To prepare her for Without BloodAngelina Jolie locked Salma Hayek in a completely white room, without objects, without jokes and without precise directions, asking her to imagine and live the part of Nina’s life spent in a mental hospital. Hayek remained there for almost two hours, improvising something that would not necessarily end up in the film but which from that moment on would define the character, and when she left that room she had not only found the woman she was supposed to play, because that work had also begun to bring to the surface parts of her own life that she thought she had left much further behind.
This is probably the starting point to understand what it meant Without Blood for Salma Hayek, because while she talks about Nina, the trauma that continues to bring her back to the same moment of her existence, the anger, revenge and the possibility of forgiveness, the actress inevitably ends up talking about herself too, from the childhood wounds that suddenly came back to the surface during filming to the pain that was never completely resolved due to the feminicides in Ciudad Juárez. At the center of it all is Angelina Jolie, not only the director who asked her to push herself into territories that Hayek herself sometimes considered almost impossible, but the friend capable of remaining by her side when the line between character work and something much more personal began to become thin.
Panorama: Before getting to Nina, I would like to start with Angelina Jolie. You had already met, but when did your friendship really begin?
I think I met Angie a few times in passing in the past, maybe at a party, but mostly we had a friend in common, a woman who has nothing to do with this industry, an activist, an author and a feminist, who kept telling both of us separately that we should get to know each other and become friends. Neither of us wanted to force that thing, then we worked together Eternalswe met at Comic-Con and this friend of ours also came to visit us on set, and that’s where the relationship really started to grow. Working together we realized that we had a different way of communicating than we had with others, we understood very quickly how to solve things and above all we understood each other in a very organic way, and since then it has become a true friendship, a relationship in which you are not looking for a transaction or thinking about what the other person could do for you, because between us there is great protection and enormous mutual respect.
With Without Bloodhowever, Angelina asked her to get closer to Nina in a very particular way.
For months we had talked regularly and not necessarily about the film, but today I realize that those conversations were preparing me for Nina without me even being aware of it. Then one day I went to surprise her on set and Angelina asked me to improvise Nina’s life in the mental hospital, so I found myself in this completely white room, without objects, without lines, without anything to hold onto and without even a specific goal, and I continued improvising for about two hours. Almost everyone who was present on set cried, but for me the really important thing was to reach an enormous level of concentration and be able to enter into the madness of this woman, because during those two hours I built an entire part of her life that perhaps the viewer will never see but which from that moment on existed completely within me, and this gave me incredible confidence to face the rest of the film.
She said that, at one point, Nina almost seemed to own her. Why did this character enter so deeply into you?
Because Nina keeps returning to the same episode in her life and I think this is one of the most profound aspects of trauma, the fact that you can continue to live and go through the years, but a part of you remains stuck exactly in the moment in which everything happened. At the beginning she is paralysed, she lives in a condition of absolute passivity and helplessness, then that paralysis progressively transforms into anger and the anger becomes a desire for revenge, and for me at a certain point Nina also began to carry the pain of many other women who have experienced similar situations. The problem is that then you discover that revenge doesn’t heal you, you may even get what you thought you wanted and realize that none of what you lost comes back, and when you come to that complete surrender, when you understand that not even revenge can save you, you become perhaps desperate enough and human enough that you can begin to explore something even more difficult, which is forgiveness and even the possibility of love. In the end I think Nina wants an answer above all: she wants to understand why love, the people she loved and the life she could have had were taken away from her.
However, the film also asks her to seek a form of empathy towards the person that Nina associates with her own trauma. Was it difficult?
It was very difficult for me because I was angry with Demián’s character, with what he represented and with everything he evoked, while Angelina continued to push me to seek a form of compassion and to try to even see the goodness in my attacker. It was a complex job because at the same time I felt I had to defend the women who were victims, their pain, their anger and also their right not to be forced to forgive simply because someone thinks that that is the fairest or most reassuring conclusion. What I understood is how fundamental it is to listen, but really listen, not just wait until the other person has finished speaking so you can reaffirm your point of view; you have to be willing to even destroy some of your own opinions to make room for understanding the other, and that’s where, in my opinion, empathy really begins.
