Contents
Passion, brightness, chic, brilliance. Restraint, seriousness, severity. The first is on the screen, the second is off it. Meeting with Penelope Cruz, a woman who denies her “demo”.
There is nothing superfluous in her Madrid house. No extra furniture, no extra colors. White walls, white floor, black carpet. Half-wall black and white portrait of a young Audrey Hepburn. Raimund’s cat, picked up by a kitten on the street during the filming of The Return (hence the name, like the heroine of the film), is the brightest object here: she has a redhead.
Nothing superfluous in the hostess herself. Not an extra gram of weight, not extra cosmetics, not an extra gesture. No unnecessary paint in clothes – a white shirt, black jeans … And not an extra word. She is serious and quite open. She is open to cooperation: this interview – she made it clear – is our common cause. And we are doing it now. I ask questions. She answers succinctly and succinctly. I feel almost like an investigator – our conversation is like an interrogation: the witness gives me specific information, gives me data that can become her alibi and allow her not to become a suspect. In the category of “dark” … Because Penelope Cruz, beautiful and strict, lives in a black and white world. A world where there is only light and dark, friends and foes, permissible and impossible, right and shameful. Work and everything else. That is, the truly important and not at all essential. I’m trying to find if there is a middle, if there is something between the poles … Maybe there is another Penelope Cruz, not black and white. Not polar.
Psychologies: Everyone who communicates with you, from colleagues and directors to men, your former partners, claims that you are completely subordinate to work. And they made a really almost fantastic career. What is more important to you – work or career?
Penelope Cruz: I don’t see a difference. The only difference is whether you are subordinate to work or your life is subordinate to work.
Where do you think this difference comes from?
P.K.: From psychological dependence. Whether you as a person depend on work or only your life is determined by it.
Do you have such an addiction?
P.K.: Alas, yes. In fact of the matter. Not my life is subordinated to work, but I am myself. I think that’s why I was simply doomed to make a noticeable career – when you are empty for everything else, you inevitably fill yourself with a profession.
But there is some hopelessness in your words.
P.K.: Oh yeah. But it’s nothing. You just need to fill yourself with life. We must learn to live like people. Live, not just work. Just live. Feed the turtles… you see, there, in the garden (points out the window)? And at the same time, think not about the script you read, but about, for example, which turtles are slow. And how they save vital energy.
It is hard to believe that you have any problems with vital energy.
P.K.: I have a problem with having too much energy. And you don’t know where to put it. And in the end, you don’t know what to do with yourself. Too many feelings, too many experiences, too many actions. When I was 16, it almost killed me. I had a terrible crisis. Some kind of wild mixture of nervous and physical overload. I danced, tried to act on TV, danced again and again went to auditions. It all ended in two months, which I still consider the worst of my life. As if some strings break in you, and they connected important elements … And you fall apart. And you don’t know why or what. Since then, I realized that I need to learn to relax, switch off. How others need to learn to work and focus. I envy this last one. I envy the lazy.
You started your career quite early, at the age of 15. What motivated you to conquer life?
P.K.: Do I look like a conqueror? No, I didn’t want to achieve anything special. I wanted… how to say in English… to be incarnated. And my parents are completely different people. Rather hedonists, which is very our way, in Spanish. Siesta lovers. Mom still remembers that I was her most problematic child. I hated being told what to do. Dad sometimes, as he says, for preventive purposes, shows one old film. He was a film buff all his life and took pictures of us as kids and then as teenagers. So, on that 16-mm film of his, I, a four-year-old, on some kind of picnic, am heading into a thicket of nettles. Mom screams at me: “Pe, don’t go there, you’ll get burned!” I, strictly heading for nettles, answer: “No, I won’t burn myself!” And then I yell, getting burned … Dad calls this my ability to climb on the rampage a passion to lay my route where the highway has already been laid. But there’s nothing to be done – character. And all the same, there is a lot in me – from the women of our family. Grandmother claims that a “little sergeant” lives in all of us. And besides, perseverance – or, as my mother says, my “damn stubbornness” – is a good help in life. It never let me down. You say, at the age of 15 … At the age of 15, I decided that I needed to become an actress, which means I need to look for an agent. Came to an agency for an audition. There, a serious woman, the head of the agency, told me: “You are an interesting girl, but small. Come back in three years.” I arrived three weeks later. And walked until she gave up. She is still my agent. I’m from ballet! And most importantly, what you learn there is to despise pain and obstacles. If you can’t do something, work and you can.
What other qualities do not let you down, help you?
