Puss In Boots Talks
With Puss In Boots buckling his swash across UK cinemas in time for
Christmas, Filmjuice caught up with stars Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek and
director Chris Miller
At 52 years of age and as
devilishly handsome as ever, Spanish star Antonio Banderas is as enthusiastic
as a child when talking about Puss In Boots, who, after being the best thing in
the Shrek movies, finally gets his own spin-off film. But how much of Banderas is in the swaggering kitty?
“I adore this character,”
says Banderas. “It would be very bad for me just to say that I have
similarities with him because he has values that I really don’t.
“He’s just too courageous
and I am not that courageous in my personal life, I try to be but its
hard.
It’s obvious however that
Banderas and the roles he’s played over his career (well, maybe not the
Almodovar ones) have inspired the screenwriters who’ve given him a role that
fits him like a glove.
“What I would say is that
creative people, the screenwriters, our director, everybody who is involved in
the movie, they try to get from you a lot of your own personal features and so
I may have something of my character,” says Banderas.
“And they also make
reference to characters I’ve played in the past like Zorro, Desperado, The 13th
Warrior. Epic characters I have
played. So I suppose there is
something there and because I have been doing this for 10 years, not only just
when we are recording but also when we were travelling all around the world
learning about each other, our sense of humour, so more and more I can see a
little bit more of me every year, or every 3 years, in this character.”
Similarly, the character of
the seductive cat burglar Kitty Softpaws draws inspiration from Salma
Hayek. But there’s one thing the
sexy star of Desperado, From Dusk Till Dawn and Frida would like to make perfectly
clear.
“I’m very independent and
have a great sense of adventure, I do feel like I have a lot of similarities
with my character but I want to clarify that I am not a thief. In this manner we are not alike at
all.”
“She just borrows things a
lot,” jokes director Chris Miller who plays most of the film’s incidental
characters including orphanage bully Boy Blue. “I think I get any roles in these films because I come
really cheap.
“When we make the movies we
spend a lot of time in our editorial bay, our editorial suite, and we record
what we call temp tracks for everything even before we bring in Antonio or
Salma or any other of the performers so we test material.
“So what ends up happening
is myself and my writer Tom Wheeler will play all the boy parts and our
producer Latifa Ouaou will play every woman in the film and we’ll get the
chance to see them and know how it works.”
Both actors found
inspiration in childhood heroes.
“I loved Peter Pan,” says
Banderas. “The fairytale. I didn’t know about the fairytale
actually, I saw the movie when I was very young and it had a huge impact on
me.”
He’s quick to refute though
any similarities with the Boy Who Never Grew Up.
“That doesn’t mean I have a
Peter Pan complex because I grew up and I am responsible and I have a family but
I just love the adventures. And
possibly the not growing up. At a
particular time when I was 7 or 8 years old, it was good.”
Hayek’s inspirations are
less cheery.
“More than inspire me, they
send me to the shrink,” she laughs.
“First it was Bambi, you know.
I went into a severe depression at the age of 6 because the mother
dies…and that’s it! She doesn’t
come back, she doesn’t revive there’s nothing to it. So it confronted me with death…I’m still working on that
one.
“Then there were all the princesses. And those ones messed me up because
they make you think that there’s gonna be a prince that’s gonna come and rescue
you and if you’re sorta cute you don’t have to do much in life which is not
true. So I had to deal with that
one for a long time.
“But then came Willy Wonka
and the Chocolate Factory and this was a redemption because then somehow
something clicked in my brain and I understood that there was a place in the
world where anything could happen, where there were no limitations and the
river could be made out of chocolate and you could chew some gum that was gonna
make you fly and then you could burp yourself back to earth and this is what
made me want to be an actress because I realised there was a place in the world
called films where you could go and you had no limitations.”
So Gene Wilder changed your
life?
“Gene Wilder and Antonio
Banderas.”
So why has it taken so long for Puss to get his own film?
“I think it took just long
enough,” responds Miller. “The
idea had been out there since Puss first appeared.
“The size and scope of that
character and the personality that Antonio infused that character with just
sort of demanded it.
“And couple that with the
giant big eyes and we always felt like ‘Wow! We got a weapon of mass destruction
here,’ but it just took time. It
took a little while for the right kinda story to form. It’s all timing. We knew it was just a matter of time.”
“I’ve played the character
four times and spent almost 10 years working on the character,” continues
Banderas. “But what I know is that
it was really rewarding to see when we opened Shrek 2 and we were at the Cannes
Film Festival in competition, the movie just kind of produced twelve applauses
in the middle, you know in front of all the intellectuality of Europe.
“We were there with some very serious and strong movies and suddenly
everybody was talking about a cat. That was cool.
“And then at that time Jeffrey (Katzenberg) started thinking about a
movie. I was invited to participate in number 3 and 4. I don’t know… I suppose
at this particular time we are at that point where audiences all around the
world they’re gonna decide if the character is going to have a longer life or
not.
