Walter Salles
Introducing The Motorcycle Diaries at the National Film Theatre last week, Brazilian director Walter Salles discussed Latin American identity, Argentinian cinema, and the character of Che Guevara. Here's a full transcript
* Geoff Andrew
* guardian.co.uk,
* Thursday August 26 2004
Geoff Andrew: First, I'd like to thank you so much for coming. I've been trying to get you here since 2000, when we did a retrospective of your films, but you've just been so busy, filming all over the place. What I'd like to do is start off by discussing those clips that we've just seen [Central Station and Behind the Sun] because they do relate to Motorcycle Diaries in different ways. The clips I chose from Central Station show you as a director who uses quite a lot of non-professional actors, which you do again in Motorcycle Diaries . And first, you started off in documentary film-making before you went into feature films. What interested you in film-making in the first place, and why documentary?
Walter Salles: First of all, I'm really honoured to be here. When I come to London, I always like to see what's playing at the NFT. I'm very undeserving to be here, but very, very happy nonetheless. I think I turned to documentary film-making very early on as a way to know a little bit more about my country and my roots. My father was a diplomat for part of his life and I jumped from country to country and culture to culture. So when I was very young, I longed for Brazil. I really wanted to know the heart of it much better than I did. That's why I have always admired documentaries, because they open windows that can make you understand much better where you come from, much better than fiction, I think. So this was a really good place to start. I did documentaries for maybe 10 years before I turned to fiction films. But one of these documentaries helped me a lot to understand what fiction was about: I had an opportunity very early on to make a documentary about a sculptor known as GTM - those are his initials - who came from Minas Gerais, which is the heart of the country, and also where my family is from. And he used to carve animals out of wood - he was an extremely intelligent man; he was illiterate but he was much, much brighter than all of us who were there interviewing him. So I asked him, how do you carve an animal which is not native to Brazil, for example, elephants or giraffes? He turned to me as if this was a very unlikely question and said, "Well, I pick up the wood and whatever is not an elephant, I take out."
[laughs]
WS: I think fiction film-making is a little bit like this - it's deciding what is part of the film and what is not. The necessity to conceptualise has to come very early on, and defining a vector of development for that film also at the beginning of the process will allow you much more freedom as you go along. I don't believe in such a thing as a "locked" screenplay. On the contrary, I'm a strong believer in the necessity of imperfection coming into the film. But I also think that the more you reason collectively about what the project should be at the beginning of the process, the more you can improvise later.
GA: Yes, we can talk a bit more about that aspect when we discuss Motorcycle Diaries . But Walter just told me as we were watching the second clip from Central Station, the scene with the big religious festival, that that was actually improvised. So how did you deal with that?
WS: Well, it was a very well-written screenplay by a couple of young guys who had never done this before but had something more important, I think, than experience - they had the talent and the desire. One of them was a young cinephile who had never written anything before, and the other is a short-story film-maker. So I had this idea for the film but I was shooting Foreign Land and I had written 10 pages on it about what the story should be. And I trusted these two guys who improved the screenplay immensely. But they hadn't been on the ground to actually capture the temperature. So when we were location scouting I saw these religious processions and I really felt that that was so descriptive of what was inherent to that part of Brazil that we needed to plunge it in, so we rewrote the screenplay as we were filming it. I think with road movies, especially, you should leave the door open for things like that to happen. And also, you should be porous to the people that you encounter on the road. You have to be open to let those persons change you and change the fabric of the film.
GA: This is what I like about talking to Walter - I ask him one question and he answers five. Now, the first of those two clips from Central Station has an extremely shallow focus [a sequence with Dora the letter-writer's customers] - all that's in focus is the faces, and all that's behind them is almost abstract. Whereas once they go on the road, you have much deeper focus. I think that shows the importance you attach to the way the film looks. It strikes me, and I tried to show this with the clip I chose from Behind the Sun, that you're a very visual film-maker. The words are there, but quite often you're telling stories through images, primarily.
