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A Conversation with Walter Salles (I’M STILL HERE)

Brazilian director Walter Salles has made a number of powerful, expertly crafted films over his career, including the 1998 Central Station and 2004 The Motorcycle Diaries. He’s back now, after a decade away from features, with I’m Still Here, set mostly during the time of Brazil’s military dictatorship (from 1964-1985). Based on Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s eponymous memoir, the movie tells the sad story of the author’s father, Rubens Paiva, a former congressman arrested in 1971, and the resultant devastation weathered by Paiva’s wife, Eunice, and their five children, Marcelo among them. I had a chance to virtually talk with Salles earlier this fall, and here is that conversation, edited for length and clarity. Salles’ English is perfect and his words here are his own.

Hammer to Nail: I read in the press notes that, growing up, you were friends with the family portrayed in the film. How did you first meet them?

Walter Salles: I met them through the third sister of the family. We’re talking about a family of five. The sister in the middle, Nalu, was the best friend of a friend of mine, and this is how I got to meet the siblings and the father and mother. And what surprised me immediately was how alive that house was. It’s not by accident that the house is a character in the film because this is where people from different generations mingled, in opposition to what happened in my house, for instance. And the political discussions were free. Everybody could weigh in and could listen. There was music; Brazilian music that is, and some was censored at that time, but playing on the turntable all the time. There was a kind of physical affection that was also at play, which was very different from the other houses.

So, in retrospect, when I think about that past, when I was 13 or 14 years old, it’s almost like there was still a country we all hoped for, with those characteristics, that was still very present in that house. That house was completely jammed with people during weekends because we all gravitated towards it. And it was the last place where I thought a tragedy would strike. And to see that luminous place suddenly devoid of life and the house shut down and police a little bit everywhere in the street was a shock I never forgot.

40 years later, the second youngest kid of the family, Marcelo, published this beautiful book called I’m Still Here, about his family’s journey throughout those 40 years. And I fell in love with it. I was so moved at the end of the read that I couldn’t stop reacting emotionally to it for maybe two days. And then this adventure of the adaptation started seven years ago. It took us seven years because that film that was about the story of our past suddenly became a film about our present, as well, because the political reality in Brazil changed so rapidly and veered to the extreme right. Suddenly the world that we thought was long gone became very palpable again. And every single person who was doing the film realized that they were at the same time doing a film about the military dictatorship seen through the microcosm of family, but also a film about the present of Brazil.

HtN: I want to ask you about the house, because it is very much, as you say, a character in the film. I love it. It’s right on the beach and amazing. You and your production designer have done a wonderful job with that particular location. How much does it resemble the actual house in which the Paiva family lived?

A still from I’M STILL HERE

WS: It was a house that we found after long research and it was absolutely identical to the real house. This was fundamental because we were telling a real-life story and the geography of the house was very particular. We found a very similar house from the 1940s, built by the same architect. Our production designer, Carlos Conti, did extraordinary work making everything in that house come alive. We rehearsed for three weeks before we shot. And we didn’t rehearse the scenes of the film, but improvised scenes that would be the prequel to the scenes. And we shot chronologically in that house and we cooked in that house. And when Marcello came for the first time to visit, he said it even smelled like his house. And that was the best possible compliment.

HtN: In addition to the wonderful work of your production designer, you have a great cinematographer, Adrian Teijido. I love the cinematography of this film, both the 35mm and Super 8 footage. How did you connect with him and then plan out the look of the movie?

WS: The grammar was defined very early on. It was clear to me that we needed to embrace 35mm to offer the texture of the time without having to do any digital intervention. And the Super 8 was just the reflection of the enormous number of Super 8 films—family films—from the 1970s. It was so common to see families filming in Super 8 at that time. This is when I started to shoot as a 14-year-old; I had a Super 8 camera and I started to play with it. So the idea to integrate the Super 8 was to bring back the immediacy and the vividness of that family and the imperfections, as well, of the medium. You enter into a film through its imperfections.

And Adrian came in very late because we started collaborating with a DP [cinematographer] who ended up having a personal problem and couldn’t pursue the film. Adrian was somebody I had admired for a long time and he generously embraced the idea of the 35mm and Super 8. And he came in three weeks prior to the shoot. His work is absolutely extraordinary because we did things that were very courageous. We pushed the film. We pushed the negative when we were in the prison, for instance. We pushed it two stops to augment the tension and the texture of it. We changed the magazines also in the final part because we wanted to change the look of the film during the ‘90s and 2000s. And he was an extremely creative and present collaborator in this.

