Antonio Banderas

     Terry Gross' interview (Fresh Air) today is with the actor, Antonio Banderas--whose newest movie is "Pain and Glory."

     https://www.npr.org/2019/09/30/765698759/how-a-heart-attack-brought-antonio-banderas-closer-to-pain-and-glory

     Since I was in and out of the car--having had the good fortune to be invited by Kate to have fish tacos--I only heard parts of it, so I came home and there it was already, on the podcast.

     Banderas had a heart attack a couple of years ago and he talks about how that experience benefitted him as an actor, particularly in this role.

A few years ago, when actor Antonio Banderas was in the hospital recovering from a heart attack, a nurse told him that the heart was a warehouse for feelings — and warned him that he'd likely feel sad in the weeks or months to come. 

As it turns out, she was right: Banderas had always considered himself a "tough guy," slow to cry and not overly sensitive, but suddenly he found himself tearing up watching movies or listening to music. 

"It just gave me a perspective of who I was, and it just made the important things [go to] the surface," Banderas says of his heart attack. "When I say this, people may just think that I'm crazy, but it's one of the best things that ever happened in my life."

     The film was written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar, and it is based on his life as a film director.

     After discussing Almodóvar's struggle with depression, Terry Gross comments that his films are always stunningly beautiful in spite of the fact that his interior world was so dark.

       "Whenever I walk away from an Almodóvar movie," Terry Gross says, "I always think, 'I wish I lived in a visual world like Almodóvar creates,' because everything from the way walls are painted in the interiors of houses to the patterns people are wearing in their clothes and the way it's lit, everything is just so visually alive and vibrant, and the colors are always perfect...they're all just vivid and jumping off the screen....But when he talks about his life, he always talks about the pain of the soul that he has."

      Provocative interview--give it a listen if you plan to see (which I do) "Pain and Glory."