Interview with Penelope Cruz

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You?ve been working a lot recently. Do you like working at that pace ? film after film?
Right now, I don?t think that I'm going to work before I shoot with Pedro, which will be in June. I'm going to be doing the publicity for ?Don't Move? here and in New York and really treating this movie the same way that I treat an American film. [I?m] doing all the big shows and Jay Leno, and doing everything that I would do for an American movie just to encourage people to go and see more foreign films.

Especially this one because I love it so much. So I'm going to really take the time to do that job properly because it's a lot of work. Then I'm going to do all the tours for ?Sahara,? which comes out April 8th. I also want to do that and enjoy it. It's hard work and when you're combining it with something else, it gets too crazy. So I want to do one thing at a time.

?Sahara? may end up being a big franchise. How was your experience working on that movie?
It's been a great experience because it's the first time that I've done an action adventure film, and I felt like I was Indiana Jones. I was doing all of these crazy things where I had to learn how to ride a camel. The day that I got on the camel, I said, ?Bring me down. There is no way.? I told the director, ?I have to do this with a double.? And he said, ?No. We want you to do it. The actors have to do this scene. It's one of the most important scenes in the movie.?

I've never said no to a director for something like that because of fear.

So I train and train and train. I became best friends with my camel. He was talking to me, and I ended up galloping next to a train at forty kilometers per hour in the middle of the two guys because I never wanted to be the last one, like being treated like the girl. It was like Steve [Zahn] and Matthew [McConaughey] were there, and we weren't taking breaks for lunch. We were training with a great trainer that we had there, and who came with us everywhere. I didn't want to be the girl. I was the girl, but I didn't want to be treated like physically I could do less. So we trained really hard and it was great working with them.

Do you workout a lot on your own?
Like three times a week, something like that. Then when I'm shooting, it's more difficult for me to workout unless I'm doing something like ?Sahara? where you need to everyday, really, because if not you get hurt.

When you were starting out, if someone had said you had to learn to ride a camel, what would you have thought?
I know. But it's fun. And now with ?Bandidas? I have to learn to do all the tricks with the guns. I was so bad at it. Again, you get to train at things that you would've never learned unless for the job. Or all these languages, maybe I wouldn't have learned them if I didn't have to use them in my movies. I love that there's always more to learn. The day that I'm 80 years old, if I'm still working there is always more to learn. So that keeps me young.

Did you have any mishaps on the set of ?Sahara??
No, never. Never, because we were training everyday for that reason. Because it's so easy to get hurt if your muscles are cold. Every day we would train.

So you can kick a little butt if you have to?
I think that I could. They taught us a lot of kicking and boxing. But I don't like fighting.

Do you look forward to researching your roles?
I think that when you can get it, it's a great thing for you. When someone wants to share that with you, you do that with a lot of respect and you get to meet amazing people. There's a movie that I just did in England, ?Chromophobia,? with Kristin Scott Thomas and Ralph Fiennes. In that movie I was playing a woman with liver cancer and is hiding it because she doesn't want them to take her daughter away from her. So I met these amazing people who were actually very generous with me and wanted to talk about it, because they want that subject to be out as much as possible. There are a lot of generous people who want to help and that want you to do the subject from reality. For me, if I have that, I'd rather tell the story from what I've seen in real life.
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