Woody Allen to make 3 movies in Spain / His fears about Johansson’s career
Director Woody Allen has signed on to make three movies in Spain with producer-distributor Mediapro and Gravier productions.
It’s not his first film in Spain: romantic comedy Vicky Cristina Barcelona was shot there last year and is scheduled for North American release this fall.
It stars Scarlett Johansson, Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz. The three films will shoot over 2009, 2010 and 2011.
Mediapro also produced Isabel Coixet’s ‘The Secret Life of Words’, Agustin Almodovar’s ‘El Deseo’ and Oliver Stone’s ‘Comandante’.
In a recent interview, Allen said he sometimes has difficulty getting backers in part because he wants to have complete creative control.
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Javier Bardem - Interview
So far, this has been a decent year for Javier Bardem, who’s actually been out and about promoting a few new movies for the first time since 2004’s Oscar-winning The Sea Inside.
Bardem can be seen as the murderous Anton Chigurh in the Coen brothers’ adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, opening in limited cities today, but we had a chance to talk to him a few weeks back for his other new movie, Love in the Time of Cholera based on the Spanish romantic classic by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Bardem plays Florentino Ariza, a poet and telegraph clerk in 19th Century Columbia who falls for the beautiful Fermina Daza (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), but when she marries a doctor (Benjamin Bratt), Florentino promises to remain faithful and true to Fermina until she agrees to be his. Over the course of the movie, which spans over 50 years, we see Bardem as Florentino at all different ages, as he sleeps with over 600 other women before finally getting his wish.
You’ve said that you read Marquez’s book when you were 14 and that it made a big impression on you. How did those feelings carry over to yourself as an adult and getting to portray that character?
Javier Bardem: Well, the first time I read it, as you said, it was so big. It’s such a big novel. I mean, I followed the storyline, but I remember being thoroughly stuck in the reading of it. I was trying to get lost in the descriptions, for example when she goes to the market and the way that Garcia Marquez explains the flavors and the smells of the fruits and all of that. I remember reading that like six times in a row, going through the page. It just opened a whole world for you and there were many things that I missed. After that, I read it twice. When I knew the movie was going to happen, I felt like I had to talk to the director and say, “I have a big passion for this character.” Also, as an actor, it’s a challenge to try to do somebody that goes from 20 to 75, because when you do that you have to avoid acting age. You have to really try to act the character aging, which is different. That’s a challenge, especially when, for example, you’re shooting scenes in when you’re 20, when you’re 40 and when you’re 75 all in the same day, and you have to change years that fast. That’s a challenge, and I wanted to go to that challenge.
How do you feel about the movie being made in English and not in Spanish even though you have a lot of great Spanish actors in it?
Bardem: Once again, it’s the way it’s conceived and you have to get onboard or not. I would’ve preferred that it was in Spanish. There were many moments where I said, “F*ck. If this were in Spanish I could really make another thing.” There’s an understanding, a knowledge, of the language that you can play with in the novel. There are certain words that for you mean something deep because it belongs to your own memories and experiences, and you bring it with you and the character will go to another level, but when you’re working in a foreign language, you have to try and put that as a surgeon. You have to try to put those images and experiences into those words that don’t mean anything to you, which is extra work. It’s also a great experience, because you have to really focus and you have to really be able to let yourself go as an actor but without losing the conscience of the language that’s not your own. It’s a weird, kind of schizophrenic moment, but it’s good.
I thought Ron Harwood did an amazing job adapting this, so did the words in the script have the same effect on you in English than the book when you read it in Spanish?
Bardem: No, no, it’s impossible. I mean, I was always working with the book in Spanish. When I was shooting the movie I was always with the book in my bag and I was always coming back to it and reading and putting notes from it. From there, you’re in this universe of what you’re reading, the language of Garcia Marquez in Spanish, to go to set and say it in English was a weird situation. Sometimes, I’d get lost in the translation. It was obvious sometimes that I wasn’t bringing what I could.
Would you consider this a story about undying love or about persistence?
Bardem: I don’t know. I think it’s the ultimate love story of a person who really falls in love when he’s fourteen years old, and still, when he’s seventy-five, feels the same way like as if he’s seen her the day before. I mean, it’s fiction. It’s a novel. I don’t know if that exists in the real world, but we all want to think it exists, no? That’s why we’re always fighting for it.
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