Antonio Banderas looks like a naughty schoolboy. In a fit of impatience that morning he had grabbed a pair of scissors and hacked off some wayward locks of hair that had been bothering him, making him look like a cross between a cute fifth-former and a Roman centurion. A disarming crinkly-eyed grin along with furtive but enthusiastic pulls on strong-smelling cigarettes completes the look.
"I looked in the mirror this morning and this long hair in the front was bothering me, so I just cut it straight across. Chop, chop, chop. When my wife saw it she said, 'What have you done, it makes you look so young,'" he says with an infectious laugh. Clearly, Señor Banderas, who has carved out a career as a Latino heartthrob, does not take himself too seriously. He sits in a corner of the vast lobby of the Emirates Palace hotel without minders or bodyguards, his long-suffering personal assistant waiting patiently for him to stop talking so that she can move him on to his next meeting. The actor is in full swing with his quick-fire, heavily accented English, his handsome face energised, and his hands expressively underlining a point as he enthuses about his latest project. His wife, the actress Melanie Griffith, is in their suite preparing for their red-carpet appearance at the Middle East International Film Festival.
His visit to Abu Dhabi is timely but coincidental. He's not actually part of the festival but happily accepted an invitation to the opening night. The good-humoured star of the Zorro movies and Evita and the voice of Puss in Boots in Shrek 2 and 3 does the fame thing with consummate grace. "I don't have bodyguards - they make me uncomfortable. It isn't real. It's a pain in the arse. I play the game, I sign autographs and smile. When you are not nice it takes more energy. When people smile at you it's nice and it makes you feel good. To be famous is a bit like having a rumour or a buzz that follows behind you wherever you go. You hear them say, 'He isn't so tall' or 'I thought he would be bigger' or he looks like this or like that. Well, I'm sorry that I'm not taller or bigger, but there you are."
Banderas is here to talk to people in the business about a project he has been working on for the past 12 years. It's the story of Boabdil, the last Muslim king of Spain, whose struggles against the Roman Catholic king Ferdinand and his wife, Queen Isabella, ended in capitulation. Rather than risk the lives of thousands of his people, he surrendered the city of Granada to the royal forces and consequently was much maligned by historians. Banderas wants to repair and restore the reputation of the Muslim king by explaining why he acted as he did.
In this post September 11, world he believes that Muslims are unfairly represented in movies and the timing is right to make an epic about Boabdil. "History is written by people who win wars. He was treated as a traitor for many years, a coward who didn't defend the Alhambra and Granada against the Catholic king. "But when you look at it a bit more closely you see that he was a humanist and a very cultured man His mother, Aixa, was a very political animal. Her husband, Muley Hacen, married a Christian slave and she was very bitter and wanted revenge. She was angry with life because she was not born a man. She had a vision about the future for her son and she plotted to put him on the throne. When Boabdil was young, there was a prediction about him that he would be the last Muslim king. In the end he decided to sacrifice his image in history to save thousands of lives and for that he was treated like a traitor."
"Now is the right time to do this film. After September 11 there has been a great deal of misrepresentation of Arabs in the movies and especially the movies from Hollywood. They always turn out to be the bad guys. In that context I positioned my film. We cannot take responsibility for what happened in the past, but we can interpret events in a way that will leave people with a different perspective."
Banderas and a group of fellow Andalusians have been digging into their country's past to re-evaluate the events surrounding Boabdil's life with the support of the Spanish government. They hope it will "open a wider way for dialogue and tolerance for future generations". "When I was at the Toronto film festival, people I met there said I should come to Abu Dhabi and talk to people here because they might be interested. This is a movie that I can't do without Arabs. I have to go hand by hand with them, not only for their support but for advice. I also want to do it because I am Andalusian, although I am pretty sure I have some Arab blood in my veins."
Initially, Banderas considered doing the film in Spanish and Arabic but decided against it in order to appeal to a wider audience. "From a financial point of view and for distribution that would be very difficult, but I will still stick with Arab and Spanish actors even if they have to speak English," he says. It would be reasonable to suspect that he has reserved the leading role for himself. "Absolutely not," he says firmly. "Boabdil has to be played by an Arab." Instead he has decided on the part of General Gonzalo Fernandez de Cordoba, the man whose signature is on the capitulation treaty alongside that of Boabdil.
