A-list couple Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem touched down at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday for the competition world premiere of Oscar-winning French director Florian Zeller’s highly anticipated thriller Bunker.
Bardem plays an architect who takes on an ethically questionable project to build a survivalist bunker for a tech billionaire, in a move that will lead his wife (Cruz) of seventeen years to question their relationship.
It marks the first time the stars who wed in 2010, and share two children together, have shared the big screen together in the role of a fictitious married couple.
The couple were asked at the press conference for the film whether they had put any of their real-life marriage into the roles, and whether they sometimes argued about work.
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“We are very good at really creating fiction and reality; otherwise, we won’t survive in this job,” replied Bardem.
Cruz said it would be unimaginable that they had never argued once over the course of their 30-year relationship but that they rarely got heated over work.
“We both really love this profession, but it’s true that there is a good balance in terms of how much you are speaking about work,” she said.
“Obviously, if you are preparing a movie together, obviously that is going to be very present in the conversations. But we haven’t done this very often… it has appeared like every five years because all the things that we were offered, we didn’t think they were for us, or for us at that specific moment.”
“But with this, there was no question because it was with Florian. When we had the first meeting with him about it, because we both loved the script, we knew that we were going to be protected.”
Cruz suggested Zeller had a way of getting an actor to bring their life experiences to their performances, without bringing in their personal life.
“Have somebody like him in the middle, you feel safer because you know there are going to be days that are more tricky, big arguments in the movie… emotional scenes… and I’m very grateful to Florian because he was always watching us, always feeling and seeing everything, without invading, he was a real protection for us in that way, and it was really beautiful to have that.”
Zeller said he had approached the couple for the film simply because he “adored them” but also admitted he was intrigued as to how the fact they are a real couple would impact the film.
“They are among the greatest actor actors working today, and so obviously it was an honor for me to work with them,” he said.
“But I have to say that from the very beginning, I was also interested in having them together on screen, because I thought it would be a unique way to capture something special as a real couple, to give layers to all the scenes of this film, to blur the line, between reality and fiction, but to try to approach something that I’m interested in, which is the burning authenticity of the truth, and to do that for actors, you have to be very bold, you have to be very fearless and ambitious, and this is what they are, and that’s why they are such great artists.”
