'Ghosts' Stories

'Ghosts' Stories
Javier Bardem and Milos Forman rule Spain in the historical yet all-too-prescient epic 'Goya's Ghosts.'

By Stephen Saito

(posted 7/19/07)
Milos Forman made a discovery when he picked up a fashion magazine on vacation.

"On the cover of some Vogue or Elle magazine, [I saw] a face of a model and I couldn't believe it," Forman says. "This is the face of the last painting of Goya, 'Milkmaid of Bordeaux.' It was the same face, so who is this? I find out she's an actress."

It turns out that the face belonged to Natalie Portman, an actress who has been known to inhabit the role of muse before (see: Garden State, Closer, The Professional…). Perhaps Forman should be forgiven for not knowing Portman's famous visage, given that the release of Goya's Ghosts concludes an all-consuming 23-year journey for the director. When he wasn't dealing with the controversy created by The People Vs. Larry Flynt, his 1996 biopic of the Hustler publisher, or fine tuning Jim Carrey's transformation into Andy Kaufman in 1999's Man on the Moon, he was steeped in the Spanish Inquisition and the work of Spanish artist Francisco Goya.

Forman had been inclined to make a film about the Spanish Inquisition ever since he was growing up in Czechoslovakia, then under a communist regime that closely resembled the omnipotence of the Catholic Church in 1700s Spain. But it wasn't until he traveled to Spain to promote Amadeus in 1984 with Goya's Ghosts producer Saul Zaentz that he discovered how he could condense into one film the sprawling history of the Inquisition with that of the French Revolution, the reverberations of which were spreading through Europe as the Inquisition wound down.

"We went to Prado and I saw Goya's etchings and drawings and paintings, and I realized Goya illustrated what I read 30 years ago [as a student in Communist Czechoslovakia]," says Forman. "He is the journalist who is describing to me what was happening and showing it to me visually."

Etched into Forman's mind with the same vividness displayed in his most famous works, Goya's paintings and engravings became the catalyst for the two-part tale of Lorenzo, a priest who, after commissioning a portrait from Goya (played by Stellan Skarsgård), tries to help his friend's daughter (Portman) escape persecution and imprisonment from the Inquisition. The film, written by Forman with his Valmont cowriter Jean-Claude Carrière, creatively explores the contradiction of Goya's art: exploiting his access to rich and powerful patrons while at the same time channeling his passion for political beliefs into art, which he did famously during the French Revolution in a series of prints called Caprichos. But as in life, Goya is primarily an observer in Goya's Ghosts.

That leaves the burden of the action, all too literally, on the shoulders of priest Lorenzo, who must constantly change loyalties to benefit himself, especially given the turbulence of the era. Forman looked no further than Javier Bardem for the embattled cleric, who starts out as a mild-mannered servant of the Inquisition but later becomes a prosecutor for Napoleon as the French Revolution sweeps into Spain.

"When you have the chance to portray two different behaviors in the same human being, that's pretty interesting for an actor because you have to play exactly the same person who has two totally opposite behaviors and ideas," says Bardem, who was already a fan of Forman's ability to blend tones in Amadeus. "So I thought that was a good challenge, and I thought of the priest as somebody that is not emotionally connected to himself."

Bardem extends that idea to his hushed manner of speaking in the early stages of the film, saying, "That's why he uses that voice, which is more kind of like a voice that starts from the neck up, which involves no connection at all emotionally with himself. And then when he comes back as a revolutionary, he is more open to the world. He is more connected, attached to his own feelings, [but] at the same time. . . he is the same person and the needs are the same, which is not to lose power."

Besides the challenge of playing a character of such dual natures, Bardem experienced the strange wilderness of becoming unstuck in time and space. Goya's Ghosts was the actor's first period piece, which he laughs off: "It's like you go there to play with the dolls and you are one of them." Yet the film was also a homecoming for the actor, whose Spanish home is "ten minutes" walking distance from where Forman set up production. At the same time, Bardem was asked to speak primarily in English — a culture clash he found slightly jarring.

"I have my family, my friends, and I have my day-to-day life in Spanish, and I put the Inquisition dress on and I start to speak English," Bardem says. "If I take a plane and I shoot in New York or L.A., then you are culturally immersed in another language, in another culture. But to speak about your own culture in your own hometown and doing that, it's weird. It took me like a couple of weeks to acclimate."

Though Forman insists it wasn't his intention to make a political commentary on current events, the director notes a parallel between the film's theme of the corruptiveness of absolute power during the period and the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

"Nobody believes me that the screenplay, the final screenplay to this film was finished months before the events in the Middle East," Forman says, adding, "The line — which is now almost famous — 'You'll be welcomed with flowers as liberators' was in the script, but it was in the script because Napoleon said it verbatim to his generals before invading Spain. Now nobody believes me that I'm not making political comment about the situation of today. I was not. Nobody was. History is making a parallel, a terrible parallel."

Bardem agrees that the film relates to modern times. "One of the big issues of the movie is that, unfortunately, human behavior doesn't change that much — not even after hundreds of years. We are committing the same crimes. We are torturing people in the name of God; we are taking out people's civil rights in the name of safety; and we are occupying foreign countries because we feel like they need the liberation, when they feel totally occupied and violated, and that creates misery and suffering. And that's something that the movie addresses."

That same timeliness may be what left Goya's Ghosts unfairly languishing for two years. After Forman put the finishing touches on the film in 2005, potential distributors were apprehensive about how to market such a densely layered historical epic with political overtones in the current climate.

But even while portraying a dark moment in history, Goya's Ghosts retains the same light touch characterizing Forman's work in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest.

"He is a man who really makes you laugh so much," Bardem says. "And he can tell you the most horrible things, but always under the perspective of humor because he knows that in order to move on and survive and really grow up, [you must not take] yourself seriously at all."

Meanwhile Bardem is set to work with another master at alternating light and dark — Woody Allen, for whom Bardem will play a painter in the comedy Midnight in Barcelona. The actor, nominated for a best actor Oscar for 2000's Before Night Falls, is also collaborating with Smokin' Aces director Joe Carnahan in the hopes of bringing Columbian drug lord Pablo Escobar's life story to the big screen.

"That project has been around for some years now and we have talked several times," Bardem says. "I guess there will come a time where we can agree and do it, because Pablo Escobar is an amazing, amazing character. It's a bigger-than-life person that created a whole world around him, and of course, it will be a very interesting piece to watch."

In addition to his turn as Lorenzo in Goya's Ghosts, Bardem has two potential Oscar contenders coming out this fall: the long-awaited big-screen adaptation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera and the Coen Brothers' western No Country for Old Men, based on the Cormac McCarthy novel.

"I'm overwhelmed by myself," Bardem chuckles. "The good thing I think is that those three characters are different from each other. That's always what I'm looking for: to try to put myself in trouble."