Lust for Life
I thought it was going to be a very sad film. but films choose you rather than the other way around. Cinema is always unpredictable. During shooting I was so happy working with Julieta Serrano, who plays Salvador’s mother [at an older age], that I wrote two more scenes that end up being crucial to the portrait of this man [Salvador, the filmmaker played by Antonio Banderas] and his relationship to the past.
Death is all around in the film. But, one of my favorites. Garland is dressed [in a straw hat and freckles] and has a very long talk with the studio’s chief about Norman Maine (James Mason). It is a very dramatic speech in which she blames herself; it’s full of wrath and bitterness and impotence, because she can’t help the person she loves the most, and the person is not able to help himself either.