WS: It's the idea that film and content are tied. With Central Station, the story was basically about the recuperation of one's identity and also, an investigation into the country's identity. In Portuguese, the words for father (pai) and country (pais) are almost the same. So the search for a father in Central Station is also a search for a country. What we aimed to do in this film was to lose the focus at the beginning, just focus on the human drama of the faces in the station, so that as the story gets closer and closer to the father, and by extension, the country, you start to see - through the changing depth of focus - that the reality and the country is actually a lot denser that you first thought. At the same time, the colour also changes - I don't know if you realised, but it's very monochromatic. We opted to use very brown colours at the beginning, and it's as if the characters are unable to see more than that. And the closer they get to the heart of the country, the more colours they start to perceive. So the idea of recuperating one's identity is linked to the idea of having a more wide-ranging sensorial palette as well.
GA: It strikes me that the film you did before this, Foreign Land, which did get a release at the ICA here but has not been widely seen, unfortunately, is partly about being in exile. It concerns something that happened in 1990 when the president of Brazil froze all assets and that caused a lot of upheaval there. Central Station is partly about the search of identity and it shows poverty and religion around the country. Midnight was about prison conditions, in part. It seems to me that you're very concerned to make films that deal with political issues and social problems, but in a very accessible way.
WS: I come from a country and also a continent whose identity is in the making. We're a very young culture, and I think that things are not yet crystallised. So the films that are made in our latitudes, I think, carry that sense of urgency. It's as if the people that you meet on the street and the stories that they bring can influence you directly. Imagine trying to do that in Los Angeles - it's impossible because there's no one in the streets! So little by little, I think my generation became very porous to that. But I think it's not all that different from what the Italian neo-realists did 50 years ago, by taking the camera out of the studio and taking it closer to the faces in the street. And what the Italian realists created was not only an aesthetic revolution but also an ethical revolution which influenced the Nouvelle Vague and Cinema Novo in Brazil. And my generation in Brazil was influenced by Cinema Novo. So we're echoing what's been done way in the past.
GA: There's certainly an echo when you made Behind the Sun. You went to make the film in what you thought was the driest part of Brazil, and it was a place where [Brazilian director] Nelson Pereira dos Santos had made a film many years ago. But then your film got held up because it rained, and you discovered that it had also rained for Nelson. So was Behind the Sun a tribute to an earlier form of Brazilian cinema?
WS: It was, and also I was very moved by this novel by Ismail Kadare, an Albanian writer, which had nothing to do with Brazil. And yet the facts he was narrating, which happened in Albania in 1910, also happened in that region of Brazil at the same time. Therefore, I tried to make the adaptation. I'm a little bit critical of the film, watching it from a distance now, because I think I was somehow blocked by the fact that this was about Brazil in 1910 and I wasn't able to be influenced by what was burgeoning around me. The film therefore had to evolve within its own structure as it had been laid out in the screenplay. I didn't go ahead on Motorcycle Diaries before realising that the reality of South America in 2002/03 is very similar to that described by Ernesto Guevara in his book. The structural problems are pretty much the same, of bad distribution of land and wealth. I realised that our own adventure within the continent could somehow mirror what happened to them on a very small scale, and that improvisation was possible.
GA: Actually I don't think you should be too hard on yourself over Behind the Sun - it's an almost exceedingly beautiful film. And it strikes me as your most tightly-controlled film, which makes it certainly very different from Motorcycle Diaries . And in a way, the reason why I chose that clip [of the meeting of the protagonist and a female fire-eater] was to show you trying to achieve something very mythic, with its element of fire and fairy-tale. Was that something that you were trying to do, to create a myth out of reality?
WS: Watching the clips, I realised that fire was also present in Central Station and I had just never made the link. So I definitely have to ring Freud's neighbour's doorbell and ask what that might mean. I was really interested not only in the mythological but also the almost Greek quality of Ismail Kadare's narrative, the way it touched on very basic elements. I wondered if it was possible to investigate that on film, to work with a scarcity of symbols, but at the same time very strong ones. That departs completely from my experience in documentaries, where you don't crystallise things in advance. And so, the act of filming was not as pleasant as it was, for instance, in Central Station, or as exhilarating as in Motorcycle Diaries.
GA: Motorcycle Diaries feels like your loosest and most relaxed film to date; that's how it feels to the spectator. Was that the experience you had making it, because it seems like you probably had a ball?
