Everything is concerned with image, the box office, stars. But America is many Americas. What I love about Americans is how pragmatic they are. They don't think and obsess in a sick way about doing something. In Europe, you can feel the weight of many years of history. In a village eight kilometers away from another village, people speak a different language, have their own culture that they want to preserve. People here resolve a problem, act fast, and I love that. Here, ideas are volatile; people believe in people. If you're 60 years old here and you come up with a good idea, you get to develop that idea. In Europe, it's all hierarchies."

When Banderas tells me that one of his ambitions is to go back to Spain to direct that most Spanish of stories, Don Juan, I ask if he feels up to playing the World's Greatest Lover based on his own experience. For instance, was his first sexual awakening blissful? "'The first couple of times I made love, it was a fiasco," he recalls, laughing, "We were friends, young teenagers, and she was someone who I knew for a long time. It just happened." Did the earth move? "No," he says, emphatically. "Luckily, over the years it got more successful."

I tell Banderas that now that we've gotten deeply superficial, why don't we tick off the whys and wherefores of the avalanche of movies he's about to be seen in? Some of which sound, I hasten to add, dubious. I mean, icaramba! Movies co-starring Rebecca De Mornay? Daryl Hannah? Sylvester Stallone? (Melanie Griffith?) "Mainly, it is the script and director I consider. Sometimes I ask for advice because I am confused about whether this is going to be good or bad. Actors are another consideration. It's better to be in a little part with quality people surrounding you. For me, the people that surround you in a movie are what you are.''

OK, let's apply his rules of engagement as we rifle through his recent career choices. What about Four Rooms, a four-parter directed by, among others, Quentin Tarantino and Allison Anders? "I'm probably only on the screen for five minutes, but I got the chance to work with Tim Roth. The content is nothing; it just gave me the opportunity of doing something completely different. It's like a German expressionistic movie."

When I bring up Two Much, his romantic-comedy with Melanie Griffith for Fernando Trueba, the Oscar-winning director of Belle Epoque, Banderas's eyes light up and his voice takes on an excited lilt. He calls the movie, in which he plays a con artist who impersonates his own twin to romance Melanie Griffith and Daryl Hannah simultaneously, a "comedy blanco."

He continues, "It is blanco, pure. We don't even say a bad word in it, like the way comedies were done in the '40s or '50s. It's an intelligent comedy, like Lubitsch, Billy Wilder or the best Blake Edwards. I love movies like this, like Breakfast at Tiffany's with George Peppard and Audrey Hepburn-- fantastic! It's very funny, very romantic, very tender and it's the first time we can see in a movie made in America a Latino character, kind of a con man but funny and with & big heart, who is having an affair with two blonde Anglo girls. I loved making it, too, because I was one of the last people to be cast and the role was not written specifically for a Latin. And Joan Cusack--the third woman in the movie--she is a great actress, and I loved working with her." He adds, laughing, "I know you will ask me, so I will tell you, both Melanie and Daryl are very good kissers. It was very nice."

Indeed. And at what point did he and Griffith realize they were falling for each other? He says, quietly, "That's not something that I have to hide. We did not jump into... into having a relationship from the beginning. It came little by little. Slowly. But we were falling in love while we were shooting. It was something unavoidable. Melanie and I finished the movie, saying. 'Let's just forget it because probably it's just an illusion, something that happened in movieland.' But it wasn't like that. I really needed her and she needed me."

Understood. But does it trouble him that, among the things Griffith has needed in the past, are addictive substances and an apparently addictive relationship with Don Johnson? "I'm aware of that," he says. "When you fall in love you don't see all these things. But I understand the story of Melanie Griffith. I accept everything--everything--she brings with her. I am not trying to change her. The woman I have found has been through many things in her life. Fortunately, she put herself together again. She is not involved anymore with alcohol or anything else. I want to help her. I want to make her happy. I want to try to just give her all the love that I can. If that is going to help her as a person, I am going to be the happiest man in the world. People can say, 'This is a challenge.' I don't think so. I think Melanie is aware of what she is. There is no regret or remorse in her life. She is a wonderful lady and I want to be by her side. If it doesn't work, I'll take my things and go away. If it works, it will be wonderful." Works, as in married with (her) children? "I don't want to get married right away," he asserts. "I don't want to rush things. I want to take my time to see how my relationship with Melanie is going to work. If life is good to us, if we do something nice with our lives together, maybe people can say in three or four years. We 're proud of you guys. You did it! Right now, it's nothing you can guarantee. We are moving our lives by feelings. And there isn't always the truth in feelings. But that's what I am now. There is no way that I can stop it or do anything else.''

