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Javier Bardem Breaks Big
(Page 3)
“It was the first time that I had to deal with a role—a small role, but a role,” he says. “You have to really construct a character and create a behavior and create a person. I realized that that was the thing I would like to do for the rest of my life, because I understood that, through characters, I could really see myself. It’s another way of learning about yourself.”
From there on a string of popular films made Bardem a bona fide star in Spain. He teamed up for a second time with Luna on Jamón, Jamón, starred as a champion wheelchair athlete (alongside Penélope Cruz and his mother, Pilar Bardem) in Pedro Almodóvar’s moving and thoughtful 1997 film Live Flesh, and that same year shared the screen with Rosie Perez and a pre-“Sopranos” James Gandolfini in Álex de la Iglesia’s crime thriller, Perdita Durango.
In the process, Bardem has twice won Best Actor trophies at the European Film Awards, has taken home four acting awards (out of a total of seven nominations) from the Goyas, the top movie honor in Spain, and been nominated for two Golden Globes and numerous other prizes from critics’ groups and film festivals.
But as the media and the movie-going public have grown to admire his charismatic screen presence, Bardem has remained his own biggest—and perhaps sole—detractor. When visiting America recently for the New York Film Festival, Bardem was quoted as saying: “It’s hard to see yourself on the screen. There’s not a single movie that I’ve done that I’ve liked.” Though the comment apparently didn’t quite come out as he meant it to—remember, he’s still a relative newcomer to the English language—Bardem maintains that he needs to put some distance between himself and a particular film before he can appreciate his work on the project.
“There are movies that, watching from the outside, I can say, ‘That’s a good piece of work.’ What I was saying is that you sometimes feel like you could have done it better,” he explains. “I think it’s also a matter of time. Now I can see work that I’ve done five, six, seven years ago, see it with a little perspective and then realize that, under those circumstances—with that experience and at that age—I was able to do that. And then you can more or less say, ‘That’s not so bad’ or ‘That’s not so good.’ But with recent work, it’s impossible.”
But Bardem has found that going back to those older movies can be instructive, too. “There are a lot of actors I know who say they don’t watch their movies, and it’s true, they don’t watch them. I do watch them. When I have a chance to sit down with something that I haven’t seen for five years, I’ll put it on my DVD player and I’ll see what I did and what I wanted to do and see if I achieved anything in there. I think that’s something to learn from. We have this great opportunity to see our work—done—on-screen. I think you can learn from that; not really learn what works, but really see what doesn’t work.”
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COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
- Comment by alarabforum2012 on 8/24/11 at 5:49 pm
Grand article a beaucoup à profit grâce à l’article
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This story was published in the Fall 2007 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
Bardem Breaks Big
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