WS: It took us five years to get there. I started in 1999 to do the research for this project. Three years of research and interviews, but we had one privilege - the fact that Alberto Granado, the man who idealised that journey, was now an 83-years-young man, still extraordinarily vital and with an incredible memory. And he made us understand not only the importance of the journey as translated in the journals, but also how decisive that journey had been in shaping the future of these two very young men. What you also have to realise is that in the Latin America of 1952, we knew a lot about the Greeks, Romans and Etruscans but nothing about the Incas. And this is pre-television. So these two young men went on a very courageous odyssey, and the social and political reality that they found started to alter their perception of the world. We wanted to be faithful to the two books that they wrote, but we also wanted to be faithful to the spirit of the journey. And their journey got more and more deconstructed as they went along, so I thought of a film that could also be more and more deconstructed and improvised as we progressed. It's a film made by young Argentinians, Chileans, Peruvians, Mexicans, Brazilians... so it's really a family effort, a collective effort. And a lot of us didn't know very much about our own continent. It's a little bit like the title of that Wim Wenders film, Far Away, So Close. This was how we all felt when we started working on this film, so we conducted a series of seminars in Buenos Aires three months before we started filming, covering the history, music of Latin America in the 50s. We saw documentaries, feature films, a lot of debates were generated. And the whole crew started to come - in the beginning, it was four or five of us while others found the idea especially boring. But little by little, they all started to come, and something amalgamated prior to the shoot. Therefore, the shoot itself was very interesting because we were bonding more and more as we progressed, but physically it was very, very difficult as you can probably see.
GA: Well, yes, because you also had to do a location search as well before starting to make it.
WS: I did the journey three times, twice to do the location scouting and the third time to actually shoot. And yet, what we didn't want to do was crystallise what was going to happen, in order to leave the door open for improvisation later on. Especially after the motorcycle breaks down. We understood that they started to be completely transformed, not just by the physical geography, but by the people they started to encounter. And we wanted that to happen in this film also.
GA: The people you have Gael [García Bernal] and Rodrigo [de la Serna] talking to in the film, for instance the woman who works in handicrafts, they were actually talking about their lives now, weren't they?
WS: Absolutely. And the little boy in Cuzco, we found him in the streets, or he found us. He came to us and asked if we wanted to know a little bit more about the city and offered himself as a guide. So we said, "Yes, but can we bring the Super16 camera along?" And he said, "Bring whatever you want." And there it was. That scene, everything is Take 1. Nothing was repeated. Later that same day, we found those Indian women who don't speak Spanish but only Quechua, who also started to talk to Gael and Rodrigo. And the two of them were so immersed in their characters that they were able to improvise freely within the framework of the screenplay. You have to be careful not to open all the windows and be totally free and unprepared, but you have to try to capture reality as it happens. You see that very much in a refined and yet very simple form in [Abbas] Kiarostami's films, and I'm so impressed by the immediacy and the truth that you find in his films that it just transports you to a completely different level, as if nothing is truly staged. Ken Loach approaches that as well, I think. I'm an admirer of these two directors' work, and somehow I try to find, in what I do, something which may not completely be in the same direction but echoes that.
GA: Did you ever feel that this enormous journey that you were going to have to make for this film might be too much? You seem to like taking on a challenge, and you like road movies, but this was the biggest challenge yet, surely?
WS: At the beginning I was very unsure that it was even possible to do this adaptation because it was such sacred territory in the whole of Latin America; not only the book itself but the iconic quality of Guevara, which is very intimidating. Which is why it took us three years to do the necessary research before we could move forward. Actually, I didn't generate this project - it was Robert Redford, whose Sundance Institute was very instrumental in the making of Central Station: we received a screenplay prize prior to the film being made, which helped immensely in making the film a reality. And Redford was passionate about this book, and he was the first one to talk to me about it. I said, "I know it really well, I've read it many, many times, but it's going to be very difficult to put this together because (1) I don't think you can do this in any language other than Spanish, and (2) I think you have to work with actors and non-actors from Latin America. It's such a complex film to make and you'll probably never get funded." He had a very hard time funding this film. And the screenplay was refused by virtually all the American studios - I'm not going to list them... alphabetically. [laughs] Actually, the problem was two-fold: first, they asked, "Where's act 1, act 2 and act 3?" Of course they weren't there. And secondly, they said, "There's no conflict." But the conflict is internal, not externalised. And if it wasn't for FilmFour here, we would probably never have moved forward. So it was a process that took a very long time, and in between I did Behind the Sun.
