BRAZILIAN director Walter Salles talks about the making of his latest insight into his home country, Linha De Passe, as well as his forthcoming adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road…

Q. How difficult was Linha De Passe to get made?
Walter Salles: It was difficult in the sense that we started with an array of real life situations. All four stories of the brothers and the mother were informed either by documentaries I had seen that my brother had directed… I co-directed one about football, and some stories in newspapers that had caught our attention. There were two common denominators about these stories: firstly, it was always about young kids because we’re a very young nation, whose identity has not fully crystallised. So, the stories of these kids, ranging from 14 to 22, were stories about people who were actually refusing what destiny had in line for them and they were trying to re-invent themselves in one way or another. That was a common denominator that allowed us to say: “Hmm, there may be a film here if we joined those stories together.”

Also, there was also a story about a pregnant mother who had to face the relationship with her other children who were somehow lost in the city. What was difficult was to put the five stories in the same film and it was really [co-director] Daniela [Thomas]‘s incredible talent that made it possible. I was shooting The Motorcycle Diaries and Dark Water as she was doing that. We had never worked with that many characters before. Normally my films are about two characters… maybe three. And yet there we were trying to make sense of a story that was really about brotherhood. Also, it was about the different forms of re-baptising oneself in Brazil today. So, we were really interested in venturing into the worlds of football and religion and the urban landscape as a backdrop for the search of identity.

All these themes were very present in our minds when we started the film. And what made it difficult was the fact that we wanted it to be partially improvised. For that, we also needed to work with actors who were making their film debut and couldn’t be recognised on the streets, in a bus or in the stadium. So, it was quite difficult because of that… it was like jumping from an airplane and not being sure the parachute was going to open.

Q. Do you like working with unknown actors?
Walter Salles: I love films that bring you the possibility to discover actors. Just the other day, I was remembering the pleasure I had in discovering Tim Roth in Made In Britain for the first time. I’d never seen him before Alan Clarke’s film – or Katrin Cartlidge in Naked. There’s something about discovering faces and there’s a sense of authenticity also that, I think, comes to the surface when you see an actor whose face is a virgin map that you’ve never seen before. It’s the opposite of seeing an actor for the 100th time and having to go through that process of the suspension of disbelief every time. With this film, they [the young actors] are the family – they’re not representing the family. The film was about inviting the spectators to live the experience of being part of that family. And more than anything else, that’s what was at stake. So, we actually did that by rehearsing for many, many, many months and then trying to shoot things with a sense of urgency. Hence, we didn’t use extras… we used real people in different situations. I wanted to give the impression that the family existed beyond the film.

Q. The ending of the film is such that you do continue thinking about what might have happened to the boys after it has finished… especially in the case of the boy and the bus…
Walter Salles: Well, in real life he actually drove [the bus] for three hours before being arrested. But he never found his father. Again, in real life… he stole the bus when he was 14. But from 14 to 18 he borrowed more than 30 other buses to take joyrides [laughs]. He liked the taste of it. And that kid is smaller in real life than our actor. Interestingly, in Cannes I was in a round table with journalists and one from Sweden or that part of the world said: “I liked the authenticity… and yet I liked very much the surreal part at the end where the boy drives the bus.” I said: “Well thank you very much but there’s nothing surreal about it. It truly happened [laughs].” It’s just that reality in Brazil is sometimes much more surprising than it can be in other parts of the world. It has things in store that you’d never believe could be true.

Q. Would you ever think about revisiting the brothers in say 10 years time?
Walter Salles: Maybe… that’s a good idea. I thought about doing that for Central Station and then I realised that would actually be unfair to those characters because that end is solved. We were in a very specific moment in our lives and it was about rediscovering the heart of Brazil. That film does it… after 25 years of military dictatorship it was about going back to the heart of the country. And the film does exactly that. Here, the question at stake is very different. It’s about defining a future that we’re unsure of. So, it makes much more sense to revisit these characters in 10 years and it would be interesting.

Q. How important was it to you not to focus too much on the crime and violence, seeing as a lot of the biggest films to emerge from Brazil in recent years have either focused on gangs in Rio or police corruption?
Walter Salles: Well, I think there’s more to the country than has been shown recently. I respect the films that have been done in that sense. City of God is an extremely important film because it allowed everybody to witness something they were unaware of. Fernando Meirelles is such a brilliant director and the work that he did with non-actors in that film is so extraordinary that the end result for us Brazilians was something striking. But Fernando didn’t stay in the same genre. Once he did that, he was smart enough to move somewhere else. He’s a very intelligent filmmaker and he just did a really beautiful adaptation of José Saramago’s novel Blindness.

But of course, other directors ventured into the same territory. Some did good films, but the truth is that if you insist too much on the same theme you end up with a biased perception of what the country is. It’s as if after Goodfellas – which is a brilliant film about the Mafia in New York – a series of derivatives appeared and the image you’d have of that city wouldn’t be an inviting one. So, the truth is that 99.9% of the Brazilian youths don’t resort to that kind of solution to really find their lives. They’re not carrying AK47s. So, we definitely wanted to show that there was a different kind of humanity in Brazil. These young kids could have dreams and desires that were very different from the ones you would have seen in the other Brazilian films of late.

Q. What would you like audiences to take away?
Walter Salles: The sense of authenticity and the sense that these lives – from a culture that is very different from the one you have here – may have points in common. At the end of the day, we all have desires that are not met by reality. We all try to re-invent ourselves in one way or another. Sometimes we manage to and sometimes something doesn’t allow us to. And sometimes we don’t know the ending either. So, what you hope for from a film is to allow spectators to live through an experience that might somehow affect you, or affect other people, and they will think about it. That is something that a film should do. Again, it may not be the most traditional way to find an ending but it’s one that’s reflective of this story.

Q. How is On The Road progressing?
Walter Salles: I finished shooting a documentary following in the steps of [Jack] Kerouac when he wrote On The Road and in doing that I was privileged to meet many beat poets and writers who are still alive… and characters of the films, such as Carolyn Cassady who lives here in the UK, near London. She was an extraordinary lady… extremely witty, intelligent, and sensitive. But that allowed me to have an inside view of that world at that time, and why that journey existed, and what are the possible parallel with today’s world. To do a period piece is something that truly bears no interest to me as a filmmaker. When I did, for instance, The Motorcycle Diaries were the points that could connect that story to today’s lives. So, it was about the question of choice… which side of the river bank did we want to be on?

In the case of On The Road, I think that after this [the documentary] process I managed to find the dots that could connect that narrative to our contemporary dilemmas. We’re actually doing the location scouting now and in October I will be casting the film and hopefully shooting it in February and March. Before that, we have to see if we can fit into a specific budget because in the US it’s not easy. The unions define how a crew can be set. We can’t shoot like we did on The Motorcycle Diaries or Linha De Passe, with a small crew that can be altered depending on what you’re doing. The parameters [in the US] can be much more defined and therefore limited. So, we have to see if there’s a film to do the film with complete freedom. If there is, then the film will exist; if there isn’t, then I’ll be taking care of my two-year-old son [smiles].

Q. Would you prefer to discover an actor for that role as well?
Walter Salles: Well, these were young guys ranging from 16-years-old to 25, so it’s not that you can have an extremely well-known actors in those parts. The project asks for that kind of discovery, or at least to enable me to see a number of young, talented actors if the film becomes a reality. Alongside that, you will have actors that I’ve loved throughout the years and would like to invite for specific roles. That is what we’d possibly be doing from March, if we film it.

Read our review of Linha De Passe

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