Walter Salles - Cinema is about the possibility of collective exchange

updated: November 16, 2009

“In the Limelight: Walter Salles" – The director Walter Salles interviewed by Peter Cowie and José Carlos Avellar. Berlinale Talent Campus, February 11, 2007.

Peter Cowie: We have two distinguished guests, both from Brazil. The first one is José Carlos Avellar, who is the Chairman of this year’s FIPRESCI Jury at the Berlinale. He has written half a dozen books on Latin American cinema, he is a particular expert on Cinema Nuevo, he was cultural director of Embrafilme in the 1980s and during the brief flowering when we all felt that Brazilian cinema was going to recover the brilliance of the 1960s. He was director president of Riofilme and a distributor of Brazilian films in the late 1990s, so please welcome José Carlos Avellar.

Walter Salles, just two years ago, enraptured your predecessors, the Talents who were here in 2004. It was the year of THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES (DIARIOS DE MOTOCICLETA, 2004), and he left to pick up a Bafta for Best Foreign Film in the middle of the Campus. He came back, we rescheduled his talk for the evening, and he was a wonderful speaker as you will see.

Walter attracted attention first in 1995 really in Sundance with his maiden film, FOREIGN LAND (TERRA ESTRANGEIRA, 1996), from which we will see a clip, and he then made his definitive breakthrough as a major auteur with CENTRAL STATION (CENTRAL DO BRASIL) in 1998, which was nominated for two Academy Awards, won a ton of prizes in various countries, and the Golden Bear here in Berlin. His next film, BEHIND THE SUN (ABRIL DESPEDAÇADO, 2001) won him a Golden Globe Nomination, and by the end of the 1990s he found himself sufficiently strong and influential enough to be able to start a company to help other Brazilian directors, for example City Of God (CIDADE DE DUES, 2002), which was directed by Fernando Meirelles. I have mentioned THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES, which was about the young Che Guevara, and it established him as probably the best Latin American director currently at work. In 2005 he completed the thriller DARK WATER based on a Japanese novel, and he is currently in preproduction for an adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road”. Please welcome Walter Salles.

As you have seen from all the material, the theme this year at the Campus is very much politics and film, and the need to retain your own privacy in the face of globalisation, and also taking advantage of that. Walter, perhaps we could start by asking, what is your definition of politics in film? Is everything you do a political statement, as Jean-Luc Godard once said, every camera angle is a moral statement?

WHAT IS A POLITICAL FILM?

Walter Salles: Are you sure you want to start with that? Good morning, I am very pleased to be here, and you were way to generous with your introduction. Just one thing, regarding CITY OF GOD, it was really Fernando Meirelles’ and Kátia Lund’s effort, and I just came in to help at the last moment, so I shouldn’t take any credit for it.

Well, what is a political film? I think that is a good question to start with. I think it is a film that is not only about character, it is about a character that is changed by the social and political climates surrounding it. If you take a look at all the important film movements, let’s say the Italian Neorealism, or the Nouvelle Vague in France, or the Cinema Nuevo in Brazil, the great independent cinema of the 1970s in the US for instance, these were never films only about characters. This is what Hollywood normally does, films only about characters. But these were films about characters that were in a transition, that would never be the same at the end of the story because they would confront a social and political reality they had to deal with. So maybe what we should say is, what is politics?

Because politics is not only about voting every four years. Politics is really like a French philosopher Jacques Rancière said not too long ago in the cahiers de cinema. He said that politics had to do with the daily co-existence of opposites. Politics has to do with colliding points of view, or exchanging points of views which are by nature different, and it also has to do with the necessity to talk about what hasn’t been heard before, and to see what hasn’t been seen before. And this is where you link it with cinema because good cinema is about what hasn’t been seen before and what hasn’t been heard before. So I think Jacques Rancière has a really good starting point there, which links politics to cinema in general.