GA: Did you ever worry about shooting the scenes in the leper colony? I think you did it in a beautiful way, but did you feel you had problems to be dealt with there?
WS: Absolutely. First we did a lot of research on that specific disease, which has not been eradicated, contrary to what many people think. There are still 500,000 persons afflicted with leprosy in Latin America, so it is still very much present. Secondly, thanks to Alberto Granado, who is a scientist, we learnt so much about it. Thirdly, through our research we met five former patients of the San Pablo leper colony and they said, "Well, if you're going to make a film about this, we would like to be in the film," and they are. So five of the 90 non-actors that you see in the film are people who have actually spent time in the leper colony. So I didn't want to impose our perception of that, but instead be porous to their input. What I soon realised is that what was happening on the south bank [where the patients are housed] - and isn't this interesting, that even that is emblematic, the north and south side of the river? - was much more interesting in terms of exploring life in all its complexity than what was happening on the north side, with the nuns and the doctors. This is why, for instance, you have the football match in there, and that impromptu music session, just so that you don't look at these people in a miserabilist light. I don't know if you have that word or sensibility in English...
GA: It's used mainly of Finnish cinema.
[laughs]
GA: Only a couple more questions before I throw it open. One is, you have this rather wonderful speech that Guevara makes on his birthday about the dream of a united America. I imagine this is something close to you, but I wanted to talk about a united Latin American cinema - because you have been at the forefront of a revival of fortunes in Brazilian film-making, not only by the films you've made but also the films you've produced like City of God. But also you are in frequent communication with people like [Alejandro González] Iñárritu and [Alfonso] Cuarón in Mexico, among others. Can you just talk about your hopes or your efforts towards creating a stronger and perhaps more fluid sense of Latin American cinema?
WS: First of all, you may be surprised that I only saw work by Pablo Trapero [director of El Bonaerense] and Lucrecia Martel [director of La Ciénaga] for the first time outside of Brazil. Their films are wonderful. They are part of the new wave of Argentinian cinema, which I think is possibly the best in the world right now. And these films didn't get to Brazil until very recently - they just weren't distributed because of the control the major studios have over distribution. So I feel a responsibility to help first-time film-makers in Brazil, but also to increase the dialogue between film cultures which are really wonderful and so much closer to us than what we do see on our screens. Also, there are now new laws in Brazil which create incentives for Argentine and Latin American films to be premiered and distributed in Brazil and vice versa. And I hope that this will go way further, because there is much more to unite us than we think. I go and see a film by Lucrecia Martel or I go to see Amores Perros, and they remind me so much of things which are just outside our door in Brazil. I feel that this generation of film-makers is much closer than the previous ones. But also, we live in a freer society. You have to realise that 20 years ago, part of the continent was living under horrible military dictatorships. If cinema has burgeoned, it's also thanks to the fact that democracy - not economic democracy, but at least political democracy - has returned to a great part of the continent. And this allows us to express what we're feeling as film-makers and to try to provide a reflection of that on the screen.
GA: And as the Argentinians' example shows us, you don't necessarily need a lot of money, you just need imagination. It's amazing what they're doing. Okay, my last question. You have a talent for choosing and casting very good-looking people in your films. In Motorcycle Diaries , you have former regular NFT customer Gael García Bernal, who is Mexican, and Rodrigo de la Serna, who's Argentinian. Can you just talk a little about why you cast these two actors in this film.