Much of the tension arises from the confrontation between her and Demián Bichir, often through very long and verbally heavy scenes. What was it like working together?
I remember in particular a scene of about eight pages of very intense dialogue, which moreover we had to deal with in a language that was not the first language for either me or Demián, and Angelina one day told us that we were ahead of schedule and that we could shoot it during the lunch break. We were terrified, as well as hungry, while she had absolute faith that we could do it, and in the end we shot the whole thing in about an hour. It’s something that tells very well what it meant to work on that set, because there was enormous freedom, there was space to explore and take risks without knowing exactly where we would end up, but above all there was an absolute lack of ego, and for an actor this is a very rare and very precious condition.
She studied with Stella Adler and normally doesn’t use her own personal traumas to build a character, but something happened with Nina that she didn’t expect.
Yes, I don’t normally work from my personal experiences and I don’t look for a trauma in my life to use to obtain a certain emotion, but while I was exploring Nina some traumas from my childhood that I had completely forgotten resurfaced. It wasn’t something I was looking for and at certain moments it overwhelmed me between takes, but Angelina didn’t try to interrupt it or immediately turn it into material for the film, sometimes she simply grabbed me and hugged me while I cried. In that period I almost had the chance to talk to the little girl I had been, to go back to some wounds and look at them with a different gaze, and above all I was able to do it together with a wise friend and a person I deeply trusted, and this helped me a lot even beyond the work we were doing.
However, Nina also brought a collective pain inside, that of the women of Ciudad Juárez.
Many years ago I went through a very strong depression because I was trying to support a cause in which I couldn’t see any progress, that of the terrible feminicides of the women of Juárez, and the sense of helplessness I felt in the face of what was happening left a profound mark on me. That anger, that frustration and that paralysis remained inside me without ever being completely resolved and when I started working on this film I brought all those women inside Nina, trying every day on set to use that pain as something to offer to the character. Somehow this work allowed me to take something that had remained still inside me for years and move it towards a different space, into which understanding and compassion could also enter.
Angelina Jolie said you brought her smile back. What did Angelina give back to you?
It was wonderful to go to work every day with the feeling that everyone there really wanted to do something meaningful, because it may seem obvious but it’s not at all. Angelina had absolute faith in me and kept asking me things that sometimes seemed impossible, but when someone believes so much in your abilities they end up allowing you to discover parts of yourself that maybe you didn’t even know you had, and I think that was one of the most important things about that experience. On set there was great freedom and a constant opportunity to explore, but above all there was no ego, and when you work in an environment like that you can really allow yourself to go much further.
Now he is also preparing his own directorial project. Is there something about Angelina’s method that she will inevitably take with her?
I don’t think so, because we are very different and have two different ways of working. At the beginning I even tried to give her some logistical advice based on my experience, for example I told her that maybe she didn’t need to take all those shots or complicate her life so much, until at a certain point she practically silenced me by saying: «I know what I’m doing», and of course she was right, because her visual mind is incredible. As for me, however, I have spent the last two years writing and preparing my film and I am trying to finance it completely independently precisely because for me it is essential to be able to preserve creative freedom and be able to make my own choices without having to continually adapt them to someone else’s requests.
After so many years in Hollywood, how difficult is it to continue listening to your instincts without letting the industry define success, failure and even your worth?
You have to learn to really trust your instincts, and this also means making peace with the idea that following your vision can lead to failure, because if you are only willing to do it when you are certain of the result then in reality you are not following what you believe in to the end. When you accept the possibility of making mistakes, of not being understood or of not getting what you hoped for, paradoxically you gain much more strength and much more dignity, because you stop completely handing over to others the power to establish how much you are worth. And I believe that it is equally important to continue to protect real human relationships, those that are not built exclusively on transactional purposes, especially in an environment in which it is very easy for any relationship to end up becoming one; we must learn to recognize what we have and above all to find our value outside the judgment of the industry, because if we always let others decide who we are we end up losing an essential part of our freedom.