P.K.: Observation, perhaps. My first acting lessons were about observation. I watched the women in my mother’s salon – my mother had a beauty salon in our area. In Alcobendas, it’s near Madrid, a working-class suburb. So, I came to my mother after school. I pretended to do my homework, while I myself watched the women. How they came to the salon – as to a psychologist, hoping to change something in themselves. And by changing, make something easier in your life. And how they left, a little closer to those ideal women whom they wanted to become like. And they shared their secrets. They didn’t hide anything … Yes, most of all, my mother looked like a psychologist’s office … In addition, I am a perfectionist. Yes, and I consider this not a neurosis, but my positive property. I’m always asking directors for new takes because I think the new idea is better than the old one. And I remember every one of them. I’ve got a cutting board in my head! I drove Woody Allen to despair on the set of Vicky Cristina Barcelona – I asked so many times: “Please, let’s do another take!”, So after that take, which he considered successful, he usually just ran away from me … And I also I can dream.
“FOR ME, LIFE CONSISTS NOT OF EVENTS, BUT OF A STRING OF MOMENTS AND FEELINGS. AND EVERY MOMENT OF LIFE IS IMPORTANT TO APPRECIATE.
What do you understand by this – to be able to dream?
P.K.: Well… It’s when you’re six years old, you’re lying in bed and pretending to be a ballerina or an actress. And how you rehearse, and what kind of partner you have, and how you dance, and how the curtain falls … It was my ritual to dream before going to bed about how it would be when I was an adult. I think I dreamed my life today. And so now I try to qualitatively dream of my 60, 70, 80 years.
And what will happen when you are 70?
P.K.: I will not say. Secret.
As a child, did you dream of success, of becoming a star?
P.K.: Well no. I imagined what I would feel if I danced, played on stage. I dreamed of sensations. Success was something transcendental. Among relatives and parental acquaintances – and there are dozens of them, we are Spaniards – there was no one who would earn money with creativity.
You are from an environment far from the sphere of public success. Was it an incentive for you or vice versa?
P.K.: One of my friends, a director, says that I have a “double syndrome”. This is when a person of my origin, who has achieved something in life, lives with the feeling that he takes someone else’s place. A friend says that sometimes she sees this thought in my eyes: I don’t live the life that a hairdresser’s daughter should live. But for me it is not a brake or fuel, but just soil. The soil I grew up in. And in which it is rooted. She is reality and absolute. But success … A relative thing. I remember myself having made a grand breakthrough and finally got into the great American cinema – in the film “The Land of Mountains and Valleys.” And sobbing in the bathroom of a luxurious hotel where I was put up for the duration of the filming. Because my English… no, American turned out to be rather weak and I didn’t understand what my partners were saying to me – you know how American Woody Harrelson speaks! And because I picked up the phone, and there was simply no one to call – I had no acquaintances in Los Angeles … I sat in a room with two cats picked up on the street and whined … In this “Marquis Hotel” on Sunset Boulevard, I I’m still afraid to go in – I get sick there. A strange physical reaction to the experience of loneliness.
You also admitted that you are afraid of airplanes. That every flight across the ocean is a test for you.
P.K.: So it was until we flew to Mexico with Salma (actress Salma Hayek is a close friend of Cruz. – Approx. ed.). And almost fell. The turbulence was terrible, the oxygen masks fell out, we fell 4000 meters … I thought: “Is that all? So simple?.. Without saying what I had to say, without doing what I had to? But they landed. And here I saw the difference between our characters – mine and Salma’s. Shaking all over, we literally fell out of the plane into the “pipe”. I started to sob – with sobs, with snot, and Salma angrily asked: “I wonder where they have their fucking bar here?” For me, this is an unconditional demonstration of strength – anger instead of sobs. In fact, I myself almost learned not to be afraid. I’m more afraid to be afraid. It binds, makes you make the wrong decisions.
How do you answer yourself to one of the most difficult human questions – about death?
P.K.: There are things worse than death. I saw them when I visited Mother Teresa in Calcutta. People are not afraid of death, but of mortal loneliness. Or dying alone. Besides, I don’t think death is… the final end.
Does your Catholic upbringing or religion help you here?
P.K.: I am definitely a believer, but I have my own faith and my own prayers. Closer to Buddhism. My faith does not imply that there is only one god and only one right path in the world. Happiness and sorrow for me are feelings of happiness and sorrow, not facts. Therefore, it is important to appreciate every moment of life. For me, life is a string of moments and sensations, not events.
In a new role
The end of the year for Penelope Cruz turned out to be successful. She satisfied two of her passions at once – to dance and to … “Sex and the City.” A fan of the show, she starred in its second film version, Sex and the City 2. And she played, according to rumors, the new rival of the main character, the fatal rich woman, who came into special confidence in the dream man Carrie Bradshaw. Cruz’s ballet past had to be reactivated for Nine, a film remake of the musical staged, in turn, based on the film 8 S by Federico Fellini. A work of such exotic etymology was created by Rob Marshall, director of Chicago. And Cruz plays – and dances, and sings – Carla, the mistress of director Guido Contini. At this post in the film musical, Marcello Mastroianni was replaced by Daniel Day Lewis, no less desirable for women all over the world. The American Marshall generally decided to keep a kind of fidelity to the Fellini source: after all, the role of Carla in Fellini was also played by a sultry Spaniard, Sandra Milo.
