| By Fred Topel
In Theaters October 28
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When Antonio Banderas dresses in black, puts a mask over his eyes and swings his sword as his cape blows in the wind, it’s hard to believe it’s been seven years since he’s played Zorro. 1998 was two elections ago, and two kids ago for his Zorro costar Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Banderas could feel the difference.
“I hurt more,” Banderas said. “It hurt a little bit more but it’s been seven years, it happens. At the same time I think we had way more action than we had in the first part. But yeah there was a darker side of the movie for me especially the last month when we were really worn out and then you have to survive for 13 hours and you’re at 6:00 in the morning and everybody’s sleeping in the corner except who’s shooting and then you have to be Zorro and with 10 guys coming at you crazy.”
One thing that was easier the second time around was the location shoot. “What they built was very impressive. It was almost like a little city. They named the streets and we had parking there because we were going to be living there for almost seven months. It was actually much more comfortable than the first Zorro. On the first Zorro, the locations were very far away from each other. We did 47,000 kilometers just going back and forth between locations. So it was very tiring.”
Zorro may be a man of action to us, but Banderas wanted to bring more to the character. “It's something that is very contemporary which is just putting Zorro in a position that he's not supposed to be. He's a man who's having problems with his family. He's got a quite dysfunctional family at the point where we start the movie. He doesn't have communication with his son, nor with his wife. He just blames a little bit too much. He probably blames more himself than the people, and then what happens there is that once we got into that type of crisis, that specifically allows me to go to the side of Zorro that I like which is the common side.”
When Banderas thinks about aging in the role of Zorro, he knows he is lucky to even have that option. “I would be very worried if I was a woman,” he lamented. He already sees the problems his wife, actress Melanie Griffith, has in the ageist studio system.
“She hasn't worked at the studios in a long time. As many actresses as there are, and I mean amazing actresses, they're not working. I don't know if I should say names, but like Jessica Lange and Michelle Pfeiffer, people that are amazing actresses and the studios are not calling them anymore. It's like a fresh, fresh thing that goes on here especially with woman. With the men it's a totally different thing. It's funny, right after the first Zorro, Catherine Zeta Jones did a movie with Sean Connery and they were a couple in the movie and it was accepted. But if you do that in the opposite direction, there's that restriction with age. It just depends. But for a woman it's kind of cruel actually, because it doesn't happen like that all over the world. I remember Anna Magnani working until the day she died or Simone Signorette, actresses that are as important as the Statue of Liberty. They represent America in a way. They are America in a way. They're left behind which is something that is very unfair.”
Still, Banderas will continue to take advantage of the myriad of opportunities available to him. He has two American movies in the can plus the voice of Puss In Boots in Shrek 3, and he will direct a movie in Spain. “I keep going and working. I feel better than ever actually.”
A return to Broadway may be in Banderas’s future too. “It's a new musical, but it's something that you know. It's based on a movie that we all know. I don't have all the cards in my hands, and I don't want to jump and tell you what it is just in case of the possibility of it not happening with the rights and stuff like that and a variety of situations, but the plan is to make it with the same director as Nine… Don Juan DeMarco the musical. The Johnny Depp movie. We're trying to use the Michael Kamen music, but now he's dead unfortunately and Bryan Adams wrote some things also.”
When he gets behind the camera, his Spanish movie will be a far cry from the action-adventure of Zorro. “It tells the story of a group of teenagers in Spain in 1978 that realized and they are totally conscious that at the end of the summer, [they have] adult accents and it’s finished. So they are jumping to adulthood, professional life and the virtue that that produces. It’s a reflection of our life, death - death not physical but in the death of ages. And you get to do very much with me and with the decisions that I made at that time in my life, to get out of Malaga. It’s going back to many things. It’s not only going back to shooting in my own country but going back to a time that I remember beautifully actually.”
Catch Banderas in The Legend of Zorro, October 28. |