HtN: When you say you changed the mag, you were shooting on a different film stock for the more modern scenes?

WS: Yes, we shot in 500 ASA the whole first part of the shoot. And we pushed it by one stop or two stops depending on what kind of sensorial quality we wanted to achieve. And then when the film jumps elliptically 25 years ahead, at that point we used a 250 ASA to give the impression that time had changed and the film ceases to be as grainy as it is at the very beginning.

HtN: That makes a lot of sense.

WS: I think that a narrative has to hold up on the dramatic front. But then there’s another layer that is very important in cinema and it’s the sensorial layer. It’s what you don’t see, but you feel through your skin that adds elements that allow you to respond emotionally to the film.

HtN: The first movie of yours I ever saw was Central Station, which I absolutely loved. Fernanda Montenegro plays the lead role and she was robbed that year at the Oscars when Gwyneth Paltrow won for Shakespeare in Love. It should have been Montenegro. In this new film, you have her daughter, Fernanda Torres, playing the central role, and then you bring her mother in later. It seems you’ve worked with both of them pretty extensively over the years. What similarities and what differences do you see between the two?

Fernanda Torres in I’M STILL HERE

WS: Well, it’s a film about family done by a film family. Fernanda Torres and I have collaborated three times; Fernanda Montenegro and I have collaborated twice now. And we also did some documentary work in which she did incredible voiceovers. So we’ve been very, very close throughout the years. And what Fernanda Montenegro did for Central Station was she really elevated that film. We all had to become better than we actually were. And I think that Fernanda Torres did the exact same thing in I’m Still Here. I’m a big fan of Andrei Tarkovsky. And he says that cinema for him truly happens when everybody that is doing the film is in the same artery of the film, that central vein of the film. So you have to find that, but only actors can truly enlarge that artery. And Fernanda Montenegro did that in Central Station and Fernanda Torres graced us with the same possibility in I’m Still Here.

HtN: Very much, and she’s not the only strong performer here. Everyone is quite excellent. I was very impressed with how you directed the children. You did that before in Central Station. Here, how did you cast them? They’re all remarkable.

WS: Interestingly, we spent almost a year trying to cast the kids and ultimately we found them very near where we were. The young Marcello was cast at the beach. He was just in front of the location one day and the casting director bumped into him and he had, I would say, the intelligence and also the vivacity that Marcello had. He was very deft at many different things. He was like a Renaissance kid and he didn’t have an iPhone. How great is that and how unique is that? And same for the little girl.

And what we did was three or four weeks prior to the shoot, we just brought the family together and we lived in that house at the heart of the film, almost like a family. We cooked in that house. We improvised scenes that would happen before the beginning of the shoot. And little by little the relationship in that family was deepened and textured by time and by the exchange that they continuously had.

I shot chronologically, as I always do when I shoot with children. And we never anticipated what was going to happen the following day. So every single day they were exposed to information that was fresh and new for them. This is why you have that kind of vividness in the performances.

In fact, in this film, what I try to achieve is something different from Central Station in the sense that I didn’t want you to see the story from the outside. I really wanted you to be with the family for the span of time that the film had. And the best compliment I’ve heard about the film was in different places where we’ve been playing from Venice to Los Angeles when somebody comes up and says, “I didn’t have the impression I was seeing a film; I had the impression I was living with that family for two hours.” And that for me is the most beautiful gift because in fact, I was trying to replicate in film what I felt as an adolescent. I felt invited into that family to be part of that family. And in many ways, I wanted to invite every single member of the audience to also feel invited to be part of that family in cinema.

HtN: Well, I think you succeeded and it’s a beautiful film. Thanks for making it and thanks for talking to me.

WS: Thank you.

– Christopher Llewellyn Reed (@ChrisReedFilm)

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Christopher Llewellyn Reed is a film critic, filmmaker, and educator. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA) and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, he is: lead film critic at Hammer to Nail; editor at Film Festival Today; formerly the host of the award-winning Reel Talk with Christopher Llewellyn Reed, from Dragon Digital Media; and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice. In addition, he is one of the founders and former cohosts of The Fog of Truth, a podcast devoted to documentary cinema.

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