WS: That also took a long time and the choice of the two actors was made in two different periods of time and in different ways. I met Gael in 2001 when I saw Amores Perros and I was very impressed not only by the viscerality that he had but also his maturity as an actor. Everything was coming from within in a very internalised manner, and that's very rare for an actor of 19 or 20 years of age. I'm not a big fan of "performance" in acting. On the contrary, I prefer what comes in layers, not what is spelled out, and I think that Gael has that quality. But he can also do something like the Almodóvar film [Bad Education] - and he's outstanding in it. He does have the capacity to hit you with very light strokes, like gentle rain. I invited him on board before Y Tu Mamá También premiered, so he's been involved with this project for a long time. On the other hand, I needed to find an actor that could bring to life the Alberto Granado that I knew by that time, and it was so difficult because Alberto Granado is so generous and flamboyant and wonderful and he's also got a certain freshness. Rodrigo de la Serna, I had never heard of him but he came and did a screen test. He's from the theatre in Argentina, and I was in shock when I saw his interpretation of the scenes I was asking him to read because it was as if the humanity that you had in Italian cinema of the 60s, like what Vittorio Gassman or Alberto Sordi had, reappeared in front of my eyes. I stopped the search immediately and invited him to join us. Having said that, more than 90% of the characters in this film are played by non-actors. The Chilean sisters are students, the people in the leper colony, with the exception of maybe three actors out of about 100 and the former patients, so about 95 people there are actually from the little cities surrounding the place where we filmed. It's a pleasure to blend the actors and the non-actors together, but sometimes it's very difficult to find a common denominator and a harmony. You have to work with actors with the talent and intelligence and the generosity of Gael and Rodrigo to achieve that, because it's not something that comes immediately. You have to actually create something behind the scenes and not work specifically on the scenes themselves in order to generate a backstory between them, so that you can then recreate something later in front of the camera. And again, the less obtrusive the camera is, and the smaller the crew trying to capture that, the better it is. For instance, in Cuzco and Machu Picchu, we were 14, including the actors. That's not a lot, you know. On the other hand, in the San Pablo leper colony, we were 150 - there were about 100 extras in there. But it's not that I arrived there and filmed immediately. No, we played football with them, we had collective jam sessions, we tried to create something of a collective history before we did the scenes - you need the ties, you need that bond before you can actually go and introduce the camera into their midst. You have to respect those people, and not try to steal something. The opposite is true, you have to do it in total synchronicity with them.
GA: And it shows up beautifully there on screen. Okay, I'm sure people have got questions.
Q1: There's a trend in Hollywood now of remaking Japanese and Hong Kong films. I've heard that you're remaking Dark Water, is that true? How did you get involved?
WS: Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I wanted to explore something that I hadn't done before. Also I didn't want to do two road films in a row. Also, I knew that the impact of Motorcycle Diaries was going to be so resonant for all of us who went through the experience of making it that I didn't want to do anything that could reflect it. It's like you need a complete break before you can move forward. So that, on a purely personal standpoint, was how I came to make the decision to make that film. The other thing that attracted me was the study of urban solitude and fear. There's a really interesting French historian called Delumeau, who did a book called History of Fear, about how fear has been used throughout the ages to impose a dominant point of view. I thought that it could be an interesting statement about North American culture at this present moment, but what do I know?
[laughs]
WS: Also, it was a possibility to work with really very good actors that I admired, including some British actors like Tim Roth and Pete Postlethwaite. But I made sure that I had a return ticket and I intend to use it very soon. I'm completely uninterested in what you may call a career in film-making. I'm much more interested in living specific experiences in films. And a few times it has been necessary for me to go in one direction to better understand what was on the other front. One example: after I did Behind the Sun, which I felt was very contrived, I wanted to do a film where I wouldn't be defining or blocking the actors and instead try to explore the absence, almost, of the director, which is what I tried in Motorcycle Diaries . After a certain moment, what we tried to do was to liberate the actors within the frame and never to rehearse anything but just film it as fresh as it came. The fact that we had prepared and gone through the seminars and already had a back history among ourselves allowed us to do so. So again, Motorcycle Diaries was a reaction against something contrived. I'm really interested in exploring different routes - unfortunately, I can't work in a straight line, I wish I knew how to do that.
Q2: What has the reaction been like in Cuba? What about the possibility of sequels - there's certainly enough material for it.
