- Hi, I'm Krista Smith
and I'm here at The Corner Booth
and today I have Antonio Banderas and Gary Oldman
and we are gonna talk about their movie The Laundromat.
- [Woman] Bribery, corruption, money laundering.
- It all goes back to this law firm,
Mossack Fonseca.
(upbeat piano music)
- You guys, playing the real life characters
who basically are the Panama Papers.
- The characters,
I remember just talking with Steven at the beginning
and I ask him, should I study the character,
the personality of Ramón Fonseca,
just try to do a portrayal of him?
He says, "No no no no."
And so we started just building the characters in that way.
- Yeah, we are sort of mouthpieces and we represent them,
but it is not like a realistic, naturalistic portrayal.
- Exactly.
- [Gary] We're real and we're not.
- Privacy is locking the bathroom door
when you wanna take a pee.
Secrecy, on the other hand, is locking the door
because what you are doing in a bathroom
isn't what people usually do.
- It was going so far away
in terms of doing a satire. - Oh.
- That at some point we thought,
"Why don't we finish the movie
singing a beautiful song to the audience?"
- 'Cause we we wearing these outrageous costumes.
- Yeah.
- We would walk on the set together and just idly,
between takes, sing, fooling around,
"We have got the money, but you've got,
we've got the firm, you've got..."
And we sort of, you know what,
we could do a number together,
you know, with a top hat, the whole thing.
And there was talk of it.
- In fact I think in one shot, in one scene,
we sang, "Bring me the money,"
from 42nd Street? (humming)
- Yeah, yeah I think we did. (both humming)
- It must be somewhere there,
in the studio. - Yeah.
- Wilmington, Delaware is home to 285,000 companies
and none of them are paying state taxes.
- Well, what's genius about what Steven does here,
is he introduces this world that's like,
complicated, sophisticated and sexy,
and money, and millionaires and billionaires,
and then you don't think about it,
but he boils it down to the one little tiny person
on St. George Lake.
- [Gary] Correct.
- [Krista] That it's going to affect.
- That's the story, empty shelves?
- No no no, the story is somebody died!
And somebody's making money from it.
Maybe lots of people.
- I remember there was a Twilight Zone where,
if you push this button, someone dies,
you don't know who they're gonna be,
- I remember that one.
- But you're gonna get $50 million or something.
- Yeah, because there are many different layers of behavior
in the people that were actually between
the 250,000 accounts in this firm of Mossack Fonesca.
Now, some of those people, they were criminals,
literally, trafficking with anything that you may imagine,
drugs, you name it.
There were many people there,
thinking that they were doing something absolutely legit.
I know people that were in the Panama Papers
and they said, "But I didn't do anything wrong,
I mean, my lawyers said this is the way to do."
And in fact, these guys that we represented in the movie,
they are working on the street.
We are an instrument, we are just a tool.
We just deal with money and with companies and with law.
- I think it might be bad for us to do something like that.
- Bad?
Huh.
Ah, bad,
it's such a big word.
- What did you learn from each other as actors?
You're both so formidable,
and have incredible careers on either side.
- I just, I'm a big, big fan of him.
From a long, long time ago.
- Yeah?
- I've been following his movies,
he's an actor that is totally believable,
which for me is the ultimate thing,
is just to be truthful.
Working with him, it was actually easy.
You expect always
that there isn't gonna be a loT of complications,
but we had a lot of fun with the material,
we laugh a lot, actually when we were doing it,
we were just looking at each other sometimes
because the subject is so complicated,
and we were just kind of, "What are we saying?"
(laughing)
- I was just gonna say, did you learn anything?
- I'm not gonna be doing my own tax returns anytime soon.
- It's very complicated, you need help,
and that help, if something goes wrong, you are guilty.
and you may just be in front of a judge
for a crime that you commit, that you don't understand.
- Looks like an 18 US code 1343, fraud.
- All I did wrong was try and send money.
- The responsibilIty at the end,
comes from the ones who make the laws.
- Yeah.
- And the ones who make the laws
are the politicians that are in power.
That's the truth of the whole entire thing, at the end.
- It's incredible to watch how he layers the story,
from the inside out, connecting the dots all over the world.
- And you said this thing that "happened" in Panama.
There are thousands of companies like that
operating all around the world, as we talk.
- We want to win.
We want to be righteous, but we want to get ahead.
Such is our struggle.
At some point you decide,
it might just be easier to save yourself.
- When you're rehearsing that,
becomes almost like a choreographed dance,
and there's so much walking and talking,
and there's so much dialogue.
- Stay with us now, this is important.
- How did you guys approach that individually,
and then approach it together?
- We got together in Los Angeles,
trying just to find that rhythm of what we had to say,
which as you say, it was a lot.
- [Krista] A lot of dialogue.
- [Gary] There was much more.
- There was much more. (chuckling)
- The dialogue, I was thinking about that,
'cause it's just a shot,
that you guys are just talking, talking, talking, talking.
- There were endless scenes like that.
- Your advisor understands your concerns
and suggests you set up an offshore company
where your assets will be safe from scrutiny,
and that's where we come in.
- We may just hit some of those takes in two hours
and everybody went home, it was, "What?"
Everybody went home by 12:30, by 1:00 in the afternoon.
"You don't wanna do some coverage?"
"No, no coverage."
Everything that we did, practically everything
was done in one shot. - Wow.
- Never a cover, close ups or cameo,
so he was very fearless.
- Is that maddening as an actor, or is it a relief?
- No, it's terrific. (laughing)
- It's great, you get home very early.
I think Steven was experimenting.
- Someone asked me, they said, "How does he direct?
What's he like?
How does he make the movie?"
And I said, "It's like a sandbag in an apple box."
He's puts like a sandbag on his shoulder
and he holds the camera on that,
and he sits on an apple box,
and he does a couple of takes like this and he says,
"Yeah, that was great," and then he moves around,
and before you know it.
- What do all of those companies do?
- Most of the time, we don't even know!
- Thanks for coming by, it's great talking to you guys,
it's a great, fun movie.
- He's a good guy.
- Yeah.
- He did good.
- First you must ask yourself,
(upbeat piano music) are you wealthy?