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Antonio Banderas worked with director Pedro Almodóvar in their native Spain, before making a splash in Hollywood with musical drama The Mambo Kings. He later became synonymous with Robert Rodriguez's guitar-strumming Desperado until 1998, when he scored a box office hit with The Mask Of Zorro. After re-teaming with Rodriguez for the recent Spy Kids trilogy, Banderas appeals to his young fans once again as a sword-wielding Puss in Boots for computer-animated tooner Shrek 2.

How does one prepare to play a cat?

I didn't do anything special really. I just went there trying to be as open and as fresh as I could. Actually I was afraid, because at the time I started recording the character I was on Broadway, singing every night [in Nine], and there are a couple of problems with that - especially the day I had to cough up the hairball. I spent 45 minutes going [makes nasty hacking noises] and then I got to the theatre - I was working with 16 wonderful ladies - and they said to me, "You had a rough night, eh?" I said, "No, it was the cat!" But there was no special research of looking at cats all day long or anything like that.

But your role as Zorro surely served you well for Puss In Boots...

Yeah, but I think when I start the next Zorro this summer I'm going to have to work very hard to overcome this cat. I don't want people to get to the cinema and say, "You know what, we love the cat better than this guy." It's very difficult to parody because you've got to know where exactly is the limit. It's got to be on the surface of the movie, or you just lose it. The parody is a very effective way of making people laugh immediately, but if you go on a little bit longer than normal it becomes something that is actually cheap.

You must have a lot of credibility with your children now, right?

People ask me if I did this movie for my kids. No. It's a nice thing to do, it's lovely to go with your kids to watch a movie, which you are a part of, and they enjoy it. I suppose Stella [his daughter with Melanie Griffith] will remember 20 years from now that she went to the opening of Shrek 2 in Los Angeles with pappy, and that's nice. But I did it because I was actually in love with the first one and so I had a fantastic reference point. The magic word was Shrek. I actually have it at home and my daughter probably saw it one or two times, but I saw it ten times. When we did the second part, I understood why the first one shines so much. It's so fresh.

Do you see yourself doing more family movies after Shrek 2 and Spy Kids?

I did Spy Kids because of the friendship I had with Robert [Rodriguez]. We had done Desperado when he was a new director coming to Hollywood. Even Salma Hayek was new in Hollywood, so we were all in the same place - the door was half open, but half closed. So, that bonded us together. And right after that we did Four Rooms, and he said to me then, "I would love to develop a movie for kids and with this character called Gregorio Cortez." So when he called me I said sure.

He also made it very easy for me, because I didn't work more than two weeks on any of those movies. It was like going to an amusement park the way Robert did it, with clowns, magicians, and at lunchtime everybody brought their kids there. It was really a family experience working on those movies.

Is making an animated film in some ways a safer bet than a regular film?

It depends. There are some movies that I would like to forget, for the rest of my life - really! But even those movies that I'd like to forget teach me things. You know, if this was an art that could be measured, everyone would do Titanic first to make a lot of money and then spend the rest of their lives doing magnificent movies to win Cannes. But then everybody will win and it would be a problem. It's difficult. Making movies is difficult and you get disorientated sometimes - even when you're working with fantastic talent.

I got a chance to do a movie this year with Christopher Hampton and Emma Thompson [Imagining Argentina] and the movie didn't work. And believe me, we put our heart and soul into that movie because we believed politically in what we were doing. But in the end we put a political movie into a genre, a thriller style, that didn't marry together. But you have to try, just to see if it works. It could have gone in the opposite direction - nobody ever knows. It doesn't make you any worse or any better.

So where do you see your career headed now?

I'm now projecting my career in a totally different direction. I am going to work less - way less. And I want to work better. I want to direct again, I want to do more theatre, and I want to do exactly those movies that I want to do. Since finishing the theatre, I haven't jumped in front of a camera at all. I had five movies to do and now they are in the garbage can. I don't want to do that any more.

Do you have a story that you want to direct?

I just bought the rights to a novel in Spain. It won an important award called the Nadal, which is a literature award. It was written by a friend of mine from Malaga - it's called The Path Of The British Ones. It doesn't have anything to do with England, it's a street in Malaga, and it tells the story of these four guys who live in this neighbourhood in 1976-77, a couple of years after [General Francisco] Franco died, who are discovering life the same time that my country was also growing up from a dictatorship to a democracy. It relates very much with my own personal experience, so I'm going to jump into that, direct it, probably at the end of 2006. And also there is a possibility of working with Pedro Almodóvar again to do an adaptation of a French novel called Tarantula, with Penélope Cruz.

Are you looking forward to doing Zorro 2?

Yeah, that's coming this summer. I said in a funny way that I had to overcome this cat, but it's true. I don't want people going to the movie and thinking: The cat is better. Go back to the cat! Actually we won't have the same danger, because with the first one, the first hour is all comedy - making the character very clumsy and awkward. We have comedy also in the second part of the adventure, but the movie is quite serious. It goes deeper than the first one - jealousy is quite a big issue. It's more adult, and a more mature kind of movie, which is interesting for me. Now he's a father too, so there are many different sides to Zorro that weren't in the first part.

Even with so many Latinos on the A-List, do you think Hollywood still has a way to go in catering to the huge Hispanic audience in America?

A couple of years after I arrived in Hollywood, everything that was Latino was fashionable, and years after, my thought is that we're not fashionable anymore. We're here to stay. Not just because of us, but because the entire Spanish-speaking community is occupying all types of social positions - from congressmen all the way down to the people who take out the garbage cans. It wouldn't be strange now to see a science fiction movie and one of the guys on the ship is a Spanish guy with an accent. It's a normal thing. We are now integrated into American society and I don't like the word fashionable, because fashionable means that it's going to pass. It's not like that anymore.

You've got Jennifer Lopez, Jimmy Smits, Salma Hayek, Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem, myself, Benicio Del Toro. They are here to stay, and at the same time a bunch of directors too like Alfonso Cuarón, Luis Mandoki, Robert Rodriguez - and they are not directing racial movies. Look what happened with the new Harry Potter, which Alfonso directed. I think we are now in a position where the studios totally count on us. It was tremendously satisfactory for me when Jeffrey Katzenberg called just to tell me that the most money Shrek 2 has done is in El Paso, Texas. The theatres were filled to the top and there were two thousand people in the streets! For me it is beautiful that because there is a character in the film that speaks with a Spanish accent, the Spanish-speakers answer to that. The studios know that there is an audience there that shouldn't be misused. They are part of the American melting pot.