Whew. This guy is in love in a big way. A little reluctantly, I steer back the subject to flicks, namely, Never Talk to Strangers, a Jagged Edge-style psychothriller in which Rebecca De Mornay thinks Banderas is one thing when he is actually quite another. "Sexually, it is very strong and it is kind of the 'Latin lover' sort of role," he explains. Some say Banderas chose to follow that up with director Richard Donner's big-budget Assassins because, aside from the nice payday, it's a desexed, unglamorous tough-guy role, "We've only been shooting for a week and all I've done is just kill people," he says merrily. "I don't have a love scene, I don't have a partner. I don't have anything except killing. Of the rainbow of possibilities of movies that I had to do this year, T was missing an action-comedy. And I am making much more money, of course, but I'm not going to tell you how much more."

All well and good, but, given his desire to be a star who can act, doesn't he want to work with the biggest, most prestigious directors in the business? What happened during his meeting with Steven Spielberg about his, not Andy Garcia's, starring in the planned remake of Zorro? "Andy Garcia is a great actor, man, honest and direct," he says. "It could still happen. Steven said, 'Antonio, we have to be honest. We don't know yet if we want you for the movie. We want you as an actor, but we have to consider all the possibilities with other actors with [bigger] names.''' And what about his working with top actors? "Jodie Foster is an intelligent, strong, powerful, great actress. But I have never had anyone say, You should make a movie with Jodie Foster," he replies. "Julia Roberts is a gorgeous actress. But no one has said to me. Antonio, we 're going to put you and Julia Roberts together''

What they are saying is Antonio, we're going to put you and Madonna together. Banderas enthuses about having signed to play and sing Che Guevara to Madonna's Evita in Alan Parker's movie version of the stage musical about the life and times of Eva Peron. We'll believe that one when we're watching it in the theater, since Banderas has been linked for a long time to the endlessly on-again, off-again project. "Alan's got a very different approach to the project and Madonna has earned the chance to be good in it," says the actor, who in the few seconds he has off from making movies, plays piano and guitar. He tells me he's been rehearsing his song numbers with a four-track tape machine his agents bought for him and a keyboard Daryl Hannah loaned him. When I croon, "Oh, what a circus, oh what a show!" Che Guevara's first sung lines in Evita, he croons back in a mellifluous voice, hooding his eyes and swaying with just the right amount of hokeyness, "Argentina has gone to town over the death of an actress called Eva Peron, We've all gone crazy, mourning all day and mourning all night..." I don't know about Madonna, but I'm guessing Banderas is going to survive that experience just fine.

Still, given recent events in his personal life and given his steady workload, I can't help but ask him if maybe one of the reasons he was working so hard was to avoid his situation at home? "I have to recognize that part of the problems Ana Leza and I had could be my own very tough work schedule," he says, deflecting the implications of my question. "Part of the time I was working I could have spent with my wife. We were both trying to keep the flame alive."

Yet, about this and about his career in general Banderas cautions, "I don't want to have anything that I don't deserve. Sometimes it even bothers me just to see my name built up more than it actually is. I never believe anything that is happening to me, probably because I am very insecure." Is that insecurity part of what's helping him remain grounded in the tempest? "The thing in my mind now is to try and let the storm pass by," he says. "I've got to try and take things these days with a sense of humor. Some of what is happening to me right now is very painful. Sometimes it hurts very much. All I feel is that I did what I had to do."

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Stephen Rebello interviewed Drew Barrymore for the July Movieline.

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