She insists she wasn’t deterred from doing Vicky Cristina Barcelona by the poor reviews and equally poor performances of Allen’s recent cinematic adventures. She is shocked to hear that Scoop, the director’s second outing with Johansson, never even got a UK release. “Really?” she says, her voice going up with a tinkle on the second syllable.
Cruz has kept parallel careers running in Hollywood and Spain, taking often uncertain roles in misfiring English-language films, which contrasted with huge European successes such as Volver. She found Allen most unlike the other American directors she has worked with. “He has a great lack of social veneer, and you see so little of that sometimes in places like LA. He speaks only when he has something to say and is really honest.”
She will not hear a bad word about his films, and even says the excruciating Match Point is one of her favorites. She is horrified when I tell her it is the only film I have ever walked out of. Her affection may have something to do with the fact that Vicky Cristina Barcelona is the first English-language film in which she really shines.
To illustrate how unsleazy Allen is, she offers the following anecdote: when it came to the day to shoot the kiss between Cruz and Johansson, rather than spend hours rehearsing the moment of passion and observing it from every angle, Allen announced that he was off to see his dermatologist instead. “He had a spot on his hand, and he was very worried. I was saying to Woody, ‘How do you want us to do this? How do you want to shoot this?’ But he said he had to go for two hours. He didn’t want to wait until the end of the day to go to the doctor, which I thought was brilliant,”
says Cruz.
The spot turned out to be nothing, and Allen galloped through the scene with as little preparation and angst as the rest of the film: “We didn’t rehearse at all, which gives you a lot of vertigo as an actor,” says Cruz. “Often the scenes were done in two takes.” She thinks it is all part of Allen’s strategy to keep the actors — who, as a breed, are prone to “self-analysis and self-destruction,” she says — on their toes.
She admits that she can be especially hard on herself at times. Allen has said that she doesn’t appreciate how terrific she is: “She’s slightly insecure and thinks she’s not going to be able to do something well or that she needs extra takes to do it, which isn’t true at all.”
It may come as some comfort to the rest of the world’s women to hear that she says she doesn’t believe it when people tell her how gorgeous she is. Surely she doesn’t wake up in the mornings, look in the mirror and think “urgh” like the rest of us? Apparently so. It is not soothing to be told that you are beautiful, she says. “Maybe all actors are insecure ... It doesn’t mean you need more compliments, it just means your ego doesn’t really get affected when you hear them, because you don’t believe them.”
I ask her if she ever wishes she were more plain-looking so she could get different parts, but she cuts me off. “I don’t want to talk about that because you make a big deal by talking about it, you know?” Her fluent but accented English meanders a little as she tries to explain herself. “My attention is not there, on the advantages or disadvantages or anything like that. My attention is not there, so by talking about those things you make them a big monster.”
The other thing she won’t talk about is her relationship with Bardem — the pair got together on the set of Vicky Cristina Barcelona — but I am warned twice by her publicist not to ask him about her. It seems she has been burned by discussing her other famous exes; she famously went out with Tom Cruise for three years after his split with Nicole Kidman in 2001.
Cruz seems tired, and no wonder. When we speak in London on a Wednesday evening she is straight off a plane from Los Angeles, and is staying for only six hours before jetting off to Rome, Madrid, back to London and then LA again. She did the same trip 10 days previously, and was scheduled to repeat it before long. It is especially exhausting, says Cruz, because, despite her Madrid roots, she hates siestas. “I always wake up angry,” she says, because as a kid she hated being made to sleep in the afternoon.
She is on this debilitating publicity drive in a fairly unashamed attempt at wooing all the right people ahead of the awards season.
Eric Finkelstein is a world record junkie. The American’s Guinness World Records include the largest flag mosaic made from table tennis balls, the longest table tennis serve and eating at the most Michelin-starred restaurants in 24 hours in New York. Many would probably share the opinion of Finkelstein’s sister when talking about his records: “You’re a lunatic.” But that’s not stopping him from his next big feat, and this time he is teaming up with his wife, Taiwanese native Jackie Cheng (鄭佳祺): visit and purchase a
April 7 to April 13 After spending over two years with the Republic of China (ROC) Army, A-Mei (阿美) boarded a ship in April 1947 bound for Taiwan. But instead of walking on board with his comrades, his roughly 5-tonne body was lifted using a cargo net. He wasn’t the only elephant; A-Lan (阿蘭) and A-Pei (阿沛) were also on board. The trio had been through hell since they’d been captured by the Japanese Army in Myanmar to transport supplies during World War II. The pachyderms were seized by the ROC New 1st Army’s 30th Division in January 1945, serving
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) last week offered us a glimpse of the violence it plans against Taiwan, with two days of blockade drills conducted around the nation and live-fire exercises not far away in the East China Sea. The PRC said it had practiced hitting “simulated targets of key ports and energy facilities.” Taiwan confirmed on Thursday that PRC Coast Guard ships were directed by the its Eastern Theater Command, meaning that they are assumed to be military assets in a confrontation. Because of this, the number of assets available to the PRC navy is far, far bigger
The 1990s were a turbulent time for the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) patronage factions. For a look at how they formed, check out the March 2 “Deep Dives.” In the boom years of the 1980s and 1990s the factions amassed fortunes from corruption, access to the levers of local government and prime access to property. They also moved into industries like construction and the gravel business, devastating river ecosystems while the governments they controlled looked the other way. By this period, the factions had largely carved out geographical feifdoms in the local jurisdictions the national KMT restrained them to. For example,
RSS