We’re all getting ready to swoon – the women, the gay guys, even the dykes – as we get ready for the round tables with Biutiful star Javier Bardem and director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu.
Then they make us feel completely shallow: they’re both deep, sensitive and extremely smart – and neither was even speaking their first language.
Explaining how he was able to cope with his troubled, ailing character, Jardem, soulful with every word, admits that the hardest part about making the movie was the end of the shoot, “You can’t help but fall in love with the character you create.”
And working with Inarritu was an amazing experience. “He plays all the right notes,” he says of his director. “He’s a great editor, the camera is always in the right place and he writes tough roles, always about people trying to better themselves.”
Barcelona is itself one of the stars of the movie. Inarritu recalls that it was the first city outside Mexico that he ever visited, and that he wanted to uncover some of the populations no one knows anything about, especially the Chinese migrant workers.
“I call them the invisibles,” says Inarritu. “Europe has been hugely impacted by these immigrations. There are over 1 million Chinese in the UK alone but no one talks about it.”
Bardem says every major city has two sides to it and that any movie painting it one way will get a reaction.”People from Barcelona saw Woody [Allen’s] Barcelona [in Vicky Christina Barcelona] and said, ‘That’s not us,’ They’ll probably look at Biutiful and say, ‘That’s not us,’ too.”
Both agree that getting back to working in their first language was a pleasure, Jardem says his English has improved – “I used to speak like Tarzan – but that “working in Spanish let’s yourself flow.”
Inarritu, for his part described the experience as a relief. “I didn’t have headaches for the first time in 10 years.”
Bardem, in keeping with his mission to keep superficiality to a minimum, was quick to say that winning the Oscar for No Country For Old Men didn’t change his life at all. “It only has meaning if you can celebrate it with the people you love. And I brought 17 people to the Oscars that night.”
Like I said, deep, sensitive and smart.
Hot, too.
Read the Biutiful review here.