Gael Garcia Bernal, when we were asked if MOTORCYCLE DIARIES was a political film, he would say everything in Latin America is political. Even choosing the colour of your shirt in the morning is a political gesture. Maybe if you don’t mind starting like this, I have put together five or six extracts of what I consider to be really great political films of different extractions, starting with an Eisenstein film of 1929 called THE GENERAL LINE (Sergej M. Eisenstein). These are films that I really love, and they are so diverse in terms of tone and style, and yet they have a unifying quality.

[Various film extracts are screened.]

THE GENERAL LINE is a film about the importance of collectivism and it really questions the religious principles at that time. It is a film that collides against the possibility of bowing to religion. The religious orthodox priest is promising rain here, and the peasants bow to this possibility, they still believe that this will come. And Eisenstein starts to question it. Of course the rain is not going to come, and a revolt against the religious powers is going to start. Now THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS (LA BATTAGLIA DI ALGERI, 1966) by Gillo Pontecorvo. This is about the Algerian resistance against the French invaders, and if these images were in colour today, they would remind us of something that we are watching daily on television today in Iraq I think. Roberto Rossellini’s film ROME, OPEN CITY (ROMA, CITTÀ APERTA, 1945) that launched the Italian neorealism. The camera is brought to the streets, and Rossellini creates not only an aesthetic revolution but an ethical revolution in cinema as well.

This is a Cuban film by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT (MEMORIAS DEL SUBDESARROLLO, 1968). It is a film about a man who in 1961 in Havana decides not to leave the country that was undergoing the Cuban revolution, but his family goes and he stays behind. What I find interesting about this film is that many scenes are filmed in such a way that you don’t know if you are watching a documentary or if you are watching a fiction film. Godard used to say that the best fiction films drift towards documentaries, and that the best documentaries drift towards fiction, and this may be a very good example of that. And THE GREAT DICTATOR (Charlie Chaplin, 1940), finally. The only true genius in the history of cinema. He wrote it, acted in it, edited it and did the music.

THE CINEMA NUEVO IN BRAZIL

Peter Cowie: José Carlos, I would like now to bring you in. In the late 1960s, the Cinema Nuevo seemed to spring from nowhere. All over Europe there was this explosion of political cinema, but did Cinema Nuevo happen in a vacuum?

José Carlos Avellar: I think I have spoken with Walter about this. I don’t think there is a single filmmaker who thinks at the beginning, I will make a political film. It’s not a kind of genre, or formula that you can apply to a group of films. But we have here, in these groups of films, I think some starting points for some Brazilian and Latin American films from the 1960s. Because I believe that after the war, the European cinema just keeps sinking.

The important thing in film is to watch reality. To put the camera face towards it and show the world just like it is, and imagine Latin America at the same time, and Brazil especially, we start seeing Eisenstein films. And there is a kind of internal fight in us, saying that Eisenstein is just as good as the Neorealist movement. For us, to start to make film critical was a big surprise to read stories and critics who said Eisenstein films were just like a documentary. Today it is very strange to think that an Eisenstein film is like a documentary, but the idea that it had nothing to do with a central character, and not a staged action, and shooting outside was so different that it became to be analysed just like a documentary.

I think that in the 1960s we had in Brazil one wish to not only show reality how reality really is, not showing the society and saying this is the real society, but changing it. Actually to change the society. Not to show things how they are but to change things. And Eisenstein and Rossellini together helped to make it. This was the basis. But Eisenstein, at the same time said we cannot use the reality as raw material. We have to change it. And from these two points, that in Europe at the same time were looking at two different ways to make a movie, the Eisenstein way, or the Neorealistic way, which came together.

Peter Cowie: Walter, were you influenced by Cinema Nuevo when you were young? Like Antonioni and Robert Altman, you waited until your late 30s to make your first feature film, but when you did finally FOREIGN LAND it almost echoes that Cinema Nuevo tradition.

Walter Salles: Yes, I was influenced by it, and how could you not be coming from where I come. But at the same time I had seen Antonioni, and the questioning of identity became very central also to my life because I was born in Brazil but my father was a diplomat during part of his life, so I bumped from country to country, and city to city. Really right at the beginning I was trying to answer the question, where am I from? Cinema Nuevo sort of answered that question. It showed to me what the country not only was but what the country eventually could be. And it is not by accident that I started doing documentaries. I got to fiction pretty late. I never thought I could be a fiction filmmaker. I just wanted to do documentaries and this is how I started. As a desire to actually understand really what country I am from, what kind of culture do I belong to.

