Walter Salles’ “I’m Still Here” was recently shortlisted for the International Film Oscar and is a good bet to become Brazil’s first nomination in that category since the filmmaker’s “Central Station” way back in 1999. If and when it occurs, it will likely be a moment of joyous celebration for not only the Brazilian film industry but the general public. Since the period drama opened on Nov 7, the Sony Pictures release has become a cultural phenomenon, grossing $10.7 million in U.S. dollars, making it the no. 1 local title release in the country this year, and it recently became the 7th highest-grossing Brazillian release this Century. Fernanda Torres, who plays real-life historical figure, Eunice Paiva, says Brazil was anxiously waiting for the film to arrive back home following its world premiere at the 2024 Venice Film Festival.
READ MORE: Walter Salles’ “I’m Still Here” Review [Venice]
“There was this mixture of what the film normally creates in people, this kind of emotional wave, a deep wave,” Torres says of the first domestic screenings. “I think it’s because she’s so restrained that the audience becomes like, what’s the word? They’re like, ‘Come on, scream, cry,’ And she doesn’t do it. So, the audience does it for them. For her. And so for Brazil, the film created this kind of pride that a story, such a Brazilian story, we’re touching the hearts of people abroad. And Brazil is this continental island of Portuguese speakers. So we live very isolated. We consume our culture very passionately. But once in a while, we talk to the world, we do this bridge with the world, and every time it happens, we’re very proud of it.
Torres adds, “Even people who I think voted for the right wings were proud and touched by the movie, which is rare in this binary world that we’re living in.”
“I’m Still Here” follows Paiva as she fights to keep her family together after her husband, former congressman Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), is taken into custody and disappears at the height of the military dictatorship. During our conversation last month, Torres recalls her own childhood memories of that time, reuniting with Torres for the first time in almost 30 years, her continuing collaboration with her mother, the legendary Fernanda Montenegro, and much more.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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What about this project appealed to you just as a story? What made you compelled to be like, “Yes, Walter is my friend, I want to make a movie with him, but to commit to do this”?
Oh, you cannot refuse. I mean, I was very touched by the fact that Walter was coming back to Brazil to shoot after being away for so long. And also because it’s a compelling story. It’s a political movie, but through the point of view of a family of a woman. And a woman who starts the movie and the story as this perfect housewife from the fifties and ends up like this lawyer totally defending human rights, Indigenous rights, she understood that what happened to her was not something that the violence of the state that happened with her is the same violence that happens every day with poor people, black people, with Indigenous. She has such a comprehension, and she does it without ever having the necessity of being recognized for her importance. She was such a surprising woman. I started to watch the interviews. The way she smiles, the way she is very persuasive, but at the end of the day, she’s like Water. She makes her point without ever forcing it. You agree with her because you cannot disagree with such a rationality. She’s rational, but she’s also very feminine. And the script had it.
I read the script, and I was crying, and you don’t even know when you started crying because it’s so compelling that a woman with five children having to fight against the government and at the same time having to be a mother, trying to protect the family and the children from the outrageous thing that had happened to their father. It’s a compelling story. But I never thought that Walter would do the movie the way he did because you could have done that script in a high pitch with emotions, with people screaming and crying and the camera underlining the emotions.
Melodramatic. Yeah, totally.
You could do a melodramatic movie, and perhaps that’s what people normally would do. But then Walter, he’s so mature [now] as a filmmaker. I think, in reality, sometimes you almost feel you are in a documentary, you feel that people exist. And, at the end, when the real photographs appeared, we are not so far away from those people, which is very rare to achieve.
You were in your adolescence during this period, especially through the end of it. I mean, you were probably like six or eight when these events occurred.
I could be the young girl.
You could.
Yeah.
For Americans or non-Brazillians who are reading this, what are your memories of that time? How would you describe what it was like to live under that sort of dictatorship?
Yeah, this is like that. There’s no reason to do a movie about dictatorship in South America. I mean, it’s like doing a fancy movie to say how bad Hitler was. So, what’s the difference with this movie? It’s the family approach and also a kind of resistance through the family nucleus. And nowadays, we are facing very terrifying times. I mean not only because we are afraid of the apocalypse, of dying. And this film, I think, proposes this kind of resistance in a way. It’s a very hopeful film because it says that in the end, we survive. So, the memories I had from that time, my house was pretty much like that house, not with so many brothers and not so many parties. But my mother reminded me a lot of her. They are the same age the same generation. And my mother was not a housewife; she was an actress.
But I remember my mother liked serving my father when we were dining. They had this kind of patriarchal relationship, which was normal. But we lived in the streets like the children in that house. It was very pleasant. But at the same time, dictatorship was around. So, my parents, they were afraid of censorship. And I remember the fear every time they were going to open a play because you had to do one show to the censor guy who could forbid the play. My father produced one play, “Calabar,” with Chico Buarque and Ruy Guerra who was forbidden one day before the opening. My father almost went bankrupt. So, I could remember that. And, later [when I was an] adult, I was pretty much like the girl who is in the car in the beginning, before the tunnel, we were all afraid of the police. We would go out, and the police were looking for students because the political movement happened with very young children. So, I was always afraid of the police, of being blocked by the police or checked by the police. And later in ’81, when the [dictatorship] was finally over, not over but starting to open, there was a part of the army who didn’t want it to open. And then there was a second movement with bomb threats. There was a bomb that exploded in a very big show, and they wanted to blame the leftists for that.
