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Antonio Banderas Talks About "The Skin I Live In

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Based on the book by Thierry Jonquet and adapted for the screen/directed by Pedro Almodovar (Volver, Bad Education, Talk to Her), The Skin I Live In is one of the most terrifying films of the year. It's also a very difficult movie to discuss as the meat of the story involves a spoiler which, if disclosed, would ruin the experience for anyone unfamiliar with Jonquet's book. That said, at the tail end of this article the film's star, Antonio Banderas, talks about a situation from The Skin I Live In that is most definitely a spoiler.

Avoid the last answer - labeled Spoiler - unless you've watched the film. You've been warned...

And at the LA press day for the Sony Pictures Classics drama, Antonio Banderas told reporters that while the scenes were difficult and the subject matter was upsetting, writer/director Pedro Almodovar's set was a comfortable place to be. "Don’t think that we were there in a cocoon of suffering. We laughed because Pedro is still a very witty, sharp, funny, ingenious guy. He makes you laugh sometimes, but sometimes we also used each other’s shoulders to cry on a little bit," offered Banderas.

On his approach to the role of Dr. Robert Ledgard:

Antonio Banderas: "It was Pedro who approached me first and it happened, actually, almost 10 years ago at the Cannes Film Festival. He talked to me at the time that he bought the rights for Thierry Jonquet novel's, Tarantula. But then for all this time, he got involved with other projects and it didn’t happen. But then I knew that he was working all this time just trying to adapt it in his own personal way.

Then when I received the script, I was in New York. I was doing some workshop at the time for Zorba (the Broadway musical) that I had to interrupt because of the Pedro Almodovar movie. When I read the script, I was very surprised knowing already the fundamental premise of the movie and the story."

"It surprised me that basically he was not going to shoot in a linear way, that he established a very strong game with time in the movie with flashbacks. Making basically the first part of the movie a question without an answer, which actually you start positioning the people because you start knowing basically a little bit about the story of the male character, my character. And then when the flashback starts developing very late in the movie, [it] takes the whole entire audience and repositions them in terms of morality again. You know, that game and those u-turns he starts taking all around the movie go practically to the end. So it surprised me, and I had kind of the same reaction as the audience all around the world had. When I read the script for the first time is the only time it wasn’t a spectator of my own movie. Right after that I was contaminated and it was just jumping into working with Pedro Almodovar."

"Now, answering your question more specifically, I will say it was very difficult. Thank God, because working with Almodovar is not an easy task. He’s unbelievably precise in the things he wants from you. He doesn’t like you to come in with a bag full of experiences that you’ve been accumulating over the years as an actor. He loves to just take all of that bag of experiences and throw them out of the window and tell you, 'We’re going to start from zero and that’s the way that we always work, Antonio. And we’re going to repeat that as we used to do in the '80s. I didn’t call you because of actually the things you did with me in those years. I want a new you and we’re going to just attack the work and the character from a different perspective.'"

"From the time he started describing the character and his psychography and how we were going to research him - and then also, not just the superficiality of the movie, but the form he wanted to present the character too - he came to two main points that made me reflect very much about what we were going to do:"

"One thing was the fact that he wanted a character that was almost like a white screen, which the audience can actually write their own fears. To do a character that was very limitless with no parameters so you can expect practically anything from him. He’s very unexpected in his behavior and very laid back. Very economical. Because the natural tendency of me at this particular time, when you read a character that’s bigger than life on paper, your tendency is to go big with him. As an actor you want to show some skills and stuff like that. But he cut all that. He says, ‘No, no, no. We have to play it like this.’"

"The second thing he was working on was the psychography, you know, the mental state of the character. These people and this character is somebody who could eventually meld perfectly with the society he’s living in. He wouldn’t be suspicious of anything. It’s characters we have seen sometimes in the news. When they just arrest a serial killer and journalists go in the area that this guy was living, interviewing neighbors and the people who knew him and people used to say, ‘No, he was a very charming guy. Well dressed, well mannered, educated, polite, went to church on Sundays.’ But then he got a horrendous story behind him. So that’s the character we have to do. And from the moment on, we started actually working in that direction."

On coming to terms with his character's obsession:

Antonio Banderas: "The way I approach it in the work, once we finished the period of rehearsal, which was enormously big - we were rehearsing for almost two months - what I did is number one, I said to myself, 'You shouldn’t establish a morality judgment over him.' I didn’t want to play the character like I was carrying a backpack of everything that he is. So what I did is just to establish compartments in the days that we have to shoot. And I got the premise in my mind that I have to play him almost like he was a family doctor, trying to make natural of what was unnatural. Nothing from his point of view of what he was doing was horrendous. He is actually doing something extraordinary for science and for the future. I used to play that in my mind."