“FOREIGN LAND” – SALLES’ FIRST FEATURE FILM

Peter Cowie: That is reflected in the fact that in FOREIGN LAND the hero goes to Lisbon, which I suppose is like someone from Australia coming to England in the 1920s.

Walter Salles: Just to explain a little bit about the context of FOREIGN LAND, which is a film I did in 1995, co-directed by Daniela Thomas. We were coming out of twenty-five years of dictatorship, and immediately after that period we had the first elected president in Brazil, named Fernando Collor de Mello. He was a candidate from the right-wing and he collided against a whole cultural milieu in Brazil who didn’t vote for him. Cinema ceased to exist in Brazil for five years. In 1995 when I did FOREIGN LAND I really wanted to do a film about that sensation of living in a country like that. A country that ceased to be a country of immigration, which Brazil always was, and became a country of emigration. So for the first time there is this kind of curve in the Brazilian history where people from different ethnical backgrounds ceased to come into the country and started to leave.

800,000 Brazilians left in the early 1990s. So I decided to do a film about that, about what we had felt very directly in our daily life. A film that had that desire to be that very urgent. We did it with a very small crew, we were like fifteen or sixteen people, in black and white. Robert Franck says the colour black and white contains at the same time hope and despair. It was a moment of that, of hope for a better future but also a lot of despair for what had happened. Seventy percent of the crew of FOREIGN LAND had never done fiction films before. There was no video-tape, we shot in 16mm and we shot very rapidly. We shot in three continents in three and a half weeks for 300,000 dollars. Everything is almost take one, and in doing it we rehearsed it as if it was a play because we didn’t have the money to really extend the shoot. My co-director Daniela is a playwriter and theatre director.

We rehearsed it like if it was a play and then we shot it very rapidly with non-actors, and some professional actors. It is the story of a woman who wants to go back during the economic crisis that is announced on television. She wants to go back to Spain, where she comes from. And ultimately her son is going to do the journey for her once she dies. In doing his mother’s journey, in Portugal he will bump into a community of Angolans and Mozambiquan people, which were actually not part of the screenplay. But as we came into Portugal to shoot the film we started to bump into characters that I didn’t see in Portuguese films, which I actually liked a lot. Those characters didn’t exist. And they were immigrants, like the Brazilians were at that point and were not portrayed in the Portuguese films, and we completely changed the screenplay in order to incorporate them. In the early 1990s the question of immigration was really starting to rise and I think that today it is a very central political question.

[A clip is screened.]

Walter Salles: This is really the reverse angle of colonisation. It comes from the countries that Portugal had invaded before, and strangely they are not represented in Portuguese cinema. Jumping from Portugal to another country. A few years ago I was in an airport and there were images without sound on the television. They were images of people running from a flood, and I thought, what happened in Haiti? And then I realised that those images were from New Orleans, showing that American cinema at that point, and still today, don’t represent that strata in their societies. Not even independent American cinema does that.

Peter Cowie: Even Spike Lee had difficulty in making WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE (2006), which was his three-part study of that, and also difficulty in getting it shown.

Walter Salles: He also actually did a wonderful documentary about that later. But those people are not represented in North American cinema today.

José Carlos Avellar: I would like to say one thing. To construct some sort of fiction, the film industry used to take out of context the characters they are showing. So what it means is we have one political way of seeing and thinking in the film is exactly to go to the context and show the difference between people. We have to take them out and put in a very special level. Sort of floating between the sky and the earth, and speak only about some dramatical problems, which these special kind of guys we see in the film are living. When you make a political film it is the understanding that they are in the same context as you are. Not only showing this kind of things but showing in a special way. We are making some political statements or political discussion in a film we should not only choose the right dramatical points but a dramatical point of view.

CONSTRUCTING A SMALL FICTION MOMENT TO SPEAK ABOUT DAILY LIFE

Peter Cowie: When FOREIGN LAND came out, what was the impact?

