Walter Salles On Brazil’s Oscar Submission ‘I’m Still Here’

People are always on a journey in the films of Walter Salles. His 1998 breakout film Central Station saw an abandoned nine-year-old go looking for the father he’s never known, while 2004’s The Motorcycle Diaries had a carefree young Che Guevara becoming radicalized while searching for the soul of South America. More literally, there’s On the Road (2012), his adaptation of the 1957 novel in which beat writer Jack Kerouac tapped into the exploits of his rather more adventurous friends to send himself on a freewheeling trip through postwar USA.

His new film, I’m Still Here, however, has more in common with 2001’s Behind the Sun, a period piece about two feuding rural Brazilian families at the turn of the 20^th century. In both of these films, the trek is more of a moral crusade than a matter of geography, as their protagonists try to confront entrenched and seemingly endless cycles of violence that show no sign of relenting.

Set in Rio de Janeiro 1970 and based on the memoir of the same name by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, I’m Still Here is the true story of a family whose hearts, but not spirits, were broken by the country’s military government. Fernanda Torres plays Eunice, mother to Marcelo and his four siblings; her life is changed forever when her politically active, if not especially radical husband Rubens (Selton Mello) is taken away for questioning after a visit by military police. And is never seen again.

It has all the material of a dark political drama, of the kind that we often see from Chile and Argentina, but while it does address similar themes, Salles’ film is a study of resilience and resistance. Key to this is Torres as Eunice, a woman who refuses to be defined by grief or cowed by police intimidation, and her determination to keep her family together is especially inspirational in today’s uncertain world, where happiness is fast becoming an act of rebellion in itself.

Deadline sat down with Salles, now 68, to discuss his film, although, as you’ll soon see, the director did most of the talking. “It’s a pleasure to talk about the film,” he said. “Even more so after it took us seven years to do it.”

DEADLINE: When did you settle on I’m Still Here as your next project?

WALTER SALLES: It was buried inside me for decades, because the facts at the heart of I’m Still Here are ones I witnessed as an adolescent. When I was 13 years old I met the middle sister of those five kids from the Paiva family. I met their parents, and I was introduced to their house, which is a character in the film as well. That house was almost the reverse-angle image of a country under military dictatorship. Its windows were constantly open, there was no key in the door, people from different age groups mingled. I never went into that house without meeting five or six people I had never bumped into before. Somehow, that house still embodied the possibility of the free country that we had been until 1964.

The film starts in 1970, which is six years into the military dictatorship, but, still, there was the dream of an independent country where a new form of cinema was possible, a new form of creating music was possible—the bossa nova and the tropicália—and the architecture of Oscar Niemeyer still pulsated. There were new forms of literature, education, and all those subjects were at the center of that house. I learned a lot from that house as a kid. However, our adolescence couldn’t be fully blissful even in that house, because, as you see, the world we’re showing in I’m Still Here is one where pure joy could be corrupted in the blink of an eye, either by a roadblock, or by a military helicopter flying too low, or the invasion of a family’s house. The memory of that time was in me all the time, and it defined the before and afterwards in my life, as much as everyone else that used to be a part of that community.

Then [in 2015], Marcelo Rubens Paiva, the second youngest kid in the family, wrote this luminous book called I’m Still Here, in which he retraced the journey of his family. Around the same time, I was looking for a project that would retell the story of Brazil during those years. When I read his book, I was completely shaken by it. I remember I read it several times, but the first time I read it I couldn’t do anything but think about it for three or four days in a row. That was when I decided that it had to be my next project.

So, to answer your question, I had developed three or four different screenplays before embracing I’m Still Here. Those screenplays never seemed to fully translate what Brazil was becoming [in those years]. I’ve always been really interested in telling stories in which the journey of the characters and the journey of the country somehow intermingle. This is what you have in Central Station: as well as the kid’s journey in search of his father, the heart of the story was also the journey of a country after 21 years of military dictatorship. Similarly, here, the personal journey of the Paiva family is intermingled with the country’s changing identity. It gave me the possibility to get back to what truly interested me in cinema, and this is why I decided to move forward.

DEADLINE: It seems like there’s a lot that you left out from the book. Is that the case?

SALLES: Every single book begs the same question: what will be part of the main narrative and what will you leave out? In a way, it has a lot to do with what a painter opts to leave in the frame or accept as a negative space. The book could easily have fostered a four-hour series, but I was truly in awe of the way that Marcelo, in telling this story, recognized that his mother had been the silent heroine of the whole saga. He started the book by trying to trace the family’s memory and he ended up embracing the fact that his mother was at the heart of that story. In this sense, what we embrace in the film is the core of the book. At the core of the book, you have a woman who’s a housewife, a mother of five, who has to cope with a life that is completely shattered overnight. From that moment on, she has to find ways to override her loss and her grief.

