On a Quest With the Filmmaker

Two years after riding pillion into the limelight with the iconic MOTORCYCLE DIARIES, Walter Salles returned to the Berlinale Talent Campus this week. The fifty-year-old director with boyish looks and a youthful passion for changing the world spoke to Talents about making films with a point of view.

What makes Latin American cinema so preoccupied with social-political issues, whereas similar themes are missing from bigger film producers like India?

Walter Salles: Unlike India, we cannot describe our system as a film "industry". It is more of a group of independent directors and small producers making a few films every year. At the same time, television is present everywhere in Latin American countries and is very powerful. That is our main competition. So simply as a survival tactic, cinema has to offer things that haven’t already been seen on the small screen. That is really the definition of a political film - to show what hasn’t been seen before, to bring voices that haven’t been heard before - and that’s where it departs from the Indian system.

You search for a Latin American identity in MOTORCYCLE DIARIES…

Walter Salles: This identity is something that is very hard to explain but easy to experience. It is for example what we felt when the character of Ernesto (Che Guevara) sees Machu Picchu in Peru for the first time in the film. Our crew comprised of Argentinians, Brazilians, Chileans, Peruvians-yet we all felt on common ground there. You connect more to stories closer to your roots — I feel more of a bond with characters in Argentinian films than European ones. Having said that, I also feel cinema is a powerful instrument to understand the Other. Films like the Apu trilogy by Satyajit Ray or Abbas Kiarostami’s work makes me feel very close to their characters. I feel their fears and laughter and passions are very similar to those in my part of the world-that really there is no distance at all.

Don’t such films often turn into propaganda pieces?

Walter Salles: Of course this approach can turn dogmatic, which is why it is important to approach a film as a question and not as an answer. I don’t respond to documentaries where I feel I am being led to a pre-determined conclusion. If the director has all the answers, he should not make the film. But if I feel I am on a quest with the filmmaker, who is also searching-that interests me.

The news is that you’re going to be filming Jack Kerouac’s classic American tract "On the Road".

Walter Salles: The book is very important for my generation, so when (Francis Ford) Coppola approached me after MOTORCYCLE DIARIES I felt this may be the right time to do the film. Particularly because the book is all about experiencing life for yourself, doing things first hand. This was a time when it was all about experimenting and not fitting into the mould, whereas now I feel people tend to live their experiences vicariously through reality shows for instance.
But I didn’t feel ready to make this film, so I asked to do a documentary first to prepare myself. In that film we did the journey described in the book, interviewing the Beat poets and characters who are still alive along the way. So it is a documentary that searches for fiction.

Taran Khan