Mr. Salles, as a filmmaker, how much freedom do you generally take with a screenplay?
Well, I'm a director who comes from documentary, so for me the possibility to go beyond the screenplay to reinvent a scene, to work with improvisation, that is fundamental. I get very distressed when I finish a day of shooting and I shot exactly what's on the page. I have to transcend the screenplay, or at least to try to transcend it. For me, the most important thing in telling a story is to try to find the spirit of the story and to be faithful to the characters. And then you can improvise in the logic of the characters.
Can you give me an example of how you accomplish that?
Picasso used to say that whenever he painted, he tried to see the painting, know everything about what he was going to do, and then completely forget it and to try to paint it like a five-year-old, with the desire of discovery of a child. I think that in shooting a film, you also need to be drawn by that desire of discovering something about a scene, about a character. But you don't know what until that very day of shooting. With film, there's a lot of things that are created in the moment, especially when the actors are put in a situation where they have the freedom to interact and try things without just being reduced to lines that are on the page.
“I’m really drawn to stories of reinvention. And most of those reinventions are reinventions done by women who transcend what destiny had in store for them...”
How does it work when you’re adapting a memoir, like you did recently for your Oscar winning feature I’m Still Here?
Marcelo Rubens Paiva, the author of the original memoir and the real-life son one of the film’s main characters, is also a screenwriter. He didn't write our screenplay, but being a screenwriter, he respects artistic freedom, so although the book offered us an extraordinary perception of the central figure, Eunice, from within, there are also a lot of things created in the moment of the film, while still respecting the historical logic and the logic of the characters.
How was it to work with Fernanda Torres, and her mother Fernanda Montenegro, on the character of Eunice?
Fernanda Torres has for the last 15 or 20 years, been incredible in comedies. But I just knew that her range was a much wider one because of the experience we had together in the first film I did, Foreign Lands. So, this was a dream. And it was made even larger by the possibility of working with her and her mother, Fernanda Montenegro 27 years after Central Station, my 1998 film that she starred in. To have the two of them together, that was just wonderful and really fundamental for the film. I guess I’m really drawn to stories of reinvention. And most of those reinventions are reinventions done by women who transcend what destiny had in store for them. Both Central Station and I’m Still Here have that kind of reinvention at the heart.
Fernanda Torres called I’m Still Here the film of her maturity as an actor, saying that she hopes they have been worthy of Eunice’s story, that they didn’t betray her with some cheap melodrama.
That was really important to us. There’s a moment in the film when the older Eunice seems to wake from this terrible sleep of Alzheimers, and for a second you sink back with the reality of things because something is stronger than the disease itself. I opted not to leave the sound on in that moment. I did it exactly as is described in the book, but then ultimately chose to do even less because for me it was really important to stay within the boundaries of drama and not allow this to slip into melodrama. Eunice was not about melodrama. She never allowed herself to be victimized, she was never seen crying. She was not about melodrama. So we could not do that. This is why in the film, the music is mixed so low, you barely perceive that it's there.
“There’s something that goes on from generation to generation that for me is very touching. I like that in cinema. I love the passage of time.”
It is not simply a story about victimization, but about growth and resilience and strength.
I see the film as a story of not giving up, you know? It’s a story about not allowing yourself to be victimized or to be seen as a victim by an authoritarian regime. I see it as a woman who grants herself the possibility of becoming a lawyer at 46 years old, she starts afresh, she starts anew. I think that it has so much life — yes, it's about such a terrible loss, but it's also about such an extraordinary life. It's about transmission, relaying… I hear Marcelo Rubens Paiva talking, and I hear the echo of his parents. And then his children will have that, you know? There's something that goes on from generation to generation that for me is very touching. I like that in cinema. I love the passage of time, I think it is really beautiful in cinema.
Is it true that you have known the real Paiva family personally since the 1960s?
I was almost 14 when I met them in 1969. It just happened that a really good friend of mine was the best friend of Nalu, the middle sister of the Paiva family. Their house in Leblon beach, where the story takes place, really informed me as a young person, because on the outskirts you had a city on the curfew, you had the military coup d'etat, censorship, you could sense the weight of that. But in that house, you somehow had a sense of what Brazil could have been; a country that was for the very first time being defined by our own criteria. We had the possibility of being autonomous. I learned about music in that house. I was informed about politics in that house. I learned to dance in that house. Rubens Paiva was a little bit the father that we all wanted to have. So that all really informed me, in many different ways.
And then the tone shifts very quickly when tragedy strikes. Is that a reflection of how it really felt for you?
Tragedy does happen so abruptly. In moment where gravity ensues, you're not really informed. It's not going to be in the papers. You didn't have all the information. They did not have a sense of the tragedy to come. And for us who were part of that world, what really shocked us was the opposition between what existed before and what existed afterwards. It’s not paradise lost like in the beginning of The Thin Red Line, for instance, but it has a lot to do with a possible future that was cut short. I think that the death of Rubens Paiva really made everybody understand that. Tragedy can happen at any time.