Fernanda has told me she feels that, as soon as Marcelo realized that, he discovered a way to embrace a very feminist point of view. This is a woman that’s obligated to override the limits of a patriarchal society—because even a progressive family was still patriarchal in Brazil in the ’70s. So, she has to create a different form of resistance, one that has to go beyond the quiet devastation that takes hold of her to become a form of resistance that is based on fierce determination. A form of resistance that even a dictatorship couldn’t suppress. The interesting thing about this scenario is that—both in the real Eunice, but also in the Eunice that Fernanda recreated—you have a woman who is apparently very restrained, but yet, paradoxically perhaps, this restraint is also a highly efficient form of resistance. There’s something constantly brewing inside her, like a volcano that never erupts.

So, we stayed very close to the core of the book. We were very faithful to the book, and this is why the whole family embraced the film, because they recognized that.

DEADLINE: Why did you think of Fernanda for the role?

SALLES: Well, the fact is, this is a film about family, and it was made possible by a film family. Fernanda played one of the main characters in what I consider to be my first film—Foreign Land, from 1995—and it’s a film that depicts the moment immediately after the re-democratization of Brazil [in 1985], when there was not only a chaotic political and economic situation that was the consequence of those 21 years of military dictatorship but also the chaos imposed by the first elected government after that. It was a moment where almost literally one million Brazilians, and especially young people, fled Brazil.

The film is about that moment, where there was an exodus of young Brazilians, and the film follows four characters in that specific moment, where our identity was being completely redefined. We became a country of expatriates at that point. In that film, working with Fernanda was a revelation, because she soon ceased to be just one of the main actors in the film and became—truly—a co-author of the film. For several reasons. First, she had such a refined, sensitive understanding of her character, and also the whole social and political movement that motivated what that character was doing. That truly helped me, together with Daniela Thomas, who wrote the screenplay with me, to hone the screenplay and also to elevate it.

We shot that film in black and white, in four weeks, over three continents. It was a film [about] our youth. Her input was so decisive that I always saw her from that moment on as a collaborator, I wanted to keep very close to. We did a second film together called Midnight, a film for [TV station] Arte. It was part of a series called 2000, Seen By…, and that was a very creative collaboration as well.

In I’m Still Here, the part of Eunice was so vital to the film as a whole, and I knew that whoever played her had to be able to say so much with so little, because this is a role based on restraint and yet also based on the possibility of expressing the extraordinary inner strength that was driving that woman. Within what appears to be a very limited bandwidth frequency, you had to say a lot with very little.

Fernanda is the only actress, I believe, that could have done that. It’s a little bit like walking between two very high buildings on a tightrope. Fernanda for me, has that kind of capacity; her trust is completely there all the time and her belief in cinema is constantly there. In embracing Eunice and constructing her as we thought she should be, Fernanda somehow elevated the film in a way that meant we all had to somehow be better than we ever were or that we could be [to match her]. Andrei Tarkovsky, one of my filmic heroes, has a line in which he says that cinema only starts to exist when everybody who is doing a film, either in front of the camera or behind the camera, is part of the same artery, making the same film. Fernanda enlarged that artery.

DEADLINE: What was it about Selton that you made you want him for the role of Rubens?

SALLES: I’d never worked with Selton before, but I always wanted to, because, in several of the roles that he played—ranging from drama, to comedy and genre films—there was always something memorable about the characters he played that somehow echoed beyond the films I’d seen him in. In a way, what he put on screen always felt memorable to me; it was as if his presence in those films outlasted those films.

In real life, Rubens was really the meeting point for all those different age groups that would meet [in the Paiva house]. He was always at ease. And the fact is, I never forgot that man in real life. Perhaps it was because he was the first father of friends of mine who was imprisoned and assassinated. Later on, two years after that, there was a father of another friend of mine who was assassinated by the Brazilian military government. So, Rubens—the real Rubens—echoes to this day. I never forgot him, and so I wanted this character to echo through the film. This is why I approached Selton, because, somehow, he had relayed that kind of presence in his previous films.

For me, this was a film about a family that was robbed of joy, the kind of joy that you sense at the beginning of the story. It’s also about a country that was robbed of a possible future. For that absence to be felt, I needed a charismatic actor who could flow freely from group to group and improvise as much as I like to do in films. This film is about an absence that lingers throughout the second and third act. In that sense, Selton was the absolute first choice for me, and I’m glad that he made the film.

