By Marta Balaga
According To The variety “The Secret Agent” director Kleber Mendonça Filho praised Wagner Moura at Rotterdam Film Festival, calling him a generous star.
“Since ‘Neighboring Sounds,’ I’ve believed that a film is a great opportunity to show faces. Once you do, you say a lot about the country you come from. Brazil has great faces – we are a mix of many different things and anyone who tries to prove otherwise has a problem. Just this week we had a governor saying the whole state is white. Which is not true.”
He doesn’t really differ between professional and non-professional actors, he stressed. They are all great actors!”
“‘The Secret Agent’ has 60-plus characters with lines – and an international star. Wagner was very important in making that whole ensemble work. Everything came together because of the main actor who believes in generosity.”
“The Secret Agent” scored four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Moura. He became the first Brazilian to be nominated in that category.
“My films are exactly the films I wanted to make. Some people ask: ‘Are you going to release a director’s cut?’ All my films are director’s cut. They are challenging, however, all of them. It’s like having someone say: ‘Here’s our supermarket, you can have everything for free but you have two minutes.’ We shot ‘The Secret Agent’ like maniacs.”
During Rotterdam’s Big Talk, Mendonça Filho discussed his love for cinema with Spanish filmmaker Carla Simón (“Romería”).
“I grew up in the countryside, so we didn’t watch many films. Then I discovered that cartoons weren’t actually real, which was very disappointing. I member how it affected me. It was like finding out Santa doesn’t exist,” recalled Simón.
“My films are exactly the films I wanted to make. Some people ask: ‘Are you going to release a director’s cut?’ All my films are director’s cut. They are challenging, however, all of them. It’s like having someone say: ‘Here’s our supermarket, you can have everything for free but you have two minutes.’ We shot ‘The Secret Agent’ like maniacs.”
During Rotterdam’s Big Talk, Mendonça Filho discussed his love for cinema with Spanish filmmaker Carla Simón (“Romería”).
“I grew up in the countryside, so we didn’t watch many films. Then I discovered that cartoons weren’t actually real, which was very disappointing. I member how it affected me. It was like finding out Santa doesn’t exist,” recalled Simón.
“In the old days, cinema was so theatrical. Marilyn Monroe could play a British character, which is a crazy example. At the end of the day, I like to mix extreme realism with extreme cinema.”
