“The Secret Agent” director Kleber Mendonça Filho praised Wagner Moura as a generous star at the Rotterdam Film Festival.
“Ever since Neighboring Sounds, I’ve believed that movies are a great opportunity to show your face. Once you show your face, you talk a lot about where you’re from. Brazil has great faces. We’re a mixture of things, and we have a problem with people who try to prove otherwise. Just this week, the governor said the entire state is white, and that’s not true.”
He emphasized that there is no big difference between professional and non-professional actors.
“They’re all great actors!”
“‘The Secret Agent’ features more than 60 characters with dialogue, and includes international stars. Wagner was critical to making the entire ensemble work. It all came together thanks to a lead actor who believes in generosity.”
The Secret Agent was nominated for four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Moura. He became the first Brazilian to be nominated in that category.
“My movies are exactly the movies I wanted to make. Some people ask me, ‘Are you going to release a director’s cut?’ All my movies are director’s cuts, but they’re all challenging. It’s like someone saying, ‘This is our supermarket. You can eat everything for free, but you have two minutes.’ We filmed The Secret Agent like maniacs. ”
At Big Talk in Rotterdam, Mendonça Filho spoke with Spanish director Carla Simón (“Romelia”) about her love for cinema.
“I grew up in the countryside, so I didn’t watch many movies. Then I found out that the cartoons weren’t actually real, and I was so disappointed. I remember how that affected me. It was like finding out Santa doesn’t exist,” Simon recalls.
Mendonça Filho “was always very interested in movies,” he said.
“My mother was a cinephile, so I was lucky. She kept telling me about the Hitchcock movies she saw. She couldn’t remember the title, but she said it was about a woman climbing stairs and falling. It wasn’t until many years later that I realized it was ‘Vertigo.'” That was one of my earliest memories, he said.
“And a ‘Tom and Jerry’ marathon. Officially my first movie trip.”
Both prefer to focus on families and their complex relationships in their works, as well as very young protagonists.
“I’m fascinated by children and trying to capture them on camera. It should feel real and natural, but that’s difficult. I think in some movies children are playing in unnatural situations,” Mendonça Filho said.
“You don’t choose your family,” Simon said. “You do the best you can. Raising children is very difficult. Children have an amazing ability to discover the world for the first time. Having had children myself, I understand how they embrace the mysteries of life. Just like the audience[in the film]who is open to discovering the universe. It’s a very similar experience.”
Although “kids never do double takes,” kids make adult actors better.
“They live more in the moment,” she argued.
“When we made The Secret Agent, we looked for kids, some of whom I think had been trained at influencer schools to perform in front of the camera. It was very disturbing to see them already changed like that,” added Mendonça Filho.
Simon recalled: “One time, during casting, a girl saw another girl[leaving the room]and said, ‘This girl is my enemy.'” Wow. And she was 7 or 8 years old! That’s why I try not to work with agency kids. ”
They both agreed that they were connected to their hometowns.
“Our space, its history, its background, it deeply shows who you are. Anything intimate is very political,” Simon said. “I always get this question: ‘Why Catalan?’ Because it’s my language.”
“I come from a culturally established city (Recife), but actors still go out (to find) work. They undergo special treatment to lose their accent, but that was 40 years ago,” added Mendonça Filho. However, the situation is gradually changing. “I’m very much in favor of telling real stories.”
“Old movies were very theatrical. Marilyn Monroe could play an English character, which is a crazy example. At the end of the day, I like combining extreme realism with extreme cinema.”
