A line. A description. A moment. An actor can find a character in the most unexpected places. Penélope Cruz found a vital element of Lola, her manipulative auteur director in filmmaking satire Official Competition, in a box full of wigs.
She’d fallen in love with the script but was concerned about finding the look of the character. “For a few months I was thinking, how does she look, this woman? She can’t be too normal, or too plain, or too this or too that. It has to be something specific, interesting but kind of scary, kind of too much.” It wasn’t until the hair and makeup box turned up during rehearsals and she looked inside to find this explosion of red curls, a huge tangle of wild tresses, that Lola entered the room. “I put it on and there was no way back. The directors and the hairdressers and I looked at each other and went, ‘OK, this is her.'”
Those kind of magical moments aren’t always that simple, and in Official Competition (out this week from IFC) Cruz gets to relish a much more challenging discovery process. It’s that rare film, like last year’s Oscar-winning Drive My Car, that dwells at length upon the rehearsal process and the sometimes excruciating process of getting ready for set. Cruz plays Lola Cuevas, a visionary director stuck with two stars with clashing egos and contradictory styles: Iván Torres (Oscar Martínez) is an old-school, read-the-lines performer, while Félix Rivero (Antonio Banderas) is more method, more volatile, and more wracked by ego-driven self doubt.
There just aren’t that many films about making films. Not about the raw, nitty-gritty, day-to-day process, which surprised Cruz. “I feel like, that there could be hundreds and hundreds of great movies made about the process of making movies.” There’s also something aspirational about Official Competition, as Lola is a woman director – a depressingly rare phenomenon that’s getting more common, slowly. As Cruz noted, “There are more chances of more inclusion, but it’s still far away from being a fair game.”
“One of the labels is that she’s a nightmare, and that’s fair because she is unbearable.” – Penélope Cruz on her character in Official Competition
However, the actress wasn’t interested in presenting Lola as some idealized feminized mirror image of a domineering Eric von Stroheim-style dictator director. Thus the hair: From the moment she walks in the room, Lola dominates the space physically, and that’s just the start. She’s not above abusing, even terrorizing, her actors to get what she wants. “One of the labels is that she’s a nightmare, and that’s fair because she is unbearable,” Cruz said, “but there are so many layers in the way [writers/directors Mariano Cohn and Andrés Duprat, and writer Gastón Duprat] wrote her, and so many colors.”
Would she tolerate Lola’s abusive techniques in pursuit of perfection? “In my 20s, maybe,” she said, but now she would disagrees with the idea that making the actor suffer makes the performance better. “I’ve learned to work more from my imagination than from forcing my experiences into the life of the character.”
If anything, she’s learned to appreciate differing methodologies of character development. “I’ve had directors who don’t want to rehearse at all, I’ve had some, like Pedro [Almodóvar, with whom she has made seven films], who want to spend two, three months together working on the character. When I have one that doesn’t want to rehearse, then sometimes I work with my acting teacher, or when I have a real reference, like when I played Donatella [Versace], I would be totally obsessed [with] watching all the material about her.”
And, unlike Lola’s “my way or the highway” approach, she relishes the joyous, collaborative side of filmmaking and character discovery: Indeed, she said, more than one take on the set of Official Competition was ruined because everyone was laughing too much. “One of the things that I love the most about making films is that it’s really a team sport. It’s not easy to get that right take. It’s up to so many things – weather, or the sun, or the light, or dadadadada – so many things that can go wrong, and when it happens, it’s magical.”
Official Competition opens this week.
Penélope Cruz Enters the Rehearsal Room for Official Competition
A version of this article appeared in print on Jul 1, 2022 with the headline: Penélope Cruz Enters the Rehearsal Room for Official Competition
This article appears in July 1 • 2022.