Didn’t your relationship with Tom Cruise lead to a fascination with Dianetics?
P.K.: There are many important things in Scientology. And one cannot fail to appreciate the fact that Scientologists have done many things that no one before them could do. Their drug addiction program is the most effective. And the fact that they are considered a totalitarian sect… I try not to treat anything with prejudice.
You often shoot nude. Never condition your participation in a project on the absence of intimate scenes. Calmly show your body. Are you sure about it?
P.K.: In a way. I’m one of those actors who are lucky with… a suit. Nudity is the same costume as the one chosen by the dresser. There is no body on the screen. It’s a costume for a role.
Some critics believe that the Spaniards in the movies have made their supposedly heightened sexuality an export item. That they deliberately present themselves as characters with a particularly powerful libido. What do you think of it?
P.K.: Well, this is compared to the strict Protestant world. And American purism. In one company in Los Angeles, I told that in my childhood, on Saturdays in the heat, my dad turned on the Bizet and Verdi operas at full power on the tape recorder, we all undressed to underpants and so – under the classics – scrubbed the apartment … Everyone’s faces were drawn out there. But we are Catholics, we have a different attitude towards the body and everything connected with it.
And Almodovar? Isn’t one of the reasons for his popularity that he – with your help – so programmatically focused on the “call of the flesh”?
P.K.: And in my opinion, brought together the body and soul. In my opinion, his cinema is about the fact that the bodily, contrary to all prejudices, is no less important in a person than the spiritual. But of course, I’m not being objective here. Pedro may be the closest person to me. Surely, if at the end of my life I think about who they were, the main people of my life, Pedro will be one of them. I even think that we have a kind of romance. Which does not become less true from the fact that sex is not involved in it … And I understand him so well … You know: he is from La Mancha, from Castile, the very heart of Spain. We have everything in common. Even his mother, I felt like my own. She was a woman of tremendous strength, the archetype of the strong Spaniard, just Lorca’s Bernarda Alba! Far from art, a simple woman, she was clearly an artist at heart – she directed her family all her life!
You star in your brother’s videos, you bought a house in Madrid next to your mother’s, you design clothes with your sister. Now you are talking about your relatives, and it is clear: neither success nor work in America alienated you from your family. You do not want to let strangers, non-natives into your circle?
P.K.: No, I’m just close to a few. And without my family, I really can not imagine life. My people just complain about me – you see, I care too much about them, I haunt them with worries. My brother says that I just got it with my desire to protect him. But he’s the youngest, it’s so natural for me to protect him! And it was a serious blow for me when my parents announced seven years ago that they were getting a divorce. It is clear that I am no longer a child, but still I felt uneasy, a crack appeared in the family. I don’t like cracks. I do not like gaps, failures. Therefore, I try to avoid them in a relationship.
But you have parted more than once – with partners, with lovers …
P.K.: Yes, like everyone else. But it is important to leave a person’s life without leaving a void behind.
Do you know a way to not leave a void behind?
P.K.: I don’t know, of course. But I care what I leave behind. Already good, don’t you think?
Private bussiness
- 1974 In the family of Eduardo and Encarna Cruz, an employee of a chain store and owner of a hairdresser, the eldest daughter Penelope was born (her sister Monica is three years younger, and her brother Eduardo is nine years younger).
- 1978 Begins ballet classes, which he continues at the National Conservatory of Spain.
- 1991 Beginning of a relationship with Nacho Cano, leader of the Spanish techno-pop group Mecano. They will last six years.
- 1992 Debut on the screen, in the film “Greek Labyrinth” by Rafael Alcazar; the first major role was in the film Jamon, Jamon by José Juan Bigas Luna.
- 1993 “Belle Epoque” by Fernando Trueba, awarded the “Oscar”.
- 1997 “Living Flesh” by Pedro Almodovar; romance with Tomasz Obermeier, assistant director.
- 1998 “The Girl of Your Dreams” by Fernando Trueba; The first film in the United States was The Land of Mountains and Valleys by Stephen Frears.
- 1999 “All About My Mother” by Pedro Almodovar.
- 2000 Departure to New York and break with Obermayer for “romance” with Hollywood; Cameron Crowe meets Tom Cruise on the set of Vanilla Sky, the beginning of their romance.
- 2001 No News from God by Agustín Diaz Yanes.
- 2006 Becomes L’Oreal Beauty Ambassador.
- 2007 Nominated for an Oscar for her role in The Return of Almodovar; begins a serious personal relationship with actor Javier Bardem, whom she has known since the age of 17; with his sister Monica, as a designer, he develops a collection of clothes for the Spanish chain of stores Mango.
- 2008 “Broken Embraces” by Pedro Almodovar.
- 2009 Oscar for his role in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona; shooting in the films “Sex and the City – 2” by Michael Patrick King and “Nine” by Rob Marshall.