“It seems that we’re gonna go in that direction. The response in the United States has
been great and it has been unbelievably surprising in Russia! The movie is the
third biggest box office in the history of Russia. So, we are very happy with
the character.”
With The Skin I Live In and Puss in Boots, Banderas is riding high. But how does it feel to have audiences
see him play two such different roles in the same year?
“I think movies serve many different purposes, from light comedies to
movies that reflect the complexities of the human soul. This particular year is
almost like a metaphor of my career in a way. Having these two movies come
practically one behind the other…Puss is so white and so shiny and fun, and the
other one is pitch black…it’s literally a dark, disturbing movie.”
Banderas continues: “But that is what I think an actor, in my point of
view, should accomplish. Just to
have the possibility of inhabiting those very different universes and
everything in the middle.
“I mean, I just did a Steven Soderbergh movie, Haywire, where I play a
completely different character, you may not even recognise me because I have,
I’ve got a beard. It’s thick. I look like an evangelist or something like that.
And also a movie I did with Jean-Jacques Annaud that is coming out in France
that is called Black Gold.
“And so, that is for me what movies are all about. I think every movie
is legitimate if they are done with honesty and dignity. I mean, there are
people working the entire week putting bricks, building a house, or doing
whatever, and they don’t want to just go and see 8½ by Federico Fellini at the
end of the week.
“They want to see something fun, have a big bucket of popcorn and go and
see the new Spider-Man and have fun with a girlfriend. And that’s fine. But it’s also fine
that people go and see movies that are different, that offer something more
deep.”
While it’s an exciting, fun ride for kids and adults alike, it’s the
chemistry between Banderas and Hayek that makes Puss In Boots work, a chemistry
that’s been evident ever since Desperado back in 1995, even if this time
they’re not even acting in the same room.
Hayek says:
“After 18 years of knowing him, and working together on all these movies
and being friends - we get together with the kids in between movies - it was
not challenging at all.
“As a matter of fact, I also knew his character so
well because when you have a four-year-old you watch those films over and over
and over and over!
“So, I felt like I had a ghost in the recording studio
talking to me because I could almost hear him saying the lines... not to
mention that Chris is such a good imitator of Antonio. So, the relationship was
very easy and it was so much fun to do it.”
Banderas continues: “We know each other very well. When I knew what lines were
coming and I knew Salma would be saying them, I knew more or less what she was
going to do with those lines, so I just tried to bounce.
“We fight very well on-screen I think. We can produce
a lot of comedy in the soft fights between a man and a woman and knowing that
her character was pretty much in the rules of what we do.
“I know Salma, she’s independent, free-spirited, a
fire and sexy of course. I knew pretty much how she was going to play those
lines. So, I just tried to bounce
that back knowing also that I was working within the parameters and limits of
my character which I think at the same time, I think you accept that that
female character is like that. He
doesn’t try to push her down or anything like that… he’s not a macho character. I always understood him as very
open. In fact, he likes to have a
woman in front of him that can even swordfight him as hard as he can swordfight
or dance or whatever they do.”
“I'll tell you what was really great, though,” says
Hayek. “Every time I've had to
work with Antonio there were bruises, cuts and pain... herniated discs in my
back and all kinds of things from all the crazy stunts that Robert Rodriguez
gave us, which is another miracle that I'm not dead... that we survived!
“So, to be able to have that kind of jumping along the
rooftops and to be able to be so athletic when you're 45... to be able to have
the animators do that so that you just have to put the voice to it, so there's
no pain and you don't have to suffer, that was so cool.”
“I remember at the end of the second Desperado,” says
Banderas. “We were hanging from a
crane in Mexico 30 meters from the ground with a very thin cable attached to
some harness…“
“With that guy holding it with his hands!” says Hayek
“We were bouncing from one side to the other and the
crane was creaking,’ continues Banderas.
“We were like: ‘Oh my God, we’re going to die here!’ And Salma starts
screaming at Robert: ‘I am not a piñata!’”
Having been in each others lives for ten years now,
Banderas and Puss may not be done with each other quite yet.
“I was actually in New York doing a play on Broadway
and I remember having a meeting and being told: ‘Well, here we have a cat that
is very little, what type of voice would I use for him?’ I could have done it
like this (high pitched) and done it in that kind of voice, but I think the
choice that we made to go completely in the opposite direction, not even using
my normal speaking voice, but (becomes Puss) using something a bit deeper, more
breathy, more kinda suaver.
“It was a very interesting choice at that particular
time and it helped to establish the limits and the parameters of the character
in terms of personality.
“It’s almost like a lion trapped in the body of a
little kitty cat and that gave him something completely different.
“I remember after that decision the scriptwriters and
everyone who was attached to the movie start delivering the character in a
totally different way. I remember the character as it was written in the first
one and it was a recurring character, kind of little, and suddenly they saw
different possibilities and the character started growing in that direction.
And so what we have been trying to do is just to expand that kind of
personality. That we can still
open doors for him to go to places that we don’t expect.”
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