WS: What interested me in this was that really, this was a small story which preceded history with a capital H, preceded what we all have access to through documentaries and images that have already been made. This story of discovery, both of the continent and of their selves, was so attractive because it brought about that specific moment. Jorge Luís Borges, the Argentinian writer, said once that every man in every single moment of his life is everything that he has already been and everything that he will be. So this Ernesto that you have in the film is the Ernesto who at the age of five or six could not go into the water because of his asthma and the shortcomings of his social class, but there was already something in him anticipating the man who would implode the limits of that social class, and play a definite role in our continent, of Latin America. But to answer your question, the Guevara family was very close to the project from the very beginning. They opened the doors of the Che Guevara Institute in Havana, we had access to so many photographs which have never been published, and to letters from that period, and that helped a lot to shape what the film is. That continuous support was very, very important. They never asked to read the screenplay, which I thought was really fantastic and gave us an even greater sense of responsibility because it was basically about trust. They saw the film once it was edited. The film was really well received in Cuba on its premiere a few weeks ago, and it's going into wide release there in early October.
Q3: Were you apprehensive about taking on a story about a revolutionary and historical figure, when your other pieces have been, for instance, about a young boy?
WS: I think there was a common denominator, which is the search for one's identity and for one's place in the world. If I had to summarise it in one sentence, I would say that it's about the choice of which bank of the river we would want to spend all our lives. This is present in a minor form in all my other films as well, but this was so much more important to all of us. This was a film made by a crew where everybody had read the same book, which is so rare. And also, this is a film made by people who were not the same at the end of the journey - we were completely transformed by it. The other films, once we finished them, I kept in contact with many of the actors and the technicians - so, for instance, the little boy in Central Station is going to act in my next film in Brazil. But here, it was so much more amplified. There's not a week where I don't receive maybe 20 emails from Chile, Argentina or Peru, or Mexico and Brazil. This film was so important to us and something of that collective force still remains. So it was much more difficult to do than the others, but it's also, in a way, so much more emotionally rewarding than the films I've done before.
Q4: Brazil is such a big country, so I wonder if maybe people don't really see much of a connection between themselves and what they see on screen in your films. And maybe this is even more difficult for the rest of Latin America?
WS: At the beginning of the preparation for the film, I was ... I wouldn't say sceptical, but I really wanted to know if that speech at the end of the leper colony episode was one that was close to the reality of Latin America. I was in doubt about whether such a thing as Latin American unity truly could exist, could be thought of or even imagined. But the more we went into the continent, the more we thought, "Yes, it exists." I think the film really is about that. I don't think we can say what the Latin American identity is, but I think we can try to look for it, and look for the reverberations from it. In Brazil, the film has premiered and has been seen by a lot of people, so I think they are also questioning or now carry with them the very same question that I had at the beginning.
Q5: I want to thank you very much for making this film, for showing the humanity of Guevara.
WS: That was the most important thing for us, not to look for the iconic image but on the other hand, go in the opposite direction to try to understand the man behind the myth. In that sense, the work of the actors and the screenwriter, José Rivera, was so important to enable you to see the character with all the fragilities and not his certitudes, yet. So there could be, in the journey, the understanding of where he wanted to be, that choice of which bank of the river he wanted to stay the whole of his life. So the film was first of all, about choice, really; about the importance of idealism in an age where these words have lost a lot of their significance. Also, every time that we arrived in a different city in our small odyssey, we met people who would come to us and tell us of Guevara's legacy and how it was important to them. And obviously we continually ask ourselves why is Guevara so important today, why is he still so much in synchronicity with this time, and I think one answer to that is that he embodies the necessity of change. And he also makes us understand that it's not utopian to ask for change. And this is very different from what historians like Fukuyama tell us, that we have reached the end of history. Or that we live in an age where all ideologies have crumbled after the fall of the Berlin wall. On the contrary, what Guevara tells us is that you can't live without idealism. This is basically why he still resonates with us. You have somebody who kept his integrity to the end; he was faithful to himself from the beginning to the very last day of his journey.
GA: Sadly, we have come to an end, but I think we have been treated to a film by and an interview with somebody who himself has shown us a great deal of humanity in his movies and has shown that there is a possibility for change. So please put your hands together for Walter Salles.
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