José Carlos Avellar: I was a bit surprised, not only because it was a black and white film but it is a way of speaking about the Brazilian problem in the moment, not in a documentary way if I can say that. There is some documentary sides to the film but we are constructing a kind of fiction film representing the daily life. I remember two moments of the film. One when the Brazilian girl wants to sell the passport, and the guy who will buy the passport says: “But this is a Brazilian passport, this means nothing nowadays.” It is a way in a single dialogue to discuss the Brazilian identity. You construct a small fiction moment to speak about daily life where people are thinking, I am in a fourth-world country, I am nothing, I don’t exist.

Another good moment to use as an example is when the guy and the girl look at the ocean and she says, the poor Portuguese guys, they made a very big fort and they crossed the ocean and finally they only discover Brazil. Again, you are making a fiction to discuss the feeling of the people in this moment. We are not making an interview with someone, we are not showing reality directly but we are constructing a kind of fiction. All the fights we had at the beginning of Cinema Nuevo was to find a way of telling a story that has to do with us. Not to follow the well-known way of construction of a screenplay or in the shooting. To give an example with an image, we put the camera in the middle of the situation, not outside looking at the best point. We are in the middle and we don’t know exactly where the really important part of the action actually is.

Walter Salles: If I could add something here. The person who does this kind of cinema was here yesterday and that is Jia Zhangke. He does something which is so hard to do, which is to blend story, the story of the characters, with the history of the country. If you look at his films, especially PLATFORM (ZHANTAI, 2000) and THE WORLD (SHIJIE, 2004) you have a complete understanding of the incredible transition that happened in those fifteen years in China. Somehow he manages to blend those two things seamlessly, and you learn much more from contemporary China and this process of change by watching his films than by reading fifteen books on the recent history of China. This is so hard to do. PLATFORM and THE WORLD are for me in my list of ten best films ever and I think he is really one of the most brilliant directors of his generation.

THE DOUBLE MEANING OF “CENTRAL DO BRASIL”

Peter Cowie: You chose for your next film CENTRAL STATION. You started in a sort of microcosm of the bigger world, the station, a place where people are coming and going, from all kinds of backgrounds. We have a clip from the beginning, where this woman is writing letters for all these unfortunate people who had dreams and they want to reach relatives or people they haven’t heard from, and they come together in this station. And your use of sound is so overwhelming. You have a sense of confusion but also belonging.

Walter Salles: For CENTRAL STATION I had done a documentary before the film about the letters that a woman in prison had sent to a sculptor, who is a friend of mine. I call him my younger brother, he is 85 now, but he is much more radical than anyone I know. When he started to receive these letters from this woman he didn’t know, he actually answered the letters, and that exchange really changed their lives. So I started to think, if a letter can really alter somebody’s perception of the world, then what happens if a letter doesn’t reach its destiny?

And somehow it had to do with Brazil, who hadn’t reached a destiny during those 25 years of military dictatorship. I really felt like, maybe this woman who hasn’t been sending the letters, Dora, the central character, maybe the journey into discovering what country she is from, maybe going into the centre of Brazil. Because CENTRAL STATION in Portuguese is CENTRAL DO BRASIL, which is not only the name of the station but also the centre, the heart of the country. So it has a double meaning. And for me, the search that the little kid does for his father in the film is really the search for a country. In Portuguese actually the words for father and the word for country are almost the same. Father is pai, and country is pais. So psychology 101… this is really what I was aiming to look at.

Maybe we should look at the clip. The film actually starts with the woman who was in the documentary that I shot, so the first person who talks at the beginning of CENTRAL STATION and who dictates a letter is the woman who was just released from prison, and she is the person who inspired the whole film. And the letter she is dictating is actually a true letter that she is dictating to the person that she was in love with but who remained in the prison.

[A clip is screened.]