DEADLINE: What rules did you lay down for the filming? Were there any limits you set yourself, any tasks you set yourself?

SALLES: Yes, several. Whenever I shoot with children, like I did with Central Station and now with I’m Still Here, I try to shoot chronologically, because those children are discovering the story on a day-to-day basis, as I don’t share the screenplay with them to start with. Chronology is truly determinant. I also thought that due to the fact that Eunice goes to prison for 15 days—and that moment of imprisonment completely alters the inner logic of that family—you could only sense that by truly, truly going through that period yourself.

What we soon understood is that a military dictatorship impacts language itself. For instance, from the moment the military police enter the Paiva house, the family can’t exercise free speech anymore. The narrative becomes much more subjective. The characters have to look at each other to understand what’s happening, and so to shoot in chronological order truly helped us to be on that frequency from that moment on.

We also rehearsed. A year or two before the start of the actual film, we wrote a few scenes and played with the children, so that we would create a sense of intimacy. It was very, very important to me that the film would have the same kind of intimacy that I remember from being part of the community in that house back in the day. That intimacy is also something that gets lost when the police come into the house.

DEADLINE: How did that affect your visual approach?

SALLES: From a grammatical standpoint, I’d say that my memories of the house really defined the fluidity of the camera, from the very beginning. The camera moves around from one group to another very in a very organic manner because, in fact, this is how those groups would intermingle. The camera just blends with them and blends with the bodies. This is something that was very specific to that family; physical distance was much closer there than it was in my own house. There was no separation between generations. The opposite of my house. My house was much squarer and much less interesting.

DEADLINE: Is it significant that one of the Paivas’ daughters has a Super 8 camera?

SALLES: The use of the Super 8 camera has to do with the fact that I wanted to recreate the immediacy of that time as well as the intimacy of that time. This is why Super 8 became such an important narrative tool at the beginning of the story. We were also convinced, from the very beginning, that only 35mm would allow us to plunge into that period without doing, quote-unquote, a period film. There’s no artificial grain, there’s nothing fake. We worked in an analog manner in a way that was very organic to the story. There were very few takes. I would say that the liturgy of cinema was pretty much at the center of this entire shoot.

DEADLINE: Did that way of working ever throw up any surprises?

SALLES: From the moment where Rubens is taken away, I realized I had to deal with something new: I had never seen that house with the windows shut or the door shut, and I had to somehow imagine how it would be. From that moment on, the idea of subtraction—of subtracting elements—was central to what we did. There’s the subtraction of light, when the windows and the curtains are closed. There’s the suppression of sounds, because the sounds from the streets and from the beach are now muffled. And you don’t hear music. There’s no more records playing on the turntable.

The whole logic of that house is inverted. This is why the camera is still for a lot of the time, and there’s always a part of the frame that’s in shadow. My reference for that part of the film was a Danish painter called Hammershøi. I didn’t realize that immediately, but, little by little, when I was orchestrating the frames, it got to me that the paintings of Hammershøi—who’s perhaps one of the painters who better dealt the question of absence and loss—were very much at the heart of the second part of the film.

DEADLINE: It certainly feels very personal. Is this precisely how you remember Brazil in those days?

SALLES: Yes. I mean, the first part of the film is certainly comes from the memory I had of that period. As I said, it was a period where we were still hoping to live out our adolescence in a way that wasn’t corroded by the military dictatorship. We soon realized that it was impossible. You see it at the beginning, in the scene with the young people in the car—the physical and human geography of a city that seems to be so joyful. That stops when they are interrupted by a roadblock inside a tunnel. This chiaroscuro was at the center of our lives back then; the luminosity that we were looking for at the beginning of our adolescence, and then the dark ages that came with the military dictatorship. The fact that those two different vectors are intertwined is pretty much at the heart of the first part of the film. Obviously, from the moment when Rubens is taken away so abruptly, this whole equilibrium drifts and the film becomes not just about loss, but also about how you can overcome loss.

That, for me, was really central to the book. The book was not only about loss, it was about the reinvention of a family. Now, led by Eunice, they had to restructure their lives. This idea—the possibility of coping with grief and yet somehow never allowing oneself to be victimized—inspired me to tell a story in which you realize that nothing is unsurmountable when there is affection, when you’re surrounded by loved ones. That was very central to me. At the end of the day, this is a film about life, because those who committed the crime at the heart of the film, those guys will be somehow forgotten by history. Eunice and Rubens will not be forgotten. They will be remembered in books, in songs, in other forms of leaving a reflection of who we are.