"I don’t know if you guys remember the scene where he’s telling [his patient] to use these dildos. I remember thinking when I was playing the scene that I was almost prescribing pills. I never thought about the character in the overall because I knew that in the narrative Pedro was going to take to that position. So I didn’t have to replay the character again. I just went to very specific situations and, for me, it was just like that. It was, ‘You take two pills in the morning, another two in the afternoon, three at night, and in a few months you’re going to be perfect.’ And then you have the contrast of what really you were doing in the scene, and that is unavoidable because it was there. Actually, the reaction that that particular scene produces in people is the same one that I had when I first read the script. They were laughing. It’s impossible - and I can’t believe the guy is doing this."

On feeling compassion for this very sick man:

Antonio Banderas: "Pedro didn’t want to make a monster who was completely separated from the audience. In a way he’s almost telling you the monster may be around you, it may be you too, eventually. And the guy is carrying a backpack of big, big tragedies, you know, with his wife and with his daughter later on. So that creates a certain kind of sympathy. Because the first part of the movie doesn’t allow you to actually know what happened, you start establishing a relationship with him and then it’s very difficult to get away from that."

"In the overall, the movie flowed always for me. That happens actually when I saw it. I didn’t know at the time as I was shooting that that was going to come out. It floats a reflection and a metaphor about creation and about art in a way. I think - and this is my own opinion, Pedro may even disagree with me - but I think Pedro was reflecting very much about himself and about how being a movie director gives you the power to create universes, and create identities and create people. And how you as a monster or an actor can be attached to those creations. There’s a part of the movie at the end, and many people say to me that it seems that the character is actually falling in love with this woman. I always thought he wasn’t falling in love with the woman, he was falling in love with himself, actually, with the creation that he has done. And because of the timing of the movie, it’s so strange. If you remember, there’s a scene that plays at the beginning of the movie and actually in real time happens at the end, in that she’s the one that takes the initiative. She’s the one that's saying, 'I am yours,' and the guy’s totally stunned. He can’t take it. He can not believe it. He can’t believe that his own monster is just proposing things to him. So the guy doesn’t know how to deal with that and he says, ‘Get away.’ From there, he’s totally confused at that particular moment because that’s not supposed to happen in his world. That’s the big reflection that floats over the whole entire movie."

"And then there are references that aren’t very graphic. I couldn’t have in my bedroom a little television set just to watch. No, he got a big movie screen almost. And Pedro photographed me from the back. When I’m looking at her, it’s almost like he’s photographing himself looking at movies and jumping on the other side of the movie and becoming an actor of his own creation. It’s the type of game that Pedro was playing at the particular time in his life. I suppose it makes a lot of sense for him as a creator. But those are things I discovered later on because at the time, as I said to you before, I was working in very specific compartments. This is what I have to do now, and I don’t want to play this as if he was a bad guy. I've got to naturalize because that’s what Pedro asked me to do. You have to naturalize this to the point where nobody has seen anything like that before on a screen."

"There’s always a wink of the eye when you play a villain. There’s always a comment that you do to the audience sooner or later. But in this case, we tried as much as possible to never do that, to just be very natural. I’m a family doctor, I am doing good things."

SPOILER ALERT!!!! Do not read any further without first having seen the film


Spoiler: On imagining a circumstance in which he could love a person who did something horrible to this daughter:

Antonio Banderas: "I have a daughter and if somebody just damaged her, in the heat of the moment I may just have a reaction that is very violent. What I would never do is methodically, for six years perform this kind of revenge. That’s a different deal. That doesn’t have anything to do with revenge. It has to do with something a little bit bigger and a little bit darker. And I always thought in this movie that the revenge situation, the revenge issue has to do with an excuse. An excuse that he’s going to use in order to open something that is in his guts, that was latent there, that was probably sleeping. And that thing awakes."

"I commented with Almodovar that from the moment that she dies, I don’t remember at that time. She dies and in the next scene I am shaving him already because I am planning to operate on him and do that whole entire thing that happens with him. I said to him, 'It’s almost like he takes a suicidal path. He probably knows at the end of this path, there is no way out.' Of course, I was just playing with an advantage because I knew the ending of the movie. But it was almost like I felt that thing, 'Now I’m going to perform everything I had in mind regardless of what the scientific community is going to think, regardless of anything. I’m going to do it.' And so he just unplugs completely from the normal world and gets into a universe that is completely different and very sick. He can’t link with the doctor he used to work with, he doesn’t want any other person. He just dedicates his whole entire life to this particular purpose."
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