Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles has been wrestling with languages his whole life. He grew up in Rio de Janeiro and Paris and studied at USC, becoming fluent in his native Portuguese and French plus English. When he followed up his Oscar-nominated and Golden Bear-winning “Central Station” (1998) with “The Motorcycle Diaries” (2004), he became fluent in Spanish.
“I couldn’t possibly do ‘The Motorcycle Diaries’ without having an in-depth understanding of Spanish,” said Salles on Zoom, “because directing actors has so much to do with precision, with the capacity to find that one word that can trigger something fresh and new. Whenever you have to rationally extend yourself, create a sentence, as opposed to that specific word that untaps something, you miss an opportunity.”
But after struggling with his 2012 English-language adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” a beloved novel, he did not make another feature film for 12 years. “I’m not as precise in English as I would have liked to be,” said Salles. “After having gone through the experience, I realized that to admire something is not sufficient to allow you to adapt that specific material. An American or French-Canadian director would be more equipped to do the film than I was.”
Now, after years of developing the Brazilian Oscar entry “I’m Still Here” (Sony PIctures Classics), Salles reunites “Central Station” star Fernanda Montenegro with her daughter, Fernanda Torres, who leads the ensemble in a dramatization of a true story that Salles himself experienced in his teens in the early ’70s. The film is picking up traction in the Oscar race; Torres earned a Golden Globe nomination this week.
When Salles returned to Brazil in 1969, the country was under a military dictatorship. During that time Salles spent time hanging out with the family of Eunice and Rubens Paiva and was friends with their daughter, Nalu, the middle of five kids.
“In the Paiva family house, the doors were always open, the windows were open, which were the reverse angle of what a military dictatorship stands for,” said Salles. “That house was extraordinarily polyphonic. Politics were everywhere. Discussions were everywhere in those different groups that mingled in that house. There were always new people, diverse groups were there. Brazilian music was playing all the time. So what I found at that house allowed me to understand more of my country, as much as cinema, in a different way, informed me about the world. And then one day, the tragedy occurred, the tragedy the film shares, and that stipulated before and after in the lives of everyone who had been in that house.”
Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s 2015 book “Ainda Estou Aqui” drove Salles to push the long-simmering story into movie form. Adapted by Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega from the book, the movie stars Torres and Montenegro as the younger and older Eunice Paiva, the activist mother of dissident politician Rubens Paiva, who is taken away by the police in 1971. He never returned.
“Whenever I filmed away from Brazil,” said Salles, “I always kept my passport close to the chest because I feel utterly Brazilian, and I’m interested to investigate what happens beyond our frontiers, but always to come back to the source. And it took me a while to find a starting point that was as personal as ‘I’m Still Here.’ Marcelo Paiva allowed me to come back to that story with a much richer array of possibilities.”
Alfonso Cuarón’s fictionalized memoir “Roma” influenced Salles, of course, along with different documentaries about ’70s Brazil, including Carol Benjamin’s “I Owe You a Letter About Brazil.” “I had this feeling of also owing a letter about those years of youth,” he said, “especially because my generation, when we get to cinema, with the re-democratization of the country, the present was so urgent that we were obliged to actually film what was happening at that specific time, and we didn’t have the time to look back as the Argentinian and Chilean filmmakers did. So it also allowed me to offer a reflection of those times that I always wanted to do.”
Why did it take so long to finish the movie? “Well, first, the book was so rich that it needed to be decanted, we needed to find the possible narrative choices,” said Salles. “Eunice, throughout her life, rebuilt the memory of that broken family at the same time as the country was trying to find its own memory back from the dark ages to the democracy that we aimed for. So the personal journey and the collective journey of the whole country are in this story somehow superimposed.”
Also taking time during development, Salles tried to interview everyone linked to that story, who was still alive. “That started to add so many additional layers that may not be visible, but they somehow informed every single one of the characters,” he said. “And a bit like Mike Leigh, we had weeks of rehearsal in order to find the intimacy that existed within that family. The kids rehearsed a prequel almost, we spent three weeks working on the scenes that could precede the beginning of the film. So, it was like a lab, I’m so fond of the Sundance Institute labs, because it allows people to search for something. And there we were doing similar things, searching for these characters as we were rehearsing scenes that were prewritten before the film starts. So when the film starts, the kids already know each other. They have secrets. They have alliances within the family. Because we had rehearsed other scenes, there’s a texture that bonds everyone when the camera rolls on scene one, there’s already a texture there in place.”
Casting Fernanda Torres as Eunice was key. She has to rise up and pull the family together and make everything work after she loses her husband and suffers torture herself. “The real-life character that I had the privilege of meeting is somebody that never allowed herself to be victimized by an authoritarian regime,” said Salles, “that never allowed the photographer to shoot her dropping a tear. The opposite: Every time that the family was to be photographed, she would ask for everyone to smile, and that was her response, which adds so much dignity to the violence that they were prey to. That somehow guided us throughout the whole journey. And it called for the necessity to embrace a form of acting that was based on the search for the essence of things. Jean-Luc Godard says that cinema has a lot to do with subtraction.”
He added that Torres was “so brave in trying to find how to transmit everything she had to transmit with as little as she could. For the past years, she’s been working as a comedian. She does one-woman shows for 1,000 people in theaters, almost the opposite of what she plays in the film, which is all about restraint, but the restraint that is completely inhabited by what she’s feeling internally, so that you have the sense that something is always brewing in her. At the same time, it’s contained. We never expected the film to be as emotional as it is? Perhaps the emotion surfaces because she holds her tears so much that at the end of the day, you’re allowed that perception. This is how the spectator complements the film in that specific performance, which is one of the bravest performances I’ve ever witnessed as a director. We all tried to do justice to what Fernanda was offering us.”
Her husband Rubens had to be established in a short amount of time, so that your heart would break when you lose him. “The father figure had to be rooted in such a way that you would feel his absence echoing throughout the rest of the film,” said Salles. “Selton Mello is a brilliant actor and director. He’s a multifaceted artist, but beyond that, he’s also somebody who understands that you sometimes have to go beyond what’s written on the page to bring life to the screen. So a lot of his material is improvised, that comes out of the moment. The way to find the vividness of the character I had known, the Rubens that he plays was the link between all the different groups that existed within that house, bigger than life and generous and luminous. He was the father we all wanted.”
Next up: Salles has been developing other projects that should come to fruition in the next few years, including one set near the border with Brazil and Argentina, “about one of the largest kidnappings in history,” he said, “which was one that occurred as the country was gravitating towards a military dictatorship in Argentina.”
The filmmaker had no idea that “I’m Still Here” would become so resonant with the times. “When we started this project, I thought that we were doing a film that would allow us to have a reflection of the years that we went through,” he said. “Cinema is such a great instrument against oblivion. And then we realized that it was as much about the present as it was about the past. This allowed the shoot itself to be one of the most extraordinarily human experiences I had in cinema.”
“I’m Still Here” is Brazil’s entry for the Best International Feature Film Oscar and will open in January from Sony Pictures Classics.