Walter Salles: So the two initial statements are true statements by people who are telling what really happened to them. And then fiction comes into the story, as José Carlos was mentioning before, the son trying to look for the father. This is when fiction comes into it. I really wanted there to see the faces of the Brazilians that you don’t see on television, and coming back to that definition of politics, that politics is about seeing what you haven’t seen and hearing what you haven’t heard. This is exactly what I had in mind when I did this film.

CHOSING TO MAKE FILMS IN THE NATIVE COUNTRY

Peter Cowie: With regards to this year’s theme of politics, privacy and the home I think it is interesting that when CENTRAL STATION was such a huge success all over the world, you must have been tempted, or must have had offers to work in Hollywood, or other countries, but in fact you chose to make your films in your native country.

Walter Salles: I made one experience later. But yes, the film I did immediately after that, BEHIND THE SUN, was a film shot in Brazil for actually a lower budget than CENTRAL STATION. I really wanted to stay in the country at that point. It was later bought by Miramax but it wasn’t financed by them.

José Carlos Avellar: Also the film MIDNIGHT (O PRIMEIRO DIA, 1998), which was the film you made immediately after CENTRAL STATION.

Walter Salles: But I think even if you go outside your country you really have to come back. When I was asked what it is like to film outside, I said, well the first thing you have to have with you is your passport, in order to come back because I think the strength of a filmmaker lies really in his roots.

Peter Cowie: In fact THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES touches on that because it is a road movie but it is also circular, an odyssey which comes back in the end.

Walter Salles: THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES is really part of what I would say is a trilogy. Starting with FOREIGN LAND, which is about studying where you are from and where you are going to. And it goes back to the fatherland that abandoned us Brazilians. The Portuguese that discovered us took out everything that they wanted to. The silver, the gold. Even the name, Brazil comes from a tree that you can’t find in Brazil anymore because it was all taken and brought over to Europe. So it was really about that, studying where we are from and then getting back to the father who had kind of abandoned us. And then the second film, CENTRAL STATION, is about trying to find the heartland, the heart of the country.

I see the third film you have just mentioned, as a bracket in it. As a personal journey more than anything. MOTORCYCLE DIARIES is the third part of the trilogy. It is about not only talking or trying to find a Brazilian identity but trying to find a Latin American identity that encompasses the Brazilian identity. I shot it in Spanish and actually I spoke a blend of Portuguese and Spanish, meaning awful Spanish. And in order to be precise, because I think really to direct has a lot to do with precision. Especially with actors, to say exactly what you think can be changed and altered in specific moments. So basically what I did for that film is I went to live in Argentina, six months prior to the shooting, in order to immerse myself in a culture that was not totally my own. But it became my own. We had an incredible crew and group of actors. I consider Gael Garcia Bernal, who is going to be talking here, and Rodrigo de la Serna, the two actors in the film…

THE ACTORS IN “THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES”

Peter Cowie: Did you have them in mind from the very beginning or did you discover Gael later on?

Walter Salles: I had seen AMORES PERROS (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2000) but I hadn’t seen Y TU MAMÁ TAMBIÉN (Alfonso Cuarón, 2001) because it hadn’t come out yet. So when I invited Gael Garcia Bernal I had just seen one film. But I was so struck by his acting skills and intelligence that it became an obvious choice for me. And Rodrigo de la Serna hadn’t done a film before. He came out of tests in Argentina but he was so obviously brilliant that we opted for him immediately.

And I have to say that it took a lot of courage from the people who actually financed this. The project was produced by Robert Redford, so it was an ideal producer-director relationship, because him being a director himself, and on CENTRAL STATION also being part of the Sundance experience I knew him and he really gave us the means to do the film without ever interfering with it. He was available, he read the screenplay, he came to see the cut but he never obliged me to do anything, which is like the most brilliant form of collaboration. On the other hand I have to say the screenplay, which was very good, by Jose Rivera was refused by every single production company in the US. Everybody said, no, there is no conflict in this story, it is never going to work. It is as if we were speaking to the same person, just changing addresses.