Banderas believes the history of Europe might have been very different had the Muslim king carried on fighting and managed to convert the Christians to Islam. "In the end this was a war that in the mind of the people was lost by the Arabs, but I think it was lost by us Spaniards. After the Arabs left, there came the darkest era of Spanish history with the Inquisition. We didn't win anything, really. Spain could have been a totally different country if the Arabs had remained in the south of the country."
It's not the first time Banderas has shown interest in the connection between Arab and western cultures. In 1999, he played the part of Ahmed Ibn Fahdlan, an Arab poet who has an affair with the wife of a powerful man and is banished from his home in Baghdad to become an ambassador to the Vikings. In the movie, The 13th Warrior, an adaptation of the Michael Crichton novel Eaters of the Dead, the people of 10th-century Baghdad are portrayed as more civilised and educated than their European counterparts.
The movie, which also starred Omar Sharif, was not a critical success, but it underlined Banderas's ongoing fascination with the links between the cultures. It worries him that so many people, in particular Americans, have preconceptions about the Arab world. "I don't personally, but my wife is American and she did. She has always been told certain things about certain people. Now that she is here and has met so many kind and generous people and seen the education and the culture, she has been so impressed."
Banderas hopes to start shooting in 2010 and admits he has an ulterior motive."The film will take two years of my life and it means I will be working at home in Spain. Melanie will be coming back and forth. I need to have snow as the first scene as Boabdil is leaving Granada in the wintertime. I also need the springtime. Summer is a problem because there are so many tourists." He has his own production company, Green Moon Productions, in Malaga, which also helps first-time directors get started. They have already had success with a film called 3 Days, which won the Best Feature Film award at the Spanish Film Festival in Malaga in April.
Throughout his professional life, Banderas has been intimately aware of the connection between art and politics. As a young man growing up under the Fascist dictator Franco, he had his own brush with the law and was arrested and questioned along with the entire cast of a play he was doing in Malaga. "At that particular time, there was a group called Els Joglars that did plays that were anti the Fascist regime of Franco. They all got arrested and put in prison. So the police were watching all other groups of actors. When a regime is dying it becomes very violent. We were doing a play that denounced the arrests. We were near the end when we saw the Guardia Civil with their helmets glinting coming into the theatre. The curtain went down and next thing we were all handcuffed and taken down to the police station. I still had my make-up on."
Although the family's main home is in Los Angeles and they have a house in New York, Banderas finds himself increasingly drawn to Spain."Something is pulling me there. Melanie loves Spain and they love her there. I always say that she is Andalusian by adoption. They know us there and the whole city is like a great big bodyguard. If our little daughter Stella got lost in Malaga she would be back in my house in 15 minutes."
He owes much of his early success in his native country to the director Pedro Almodóvar, whom he admires deeply. "He is my mentor and my friend," Banderas says. "He broke all the existing rules of Spanish cinematography at a time when the country wasn't ready for it." It was Almodóvar who told him to take his mother's maiden name. "He told me Antonio Dominguez sounded like a bullfighter," he says and laughs. The director was with him when he first set eyes on Griffith at the 1988 Oscars, where she was nominated for Working Girl and where Women on the Verge, directed by Almodóvar, was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film.
"We both lost that night. I saw her as I was getting out of the limo and said to Pedro, "Oh my God, look at that woman. She is so pretty. Our marriage is still strong. It's different, it changes. It's probably one of our secrets that we recognise the changes. You never get what you have in the beginning, but something different comes along. Everybody is looking for very fast satisfaction and they look for it again and again with other people but they can't get what we have got. You have to spend 14 years together to get that.
"Melanie is fun to be with, a generous, sexy person and very funny. She is so straightforward even in front of a king. I like that side of her. She is the most unpretentious person and doesn't give a damn what people think. There is a lot of laughter in our marriage, but it's humour based on irony and intelligence. "I admired her before I loved her. Sometimes if other women come too close and become aggressive, Melanie will 'miaow' a little."
Banderas is a man comfortable in his skin. "I look at myself in the mirror and I seem to have lost objectivity about myself after 48 years. If you get self-conscious it's no good. You get better parts and it may open some doors at the beginning, but I wouldn't mind playing someone unattractive. "I finally accepted the role that I have to play in my professional life. I really don't have objectivity about my physicality, otherwise I would be like the Prince in Shrek, always preening. Later I may get fatter or lose my hair but I'm not afraid of getting older."
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