Unfortunately I haven’t inherited that culture, although my cinema is impregnated with it.Įvery time I wrote and rewrote the sequence where the mother, Jacinta, says to Salvador “If they tie my feet to bury me (they usually do this so that the feet don’t fall to each side), you untie them and say I asked you to. In my land, there is a very rich culture of death which manages to humanize the event without it losing spirituality. I have always admired the naturalness which my mother instilled into my sister with regard to death and its rites, as befits a good Manchegan woman. I have a childish, immature relationship with mortality. My sister listened to her with the same naturalness with which my mother talked about herself when she would be dead. Years before she died, my mother had already explained to my older sister how she wanted to be laid out. And he was right, his character wasn’t me, but it was inside me. Antonio said no, that it wasn’t necessary. I remember that during rehearsals I said to Antonio: If you think that in any sequence it’ll help if you imitate me, you can do it. As a matter of fact, José Luis Alcaine came to the house several times to see the light at different hours of the day, so as to reproduce it later in the studio. This is the most autobiographical aspect of the film and it turned out to be very comfortable for the crew. When there was some corner to fill on the set, the art director sent his assistant to my house to get some of the many objects with which I live. The shoes and many of the clothes also belong to me, and the colors of his clothing. We tried to make Antonio’s image, especially his hair, look like mine. My house is the house where Antonio Banderas’ character lives, the furniture in the kitchen - and the rest of the furnishings - are mine or have been reproduced for the occasion and the paintings that hang on its walls. If you write about a director (and your work consists of directing films), it’s impossible not to think of yourself and not take your experiences as a reference. I think it is one of the blocks that moves me most. The actors involved in this block of sequences, Asier Exteandía (Alberto), Leonardo Sbaraglia (Federico) and Salvador (Antonio Banderas), are dazzling. The monologue makes it possible for the two former lovers to meet again. Recounted as a monologue by Alberto Crespo, Federico recognizes Salvador in every word even though Crespo is credited for the work. Their names might have been changed, but the pain, the happiness and the reasons for which he left Salvador are the substance of the show. He goes into a theater to pass the time and, astonished, witnesses the dramatization of his story with Salvador. The theater, words performed in front of a bare screen, acts as a messenger between the former lovers, thirty years laterįederico comes back to Madrid after more than thirty years. It also explains the reason they separated, even though they still loved each other. The story of The Addiction alludes to the passion lived by Salvador and Federico when they were young in the ‘80s. The screen as witness, company and destiny. The white screen represents everything: the cinema which Salvador saw in his childhood, his adult memory, the journeys with Federico to escape from Madrid and from heroin, how he was formed as a writer and as a filmmaker. The monologue is titled The Addiction and Alberto Crespo performs it in front of a bare, white screen as the only décor. He cedes his authorship to the actor, giving in to his insistent demand. This love story which Salvador writes so as to forget about it ends up transformed into a monologue, performed by Alberto Crespo and also credited to him because Salvador doesn’t want anyone to recognize him. The second is a story that takes place at the height of the 80s, when the country was celebrating the explosion of freedom that came with democracy. Salvador was nine years old and the impression was so intense that he fell to the floor in a faint, as if struck by lightning. It’s the story of the first time he felt the impulse of desire. When the first story happens, the protagonist is unaware of living it. Pain and Glory reveals, among other themes, two love stories that have left their mark on the protagonist, two stories determined by time and fate and which are resolved in the fiction. Fiction and life are two sides of the same coin, and life always includes pain and desire. In the three films, the protagonists are male characters who are film directors, and desire and cinematic fiction are the pillars of the story, but the way in which fiction is glimpsed alongside reality differs in each one of them. The first two parts are Law of Desire and Bad Education. Quite unintentionally, Pain and Glory is the third part of a spontaneously created trilogy that has taken thirty two years to complete.
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