And then FilmFour read it, and we were lucky because Rebecca Yeldham, who is a producer, who used to be at Sundance, fell in love with the screenplay and said we have to do this. This is how we ended up being able to do the film. Because I really wanted to do it in Spanish. That is the other thing. The Americans said: “Well, maybe if it’s in English…” I mean could you see it with Brad Pitt? So it was obvious that the film had to be done like that or it couldn’t be done because how could you do a film about Che Guevara in English? I was actually very happy to see that Steven Soderbergh had opted to do his films on the later life of Guevara in Spanish because that is the only way you could do it.

[A clip is screened.]

Walter Salles: There is something to be said about these scenes but before I would like to say a little bit about how the film was prepared. As this was the 1950s and we had to dive into a reality that wasn’t ours, what we did was we all congregated in Argentina. I was there six months prior to the shootings but the actors arrived two months before, and the DoP and art director, and we did a lot of seminars on Latin American history and we studied Inca history with professors from the Buenos Aries University. We watched documentary films and news reels from the 1950s, so we got completely prepared and built a sense of a family that was going to travel through 20,000 kilometres.

And then I said, now that we know everything, let’s forget about all of this and try to recreate our journey, our version of it. I think the more you prepare for a film, the freer you are during the shooting. The more also the actors will be able to improvise. Everything that you have seen there is improvised. Those scenes were not in the screenplay. The little boy we found outside the hotel, he was a guide, and he said: “Do you want me to show you the city?” And I said: “Yes, but can we film?”

SHOOTING A LITTLE BIT LIKE PLAYING JAZZ

Peter Cowie: What camera did you use?

Walter Salles: Two Aaton Super-16mm. The DoP was doing the main camera and I was doing the second one. It is all take one, there is no second take in all that you saw there. The idea was really to capture what we were witnessing and trying to somehow be in the same spirit of the original journey, and seeing for the first time. When Gael is looking at Machu Picchu he is actually looking at it for the first time. Interestingly also, my impression is that the more constructed the screenplay is, the more you can drift away from it. It is a little bit like jazz. The better the melody, the more you can escape from it because you can find it back.

Peter Cowie: Ingmar Bergman once said that only the truly efficient can be truly lazy.

José Carlos Avellar: Again Walter, you have to prepare the screenplay by knowing the context where the characters will be. You have to know more things about Latin America to shoot a film about Latin America, more than just writing and writing and writing a screenplay. If you have knowledge about the things you are making you can improvise.

Walter Salles: Absolutely. I mean Gael and Rodrigo, they were improvising the logic of the characters because they knew so much not only about the characters but about also the social and political reality of the period, that they were able to somehow conduct a conversation for instance with the Indian women in that direction. And it worked perfectly. Because of their intelligence of course, but also because of the kind of preparation. There is another thing also, which is that we were, at one point at the beginning, I thought that we were too many in the crew, we were maybe 35 or 40 people, and I thought I would like this to be more energetic. So, in Machu Picchu we were just twelve.

There was no art director with us, there was no one to do costumes, there was just one person for hair and make-up, so in total we were twelve with the actors, and we were able to shoot in Machu Picchu without seeing a tourist. We could wake up early and we were very mobile. There is a lot of freedom and there is a lot to be said for that. You see films of the Cinema Nuevo period, and in the final credits you have 15 people at the most. And today, you see the average Brazilian film, and there are at least 40 people in the credits. There is something that went wrong.

NATIONAL CINEMA SHOULD BE PLURAL

Peter Cowie: In THE LORD OF THE RINGS (Peter Jackson, 2001), the credits ran for nine and a half minutes. But, unfortunately we have a bit of a time problem, because you have brought along a wonderful ten minute clip about the preproduction of ON THE ROAD. I want to show that but I also want some people to have the chance to ask some questions. Maybe we have some questions now and then we will see the clip as a closing climax to the whole event.

Question: I think what is so special about MOTORCYCLE DIARIES is that it is a film about friendship, and the friendship is printed so clearly on film, and I think that these people could pretty much be anybody. On that note I was wondering in a country like Brazil where cinema is only virtually possible because of public financing and public support, is there a place for cinema that has no commitment to themes of social national original relevance. In other words, is there a place for cinema that simply comes from a personal place?

