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           He’s here to receive a movie award and talk to me about his portrayal of the world’s most seductive animated cat – Puss – full name Puss In Boots, who first appeared in Shrek as an outlaw cat and whose solo movie has been in preparation since 2003.
Banderas takes a forbidden cigarette, American Spirit, looks at it longingly and decides to smoke in the non-smoking hotel room. A small sneaky naughty smile as he pulls on his cigarette. His eyes dart from side to side, large and wide. It’s as if you are talking to Puss himself.
Was Puss based on him? Was he drawn to look like Antonio? Puss In Boots director Chris Miller, who also directed Shrek 3, says, “I’ve told Antonio it’s very difficult to tell the difference between the two of them. The lines have blurred.”
A chief animator created Puss as a Latin cat who dances and fights with panache and slinks about just like Banderas. The headset of Puss is all Banderas’s creation.
“I think what makes him interesting is the decision to give him a voice that doesn’t match his body to establish a contrast. He tries to be a little bit mysterious, but he has a sweetness. He plays games. He feels a great love for the opposite sex and he knows how to make people jealous. He can be manipulative with just his eyes…” Banderas flashes a feline stare. “I think the whole audience can identify with that because we all at some point in our lives have used that side of our character to obtain something.”
His eyes now plead at mine. His mouth and nose look extremely pussycat. Manipulation is obviously something he knows well.
“He is my alter ego.” I think not so alter. “I’ve even been wearing boots since I was 12.” When he was 12 he was in Malaga Spain having his sights set on becoming a professional footballer. A knee injury a couple of years later saw the course of history change.
Pedro Almodovar’s darling. Philadelphia. Iconic as Zorro. And then there was a feeling for years and years his screen magnetism was never given the right movie to catapult him to the A list. This year though he seems to have found himself again with the return to working with Almodovar in The Skin I Live In, another project that’s been in the works for many years, and of course Puss.
He taps his feet like a flamenco dancer. His boots are suede. They look as if they’ve walked the world. They look soft and stealthy and they are not high heeled.
“These boots were made for me in Mexico. I found a fantastic studio next to where we were shooting Zorro. This man measured my feet and when I want shoes I call him.” How many pairs does he have? “Only the ones I’m travelling in.” He sighs with an air of someone who has lost the feeling that it is romantic to be a gypsy actor.
He has homes in Aspen, Los Angeles, and Malaga, his birthplace. Where does he feel most at home? “Malaga. That’s my town. That’s my place. Sometimes it’s a little bit painful to go there in the way that my family are there, my friends are still there. the ones I put together production companies with. I continue to work with them and I wish I could spend more time there. But I tell you something. If I’m there more than three months I miss Los Angeles. Don’t you find that sometimes we don’t belong somewhere?” He says, his eyes searching for a kindred spirit. He’s bored with travel, exhausted by travel. He hates planes.
“On the plane last night I asked for a mask. The guy next to me was coughing and coughing.” How very Zorro of him. “No. It was over my mouth and it was white. But I had to do it.” Yet the mysterious fighting spirit of Zorro is never far away. “I have the whole Zorro suit in my house in Los Angeles. Sometimes I should try wearing it when I go out. Especially in the world we’re living in today…”
Does he think we need a Zorro? “We need 10,000 of them. What is happening with all this pain now. There are people in the streets who are angry. Something has to happen. I think we are realising that governments can’t govern us any more. They don’t rule us. I think it all started happening with the end of the towers. The fall of those towers, we were witnessing the end of civilization as we knew it. The ways in which we communicate has changed. It’s almost spiritual. The web, the internet. There’s something happening in the world that didn’t happen before. We are acting like one big brain. The problem is that if we get in a suicidal mood the end may happen. If we get in a positive mood it will not.”
I feel the world can establish alternative powers and alternative governments. That things are going to happen in parallel. If so what is the point of legality.
“All these things are possible now. I was there in Tunisia when the revolution started happening. I was making a film with James Jackanow and it all happened because of Twitter and Facebook. People connected immediately and within two weeks the people who ran the country were out.” He seems to be saying that information can be spread quickly without anyone filtering it and without anyone controlling it and this gives people’s passions a power that previously didn’t exist. All this is strangely prophetic. We met early in the summer, long before the August riots.
The movie in Tunisia was called Black Gold, just one of the three movies he’s completed back-to-back in the last year. His eyes seem heavy and tired at the mention of an exhausting year that was filled with work. “The cat, the cat… He was always there,” he says in a purr that he has spent a lifetime perfecting.
Why did take so long for puss to come to the screen? “Jeffrey (Katzenberg) wanted to finish the series of Shrek and not put the cat in the middle.” The Puss project has been in preparation since the character was such in the first Shrek. The plan must have been that no Shrek movie would overshadow him. Banderas shrugs.
