Amenabar y Bernal gustan fuera (en inglés)

[Stewie]

Si lo dice Newsweek la gente se lo cree (remember Guantánamo)




Finding the Story Inside
Alejandro Amenábar: The Spanish director who made Kidman a star is driven not by Hollywood but by his own vision.


Dec. 27 / Jan. 3 issue - If it weren't for Alejandro Amenábar, Nicole Kidman would not be a movie star. The 32-year-old wrote and directed "The Others," a Gothic ghost story that grossed $210 million worldwide in 2001 and cast Kidman out of the long shadow of her ex-husband Tom Cruise, and into her own light. Even more impressive, "The Others" was a dazzling piece of filmmaking—visually stunning and terrifying, but without the usual crutches of special effects and gore. It was Amenábar's first (and only) English-language film. Hollywood immediately started knocking on his door, offering him every spooky script in the studio vaults, but Amenábar turned them all down. "I understand that Hollywood is a kind of mecca for many directors, but I don't even have an agent in the United States," he says on the phone from his home in Spain. "What pushes me are the stories I want to tell, not really making the trip to Hollywood."
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The latest result of that drive is "The Sea Inside," a quiet, powerful drama, based on the real life of Ramon Sampedro, who, paralyzed from the neck down by a diving accident, fought a 30-year-battle in Spain for the right to take his own life. The film, starring Oscar nominee Javier Bardem ("Before Night Falls"), received two Golden Globe nominations (for best actor and best foreign-language film) and could easily earn Oscar nods in the same categories. What's most surprising about it, though, is how stunningly different it is from "The Others"—as well as from Amenábar's earlier films, including the mind-bending thriller "Open Your Eyes," starring Penelope Cruz (and later remade in English as "Vanilla Sky," starring Cruz and Cruise), and his disturbing first feature, "Thesis," about a film student who stumbles upon what seems to be a snuff film. By contrast, "Sea" is gentle, heartfelt and driven by character rather than plot. In fact, each of Amenábar's films is so visually and tonally different, it's hard to believe that the same person directed them all. "What I try to do with each film is to completely change my style, my way of working," he says. "In Hollywood, they often want you to do what you've done before, but it's very personal for me, moviemaking. It's taking a journey, and then wanting to take the audience, to invite them to experience that journey."


Amenábar's personal path to filmmaking has been similarly wayward. Born in Chile, he fled the country with his family to escape the Pinochet dictatorship, settling in Madrid. "It's difficult to work if you don't have freedom," he says. "I always wonder what would have happened had I stayed in Chile, if I would have become a filmmaker at all." As a boy, he says, he didn't pay much attention to movies. "I had a very peaceful childhood, just drawing or reading. We didn't go to the movies much or watch much TV. My mother always encouraged my brother and me to do creative things, but I didn't really understand what filmmaking meant." It was an American director who awakened that passion. "I started to go to the theater when I was a teenager, and I remember when I saw 'E.T.' and later 'Raiders of the Lost Ark,' and realized that the same person had made both films." In fact, Steven Spielberg continues to influence him: "Spielberg, Hitchcock and Kubrick are the three icons to me."

His work draws more comparisons to the latter two. Like Hitchcock, Amenábar has a gift for generating suspense; like Kubrick, he often uses space and architecture to emphasize the isolation of his characters. But in some ways he trumps them, too: Amenábar, who started playing the piano at 10, composes the musical scores for all of his movies.

For years now, Amenábar has been the wunderkind of the Spanish film industry, winning Goyas (the Spanish Oscar) for best new director and best original screenplay for "Thesis" in 1997, and eight Goyas for "The Others" in 2001. Come February, it's likely that he and legendary Spanish director Pedro Almodovar will both be sitting in the Kodak Theatre on Oscar night. But unlike most other foreign filmmakers, Amenábar—like Almodovar—shows no desire to immigrate to the United States. "Pedro is absolutely free and is well received all over the world," Amenábar says. "He doesn't need to shoot a movie in English to make his mark." For that matter, neither does Amenábar. "If there was a really great script that needed to be shot in the States, I would do it," he says. "But if it was in France, I'd go there. Japan, same thing. It's the story that drives me." It's what drives his movies, too.
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

The Hottest New Import
Gael Garcia Bernal: A talent—and a face—that really translates


Dec. 29/Jan. 5 issue - Every month we get a new flavor-of-the-month actor," he says. "And it's always like, 'the new Marlon Brando.' There are so many Brandos now." Gael Garcia Bernal is not one of them. He first captured Hollywood's attention with the Oscar-nominated "Amores Perros." Last year he had the art-house crowd gushing with the erotic indie smash "Y Tu Mama Tambien" (not to mention Natalie Portman—the two are reportedly dating). But it wasn't until he walked onto the Academy Awards stage in March that the rest of the world took notice.


His task was to introduce the nominated song from Salma Hayek's "Frida." Instead, the 25-year-old from Guadalajara, Mexico, ignored the Academy-approved text and delivered a poetic antiwar intro of his own. It didn't hurt that he looked like some smoldering, exotic prince. Across the country you could almost hear people thinking, Who is that? Bernal was thinking something else altogether. "I was s---ting myself," he says, laughing. "But I thought I had the responsibility to say something."


He still does, so instead of starring as some hot cop in a summer flick next year, he'll be starring as hot revolutionary Che Guevara in "Motorcycle Diaries" and will play four roles, including a transvestite, in Pedro Almodovar's "Bad Education." And while he's eager to make films in the United States, this son of two actors is in no particular rush. "It's better to take things little by little," he says. "It's better to be the new big thing for 20 years." We're betting that won't be a problem.
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.