Spanish Conquest

''I don't want anything I don't deserve,'' says the actor, who happily accepts less pay for smaller movies. ''[But] if they offer me more money, I'm not a-stupid.''

Banderas' only luxuries have been purchasing a house in Madrid and another one in the south of Spain. It's not just that he has no idea where he will live from month to month, given his schedule. It's that nothing can convince him his future is secure. ''You can be right at the top, and the next week because you've got a failure movie, you go down again,'' he says. ''The hottest thing in Hollywood right now is probably me and a pig named Baby.''

Several hours late, Griffith has returned to the still-stifling house for a catered lunch and a cool-down shower, and headed out again. The light is fading, and the mosquitoes move in for the kill. Donning wading boots to trek through the marshy grasses that separate the house and the shore, Banderas, his camera slung over his arm, walks toward the photo crew down by the water. He pauses to document the posing Melanie, standing behind the photographer and mirroring his movements. He walks along the beach, dodging waves, stopping to take pictures of feeding gulls and the patterns in the sand.

The simple freedom to live as he chooses is something the actor never takes for granted: Until he was 15, he lived under Franco's Fascist regime, which toppled in 1975. ''The system was to control everybody. I was acting in a play in Mélaga and I remember seeing the cops waiting for us backstage, and all the actors, when they were finished, would go with them [for questioning]. We were just living like that, and we didn't even realize how scary it was.

''In my personal life, I am very contemplative,'' he says, kneeling to pocket a scallop shell for Griffith. ''I like the sand, the texture it has when I put my hand in it. It feels good, and I don't know why.'' It takes a lot to make Banderas feel bad: Not even the battalion of people at his house, or his inability to remember the last time he had a day alone with Griffith, or the dawning awareness that he can no longer walk the streets unrecognized, rattles him. ''You don't understand how easy I take the whole thing?'' he asks. ''You see that I am not in bad mood. Sure, it's odd, but I try all the time just to make an exercise to be with my feet on the ground and look at what's happening with a sense of humor.... All the things around are just bulls---, like the stars of a Christmas tree, shiny from the front and paper from the back.''

Naturally, there are those who accuse Banderas of having the same kind of false front. "Some people think he's changed since he's become a star in Hollywood, and they don't like that," says Enrique Arias Vega, editor of the Madrid-based paper Focus on Spain. ''They think his character and his attitude used to be very familiar and very approachable. Then he went to Hollywood, and it became like drunkenness. He kept on drinking and he couldn't get enough.''

Banderas shrugs off such criticism. ''I don't think in basis I'm different. It's the same jokes as 20 years ago. But I'm living a very fast life in a way. What's really changed is the parallel lives around me.'' He is fierce about his desire to return to Spain to work. ''I like the memories, I like the past. I would like to be more like a Don Juan, the conception I have of all that. He's a very spiritual character breaking the rules of his time and society and family, looking for a confrontation with God and saying, 'What the hell is this?'''

Fantasies aside, for the moment, Banderas is trying not to question everything. ''I suppose everything is going all right,'' he says with some resignation, as he aims his camera lens at the horizon. ''I have a friend who says when things are going right, don't make a problem. That's fair, for me to do that right now. Enjoy it. Take it. Because probably, tomorrow, you don't have that.'' — Additional reporting by Jessica Shaw