“I learned that the projects that are supposed to be ‘huge’ and supposed to be ‘the thing’ sometimes come to nothing. You never know. That is the beauty and the craziness.”
Puss is obviously going to be huge – he is seductive, funny, sweet and brave. He has a huge charisma. Banderas shakes his head. “We’ll see. I wish that I would do a great movie then everything else would be easy.”
He stretches out his booted legs as if expressing immense tiredness at the frustration of life. A small yawn says that he has come to terms with that. “Expectation is the mother of all frustration.” For a good while Banderas’s career was all about expectation. He may finally have arrived.
He has five cats: “Penny Lane, she’s brownish black. Very little, very thin, very feisty. And she talks a lot, meow, meow, meow, all day long. And then we have Maxwell. He loves to be petted and caressed. He loves to be close to people. And then we have Domino. He’s in Aspen and he has fantastic fur. You love to pet him. He’s white and his eyes are surrounded by black circles, and he has a moustache. Betty is his sister and she has the same soft fur but brownish. And one of our caretakers has another cat, she’s fat and grey and she doesn’t like us.”
He talks about them as if he is one of them. If he were animal what would he be? I’m expecting him to say a cat, after all he is a Leo. “No, I would like to be something that flies, a big one, an eagle. I have dreams, awake dreams about the possibility of flying. It’s supernatural.”
Maybe he was a bird in a past life. I mention past lives because the last time I met him it was with Shirley MacLaine. They are good friends so I imagined they would be into similar things.
“I wonder about the reincarnation the theory… that we are something more each time. Where are the new souls? Where the old souls go? Do you just become part of total consciousness?” He asks as if he would really like me to give him the answer.
Does he believe in God? is he religious? “I believe in mystery. I feel comfortable in mystery. It attracts me. Even what we were saying about reincarnation. I am religious, yes. I participate in religious ceremony in Malaga. I don’t know if I participate because of the religious side or the artistic side or because of the identity of it.
“The virgins of Malaga are carried on six thrones and each throne has a cape 40 metres long in gold. I know Mary the virgin did not walk like that, but I like that way of seeing it. In fact, I love it. I feel comfortable in the mystery of it. I don’t try to intellectualise it. It produces a huge emotion in me.”
It was also hugely emotional to return to working with Pedro Almodovar. “It was difficult thank God. He is so specific and sometimes you get frightened by that as if someone is stealing your freedom to create the character. You have to read what he wants from you.” Was it an artistic battle? “Yes it was,” he says with a pleased with himself smile.
His character in Skin is a cosmetic surgeon who carried out surgery whether people wanted it or not. “He’s more than that - he is a dangerous man - he starts believing he is God and that he can transform reality. He feels he can transform human life.
“The movie is about the reflection of identity and what can change. You can’t escape who you are. He’s a monster, cold, and doesn’t feel affection for anyone but himself. He moves with tremendous economy. He just does what he wants and has no ethics.
“The normal tendency in any actor would be to do this character big and that was my reaction. But I decided to go for flat, with little movements by lethal subtle when I’m recommending a guy to use dildos it’s like I’m talking with an old lady and telling her to take aspirin at the time. This ruling was mind blowing sometimes grotesque.”
Has he ever had cosmetic surgery or the desire to? “No, I am against it for me. I think everybody can do what they want to do but I am starting to like grey hair and wrinkles and find them interesting.” I take the opportunity to stare at his face, open, chiseled, brooding and handsome - there are no wrinkles. “Sometimes I have wrinkles, in the morning. It depends on what kind of night that I had. I accept myself and the way that I am growing older. I have eye bags and some people have proposed to me to take them out but I said no.”
I look harder. There is the vaguest hint of an eye bag. Who suggested that he should have his face worked on? Doctors? “Yes. Basically if you live in Los Angeles and you want to put the face of a dog on yours that can happen. In fact it does happen. If you look on YouTube people are turning themselves into animals.”
He looks at me with his head on one side and his big-eyed cat look, “Puss is not a bad cat. He is very faithful to his friends and people he loves.” In the movie he has a romance with another cat, Kitty. “It’s one of those classic ones where they’re fighting all the time but you know they love each other. Kitty is strong and she has her issues,” he says approvingly. Is that his favourite kind of woman, strong and with issues? “Maybe.” He gives a slow quizzical smile. He leans back in his chair and puts his knees up. He is very supple. His tan cowboy boots are on the silk striped hotel sofa.