Walter Salles: I think there is, but even that would have a social and political quality. Because even if you film the story of a personal relationship inside a room, the background, the way those people were informed about the world, the way they look at the world, would have that kind of imprint. I think what national cinema should be is plural before anything else. You have to have a diversity of points of view. Even when I mentioned Rancière’s perception of politics, it is about colliding ideas on the vision of the world. I think that this encompasses the most personal approaches as well. And yes, I believe there should be a place for this, there should be a place for purely experimental films. Why experimental films? Because I think these films are the ones that really bring oxygen into cinematography. There should be a place for the cinema that touches on the question of identity, there should be a place for any kind of films.

José Carlos Avellar: I agree. I mean cinematography is a group of different films and different ways of film productions and different relationships with society. I think that mostly what we think as political cinema is a way of looking at the films and understanding the films and discussing the films. When I make some film in my country I start a process of discussion of the country and the cinema with an audience, so the people in the audience don’t think the same things as I do. There is this kind of fight of this relationship which is actually political cinema. If we have this understanding, anything we do in the cinema will be in this direction. If you don’t, maybe the audience will put it in the film.

FILMIC REFLECTIONS OF INDIGENOUS CULTURES

Question: I was very touched by MOTORCYCLE DIARIES, especially the part you just showed, the reflection of indigenous cultures within a context of total respect and I was wondering if you have any… or if Brazilian filmmakers are watching what is going on in the countries that do have indigenous majorities, and if you have any contact with the film industries, such as in Bolivia, which is supposed to have a long-standing indigenous component to it?

José Carlos Avellar: I think there is always, or at least since the 1960s, a good relationship with the filmmakers and film producers in Latin America. Personally as a film critic I dream of the day when we can show films about the Indians made in Mexico, made in Bolivia and made in Peru. It would be an amazing discovery for the Brazilian audience.

Walter Salles: I was thinking of a few examples of films about this theme, and I was remembering Nelson Pereira dos Santos who is an important filmmaker in Brazil who did a film called HOW TASTY WAS MY LITTLE FRENCHMAN (COMO ERA GOSTOSO O MEU FRANCES, 1971). Of course it is about cannibalism. It is a great film, and actually I think it just came out on DVD in the US.

José Carlos Avellar: And we have in Brazil many documentaries about the Indians.

Walter Salles: On TV also, I was involved in a ten-hour series on the Shingu area, which is where most of the Indian nations are located in the Amazon.

WALTER SALLES’ SENSIBILITY FOR WOMEN’S SUBJECTS

Question: You are coming from a country that is supposed to be more male dominated but watching CENTRAL STATION, it struck me what a great role for the character Dora is in it, played by Fernanda Montenegro. And again, in your segment for PARIS, JE T’AIME (2006), you are dealing with a woman who gives her little child into day care in order to look after the baby of a rich family. So I wonder, where is this sensibility for women’s subjects coming from? Is this coming from your collaborator Daniela Thomas, or from yourself, or from some great movies from the past which influenced you?

Walter Salles: Well, it is certainly not male dominated in my apartment! I don’t know how to answer that directly because I think the answer must be dug somewhere underneath several layers. I was married to a psycho-analyst but we never got there, thank god. But, you’re right. I come from a country where the cinema is more thematically expanded around male characters more than female characters but for some reason I tend to drift here and there around the women, also for some reason I see Brazil, not as a fatherland but as a motherland. The father abandoned us.

José Carlos Avellar: We used to say in Brazil, mother-fatherland.

Walter Salles: For some reason I see the women as the ones who really structure the country when the fathers went back to where they were from which was Portugal. So, it may have to do with that. It may have to do with my collaboration with Daniela Thomas, which is a very strong one. In the case of you mentioned the PARIS, JE T’AIME segment. This was a collaboration between a collective film, where twenty directors did a piece on Paris. And actually the invitation was to do a love story in Paris, which I thought was absolutely uninteresting.

So I thought, how can we see the reverse angle of that? And it struck me that the people who really make Paris work are the ones outside Paris, and therefore the idea of following an immigrant in that film came about from a social and political understanding of what we were looking at. And interestingly, we filmed in the same regions that burnt ten days later in Paris. And I ended up doing a small documentary also in a part of the city as a result of that, which has yet to be shown.

