The master
and his muse

Penélope Cruz on working and collaborating
with Pedro Almodóvar on his new film
Broken Embraces

PASSIONATE PARTNERSHIP: Cruz

By MARK SLUTSKY

“The first time I worked with him, I was a whore giving birth in a bus. Then, a nun that gets pregnant from a transvestite. Every time I have my moment of ‘Really, isn’t this going to be too much? How are we going to make this believable?’ And then, he does it. Every single time.”

Penélope Cruz, sitting down with the Mirror at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, is talking, of course, about director Pedro Almodóvar.

They’ve had an unusually fruitful creative relationship for a dozen years now, since he cast her as the bus-birthing babe in 1997’s Live Flesh. Together they’ve gone on to make the critically acclaimed All About My Mother and Volver and now, their latest collaboration, Broken Embraces.

Fittingly, it’s about a director and his muse. As the film opens, we meet “Harry Caine” (Lluís Homar), a blind writer who lost his sight 15 years ago in a car wreck.

Turns out, back then, he was known as Mateo Blanco and was a successful film director working on a comedy called Girls and Suitcases (a movie-within-a-movie that looks almost precisely like Almodóvar’s own Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown). The star of the film was Lena (Cruz), a fetching ingénue and girlfriend of the film’s financial backer (José Luis Gómez). The two fall for each other, and the consequences of their illicit affair are tangled, violent and eventually, mysterious. It’s an homage to both the Hollywood cinema Almodóvar loves—just watch the scenes with Cruz trying on Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn looks—and his own career.

“It keeps growing and transforming and evolving,” says Cruz of their relationship. “It’s gotten to a point where we almost know what the other one is thinking. We get to a set in the morning, and if I look at him, I know if he’s slept or not. And he’s the same with me. We can use that in the work without crossing the line of ever losing respect.

“We really have a strong friendship but that doesn’t mean I get less nervous when I’m around him on the set, or less intimidated. Because he’s so honest. If you do a scene or a rehearsal, if it’s good he will tell you, if it’s bad he will tell you too, every detail. That’s what is so addictive about working with him, the honesty. It’s so refreshing.”

Filming a movie about movie-making presented an interesting, and according to Cruz, emotionally evocative challenge. “The set where we were shooting was the set where they filmed Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down! and Women on the Verge,” she says. “So we could see Pedro reacting to all of the different spaces. There were so many memories because those were very intense shoots.

“I was surprised that he wanted to go back there. I mean, they were great shoots, only great memories, but strong ones and from so many years ago. You could feel the energy of that studio. It’s one of the oldest studios and he chose to shoot there, I think, for that reason. To have all those ghosts there.”

BROKEN EMBRACES OPENS
THIS FRIDAY, DEC. 18