But the bomb exploded on the lap of the two bombers. So, they discovered that was ZuZu Angel was killed, A lot of people were killed before the opening. During that time, my parents were with a play in São Paulo, and they received a phone call saying that if my mother went on stage, she would be killed. They had a gunshot in the house. They were staying in São Paulo, and bomb threats in the theater. And also my father, we moved from São Paulo to Rio in ’71. Right in that moment, because my father’s partner was arrested, my father didn’t know, but he was sponsoring the guerillas. And my father didn’t know though we had to move to Rio alone with my mother. My father stayed for a year in São Paulo, and I was really young, and I didn’t understand what was going on. But all of this was the dictatorship.
Your mother, Fernanda Montenegro, plays your character much later on in life. Is this subject matter still sensitive for her? I can’t remember if she’s played other roles that have been down this road or on this subject matter, but did it mean more to her?
No, I think it meant to her because it was meeting Water again,* and also because it’s a compelling story for everything. Of course, you wanted to do the movie because it was all those reasons. And she has done political movies before. She did “They Don’t Wear Black Tie” as a play, and it won [an award at the] Venice Film Festival in the eighties. I think it was a very political movie at the end. It ended up with the strikes in Sao Paulo that at that time had Lula [da Silva] as a labor [leader].
*Montenegro was nominated for Best Actress in 1999 for “Central Station”
Oh, yeah.
So they shot it during the strike in the streets. So she did many I think. Yes. I mean, it was because of this and everything else about me, the project of course.
I apologize, this is terrible research on my part. But have you guys worked in this context before? Have you filmed anything where either of you played the same character?
Many times.
Oh, O.K.
We did avant-garde plays, we did one soap opera, and we did the movie where I would become her, and my kid would become me. And then it’s the story that passes. It’s a beautiful film called “The House of Sand,” and it’s like 100 years of history. And we did “The Seagull” together, Checkov we did a recently an installation by this great British artist called Issac Julien. So, I like to say it’s like an asset. You can hire one, the other, or the two of them.
[Laughs.]
Knowing how much you knew about growing up in that time in history, and obviously, there’s the book about their family and what they went through. Did you feel like you had to do any other research about her? Did you talk to her kids?
We talked to the children. Selton talked more to the children because Selton had less material. He didn’t have anything. He didn’t have any excerpt of [Rubens] talking, just photographs. We started the movie, of course, working with the family and rehearsing in the house. The house was great. It was another character in the movie, the house. It’s very significant in the movie. But we remade the photographs for, I think, almost one week [before] shooting. So we had costume, lighting, and sets, and we had to imitate the photos. But when you do it, it’s not only posing like they are, you have to create the emotion because if you don’t do the photograph, it’s not there. So, that was our first approach, and I think it has a lot to do with the reality. You seen the movie with the way we act and from the beginning. I remember the first shot I’ve made. He told me Fernanda, less. Fernanda, less. And he told me, “Trust me.” And I said, “I trust you.” And then he created this very narrow path that I could never overdo anything or underdo anything because it’s very complicated. It’s close to nothing, and it can never go high. And it’s this kind of restraint created in me such a deep emotion that I’ve never experienced before in my career. Because as an actor, most of the time, you want to show emotions. Look how I cry, look how I scream, look at how happy I can be. And this case was, on the contrary, look how controlled I can be. And this was special.
From the screenings that you’ve been to, what has the reaction been from the audience in Brazil and what has that meant to you?
It’s a surprise for all of us. Since the first day I saw it, I was so moved. Ah, it started there. This is everywhere. Events in Toronto, New York. Journalists who normally are very suspicious and critical. They saw, and they know why. I don’t know. This film has a mystery. Of course, Brazil was waiting for the film to finally be screened in Brazil. There was this mixture of what the film normally creates in people, this kind of emotional wave, a deep wave. I think it’s because she’s so restrained that the audience becomes like, what’s the word? They’re like, “Come on, scream, cry.” And she doesn’t do it. So, the audience does it for them. For her. And so for Brazil, the film created this kind of pride that a story, such a Brazilian story, we’re touching the hearts of people abroad. And Brazil is this continental island of Portuguese speakers. So we live very isolated. We consume our culture very passionately. But once in a while, we talk to the world, we do this bridge with the world, and every time it happens, it creates this kind of pride in Brazil. When the film was shown, there was this wave of emotion and pride, and even people who I think voted for the right wings were proud and touched by the movie, which is rare in this binary world that we’re living in.
“I’m Still Here” will open in New York and Los Angeles on Jan. 17.