He is hoping there will be a Puss sequel. “It’s surprisingly complex. It takes a long time.” A few weeks later I visited Dreamworks and they told me it takes a month for three seconds of animation, and that’s if they’re lucky. Puss took three years to make. The animation process is extremely complex. Says Chris Miller, “Our recording sessions are spread out over two of those three years. It’s always a difficult scheduling thing. But when we were writing this movie and talking to Antonio we really wanted to create a classic story. Give Puss something from which he needed to recover, as if it was a Western. We had to punch a giant hole in Puss’s heart.”
Banderas tells me, “When you first have a script you know it’s a pretext to start working, it’s not the final script. The creative people listen to your voice and transform the script. When you start recording there are all these cameras so they can draw from you. They give you sometimes the elements of the cat, the hat, the sword. Then you have the ability to improvise and utilize alternate takes. You might do three, four hours a day for two months and then you’ll see the beginning stages of the animations, and then you have ideas. What about this? What about that? It’s a very liberating creative process but it’s very long. But at least you don’t have to go through make-up and you can go in your pyjamas if you want to.”
He smells sweet and musky. It’s his own perfume. He designed it and actually wears it.” Next up he would like to start directing again, his third movie. The first two Crazy In Alabama which starred Melanie Griffiths, and Summer Rain, were based on books.
“Solo is my original idea. I’m working with a scriptwriter. It’s about a Spanish colonel coming home from Afghanistan who has experienced something crazy. It’s almost touching the world of science-fiction. I am the producer, the director and I’m going to jump into the parts and direct myself and do a lot of close-ups.”
He’s not afraid of close-ups? “I am. I’m afraid of everything but at the same time I do what I’m afraid of because that’s the way life is. Life is frightening but you live it,” he says with eyes burning and head tossed back, suddenly lively. “I’m not really afraid of the close-up, I’m afraid of the ego. I have to control those situations, especially the Leo situation.” He’s referring to his big cat star sign, renowned for egotistical, demanding behaviour. Griffiths was born August 9 and he on the 10th. Both right in the centre of the fiery sign.
Does that mean there are lots of sparks and fighting? “No. it means that we’ll have a party for both of us on the same day, which is economical. Sometimes we both roar at the same time and that can be very loud. But we are both cats. We come to terms with it. She always wins.”
There are constant rumours about Griffiths. The main one that she gets very jealous if Banderas is on location and other actresses are around. There are rumours that her possessiveness have caused fights. “No, no, no. people get nervous of others’ happiness.
“There is a beautiful anecdote in Spain of a very popular dramatist. This guy was famous and he would go to meetings with intellectuals who thought they were better than him but they were not so successful. The guy would always go back to the group after having a successful opening night. The opening was fantastic and they made hell for him. So one day when he had an extremely successful opening night he went to his friend’s place who was a doctor and he said ‘Can you put my leg in a cast even though it’s not broken’. He did and he went to his group of friends and told them that he fell down the stairs and he was in pain. So instead of making hell for him they thought he was suffering a bit so they were nice.”
Does he feel he has to put his leg in a metaphorical cast? “Absolutely I do?” Griffiths once told me that when she met Banderas it was if she’d waited her whole life for him. Did he feel the same way, the instant purring of two felines? “Yes, it was a lot of purring. I didn’t know until I met her that I had a dream that one day I would meet a woman like that. It was very much in some abstract part of my brain. But when I met her I knew she was the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.
“I feel that we are human beings who have a lot of shit in life and we travel with it. But once we have the capacity to know love and loss you should be able to adapt to what’s coming next. You can’t be stuck. The point is, if you get stuck in the beginning of a relationship then you have to fake it. And if you fake it you are not going to be able to find the next step. You are not going to be able to move with it. You have to be able to move with your relationship and not be afraid of transforming and getting into new spaces. I think that’s our success as a couple for 17 years.
“You have to accept change. Sometimes it’s even better than the change you would long for, from what you had in the beginning. It does change though. It’s impossible to keep that rush, that crush that you had in the beginning forever. It’s stupid to think so. Everybody is looking for that orgasmic feeling that you have in the first six months and the moment they lose that they break up and look for someone else to find it again. We are human beings and sometimes we always want that, but then we won’t mature because that thing doesn’t last.
“Melanie and I were both coming from failures in our relationships. So it was a non said agreement, a strange invisible pact between us. That we would give ourselves time to be patient with each other. To overcome any crisis and get out of the tunnel.”
Invisible pact? How does that work? “Because that’s what it is. We didn’t sit down and say we’re going to do this or that. It didn’t happen like that. It’s something you just know in the back of your head.”
I love the way he talks about invisible pacts and he talks with such passion and heat. In a relationship is he the person who wants to love most or be loved most? “I think it changes. Sometimes I may be depressed and she’s the one who is pulling me up. If I see that she’s down I take the reins. Depends on the situation. You go with it. It’s about your capacity to adapt and recognize the life in which you are living.”