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Cruz goes back into Almodovar fold for Broken Embraces

Penelope Cruz may be Pedro Almodovar’s muse, but she won her Academy Award for Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona.
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Penelope Cruz stars in Broken Embraces

Penelope Cruz may be Pedro Almodovar’s muse, but she won her Academy Award for Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

The world-famous directors – one a 60-year-old Spaniard, the other a 74-year-old New Yorker –could not be more different, Cruz told reporters squeezed around a restaurant table during the Toronto International Film Festival last year.

“Pedro likes to rehearse for three months. Woody doesn’t like to rehearse, not even on the day of the shooting. You just go and see the camera movements.

“But he gives you a huge amount of freedom, in terms of, you want to do the scene giving your back to the camera, you can do it. You want to do it upside down? You can do it . . . I loved and really enjoyed both systems,” which strive for honesty and truth, she said.

“I know they really like each other because they would both tell me things about each other and they both have huge respect for each other.”

Dressed in a belted floral dress, hot-pink sweater and wedges that added several cm to her height, Cruz was in Toronto for the North American premiere of Broken Embraces.

An absent Almodovar sent his regrets through Cruz, who stars with Lluis Homar in a story set partially in the world of filmmaking. It leans on notions of doubles, stand-ins, pseudonyms, long-held secrets, parent-child relationships and “amour fou” – crazy love.

Now 35, the dark-haired beauty met Almodovar at 17 or 18. “I was too young for the script he was writing, but he told me, ‘I will write something else for you.’ And then he did and we did Live Flesh, and then we did All About My Mother, then Volver and now Broken Embraces.”

She drew on that history for this movie, particularly in a scene where she looked through a mirror and Almodovar was on the other side. “I was not looking just at my director, I was looking at somebody that has been my close friend since I was 17 and somebody very, very important in my life.

“So, I think from the whole process of making the movie . . . five or six months, that was my favorite moment of that whole process, those seconds that Pedro and I had through the mirror,” she revealed in accented English.

“He sees everything, you cannot lie to him, in and out of the set, you cannot lie to him. He really knows me. He cannot lie to me, either. The fact that we are close friends doesn’t mean that he’s less strong or less demanding.”

She confessed to still getting butterflies on the set. “My biggest worry is to have him go home disappointed at the end of a day of shooting. I just want him to be happy and feel like that I’m really trying to give him 100 percent because he’s given me, one time after another, huge amounts of trust.”

Cruz, who considers music “the highest art, the one that goes directly to your heart quicker” and Meryl Streep and Anna Magnani her favourite actresses, has had a career brimming with surprises.

“These are things that you see and you think, if you put this in a movie, nobody will believe it. A lot of those things you maybe would not talk about in an interview, no?

“But it’s the circus part of the movies, I always look at it like a Fellini movie,” which is only fitting given her role as a married mistress in Rob Marshall’s Nine, inspired by the semi-autobiographical Fellini film 8-1/2 starring Marcello Mastroianni.

“Fellini was very present there ... and we were fortunate to have Sophia Loren there, and she knew Fellini and worked so many times with Mastroianni, and we had access to a lot of wonderful stories about that time and those amazing people.”

Cruz had always wanted to do a musical. “I loved the feeling of dancing for five hours a day and going back to that, and the challenge of having to sing and having to prepare for that and feeling completely vulnerable.

“The training part, we had a building full of different rooms where we would do the singing, the acting, the choreography, the dance, we would do classes all day long.

“We were very happy.”

A scroll down her credits proves that Cruz gravitates toward intense, emotionally demanding characters, whether for Almodovar, Allen or Marshall.

“That’s why I’m not doing four movies a year, I’m doing maybe one or two because it’s so draining. Also, emotionally, these type of characters, something happens there, you cannot treat yourself like a robot and pretend that doesn’t have secondary effects, because it does.”

As for the Oscar the actress won last February for playing tempestuous Maria Elena in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the golden man has accompanied her around the world – including to the beach, where he had his own towel. Of course.

Joking about her small travelling companion, Cruz said, “I think my family was starting to get worried.”

Barbara Vancheri is movie editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.