WALTER SALLES PRODUCING JACK KEROUAC’S “ON THE ROAD”

Peter Cowie: Walter, your long dream of making a film version of Jack Kerouac’s ON THE ROAD, which was originally a dream of Francis Coppola, is now coming towards fruition. You are making it for Francis’ company and you have kindly brought along something which I don’t think has ever been shown?

Walter Salles: First of all I am very probably going to be doing a Brazilian film now, before doing ON THE ROAD. It takes me a long time to do a film, and when it doesn’t I normally miss the boat. It takes me three to four years to see an idea mature and this is why I tend to develop two or three ideas at the same time. So the film I am going to be doing next is going to shoot probably June/July/August, with Daniela Thomas again, so it is going to be our third collaboration, and it is about four brothers in the outskirts of São Paulo.

It is really about what is considered to be ethical today to break the social barriers in Brazil. It is going to be a road-movie of sorts because every single character is in movement in the city, so you could say it is an urban road-movie if you want to define what it will be. We are basically going to do it with a crew with very little experience. The idea is to have like in FOREIGN LAND, more than fifty percent of the people have never done cinema before, but have something that I find really vital in cinema, which is the desire of cinema. We will work with unknown actors, with one exception, which is the boy from CENTRAL STATION, who is now nineteen, who will be one of the brothers in the film. So that is what is next.

As a form also of getting strength again, and to do a film like a question. I don’t have all the answers for this film and if I had, I would probably not be tempted to do the film. This is why I am not very fond of documentaries that are made to prove a point. When the filmmaker has a final idea of what it is going to be. For example, I am not a Michael Moore fan. Because I think if you are interested in finding the questions during the film, you will probably make something that has a vitality, that will not be constructed. Every time I had an idea for what the film should be, completely from beginning to the end, I didn’t get to where I wanted to go. If you don’t know everything I think it is a better starting point. But you have to dive as much as you can, vertically into it, but never get to the end of that process, so that the film itself answers it.

About ON THE ROAD. I was approached by Francis Coppola after he saw MOTORCYCLE DIARIES to consider it. It was a book that was very important for me, and for several generations. It didn’t only have a repercussion in America but also elsewhere. It is really about the birth of counter-culture, the beat generation but more than that. Really about experiencing things first hand and not trying to fit into the mode. And I think that today, when you see the reality shows, and you see what is out there. People tend to live experiences vicariously and I thought maybe this is the time to do something like ON THE ROAD where the experiments with drugs as a form to expand your consciousness, or experimenting with sex also as a form of amplifying your perception of the world, and redefining what family is all about, may be an interesting point now.

But still, I didn’t think I was equipped to do the film when I was invited to do it, so I said, let me do a documentary to search for the theme and to see what could be really interesting in it. Coppola thought it a little unusual but said: “Do it if you want to.” So basically what I have done is that: With three people I did the journey of ON THE ROAD, the journey that is in the book. Crossing the country from East to West, then from the North to the South. And in the process we interviewed some of the beat poets who were alive in the 1970s, like Gary Snyder, who was the first environmental poet of the 1950s and 1960s, or people who were part of ON THE ROAD as characters, and who are still alive.

And finally we interviewed people who were influenced by the book, and that goes all the way from Wim Wenders, who is a director I really love, to David Byrne, Laurie Anderson… It is really a documentary searching for a fiction film. And what I will show here is a ten minutes compact perception of what the theme is.

[A clip is screened.]

Peter Cowie: They need the theatre now but I am telling you, this has been the best opening panel that I can remember at any Berlinale Talent Campus. Thank you. It is right on the theme that Dorothee set for this Campus and I think everybody will go away buzzing.

Walter Salles: Thank you very much. Obrigado. I would like to say it is really a pleasure to be part of this, and it is not by accident that I am here again two years later. Because really cinema is about this possibility of collective exchange, and I have learned so much two years ago that I felt like really coming back, before shooting. Thank you very much.