Linha de Passe: Walter Salles interview

We caught up with Brazilian director and king of the road movie, Walter Salles, to talk about his latest film Linha de Passe, which tells the story of four fatherless brothers from a poor neighbourhood in Sao Paolo – a city of 20 million inhabitants – who’s only options for improving their lives are crime, religion or professional football. Or failing that, they could become one of the city’s 300,000 motorcycle couriers. Linha de Passe forms part of a larger co-directing partnership with the director and playwright Daniela Thomas, so we asked Walter how working with Daniela differs from his solo projects and what was behind their decision to use non-professional actors in the film.

LOVEFILM: What was the inspiration behind Linha de Passe?

Walter Salles: The British project called 14 Up, in which several characters were followed by the filmmaker Michael Apted. Every seven years he goes back and sees where these guys are. They were seven when he started. They’re about 49 at this stage.

With Daniela Thomas, who is a very gifted theatre director and playwright in Brazil, I have this project to look at Brazilian youth every eight or ten years. The film that I did before Central Station, Foreign Land, was our first collaboration. It dwelled on a generation of Brazilians who, in the midst of a political and social crisis, opted to go into exile. We followed several of those young kids in Europe, so it’s a black and white road movie shot in ’95 at a time when Brazil ceased to be a country of immigration, which is what had defined us, and became a country of emigration.

Now, 10 years later, we take a look at the young generation of Brazilians who try to go beyond what destiny has in store for them in a moment when the country’s also trying to be a bit different from what it has been in the last 30 or 40 years.

LF: Is that idea of going beyond the prescribed paths something that reflects your own experience of growing up?

WS: Yes. I was brought up as the son of a diplomat and what ended up characterising my whole youth is moving from one latitude to another and trying to suddenly understand a culture I had no idea of six months before. What’s left of that is that I’m always more interested by what I don’t know yet than what I know.

If you want play Freud 101 [laughs], I think you can easily see that in films like Central Station or The Motorcycle Diaries, or even Linha de Passe, it’s always about characters who try to go beyond the limits of what life had in store for them.

That is very clear in The Motorcycle Diaries. Two young guys take a journey in a continent they knew very little about and at the end of that journey, they have to choose the bank of the river on which they would stay for the rest of their lives.

LF: You mentioned your co-director Daniela Thomas, what’s the process like when the two of you work together?

WS: It’s one in which we have to elect a theme that interests us both and then we develop that theme into a screenplay, and that takes a number of years. This film, it took almost four to five years of actually working on the screenplay.

Then, choosing the actors, which is also takes a long time, especially in the case of Linha de Passe because we wanted to work with actors who were just starting in cinema.

It also encompasses the need to rehearse before the shoot, when you can actually discuss ideas. This is what allows the co-direction to be possible because if you leave all the discussions to be held by the co-directors during the film, you would probably need a whole year together.

So we try to discuss most of what we need to define before the film starts. And then it’s very collective, to the point that it’s not even about me and Daniela suggesting things, it’s about transforming everyone in that crew into a co-author of the project.

LF: What was the thinking behind using mostly unknown actors?

WS: It was a decision based on what the film is about. The film is about young kids trying to rewrite their own stories. So I thought it would be interesting to do with actors who were actually doing this just by the fact of being part of the film.

What you have to understand is that Brazil is a country where there’s much more talent in all professions than the capacity to express that talent. So, just to give you an example, we tested approximately eight or nine hundred for the five leading roles in the film. And for each character we had at least six or seven excellent options of people who had never acted before.

We also opted for this because we wanted to film in the streets without being recognised. We wanted to grab life in movement in the city and if we were filming with actors who had a lot of experience in television, for instance, we would be mobbed during the shoot. [Laughs].

It was very fulfilling for us to take that chance and see that an actress like Sandra Corveloni doing her first film could win the best actress prize in Cannes in an especially competitive year.

LF: I read that the motorcycle courier scenes were filmed guerrilla-style. Was the thinking behind that the same?

WS: We were left with no option really [laughs], because we never got the authorisation from the city to do those scenes, so we ended up having to steal them. The shoot itself was quite unusual, because you had the actor on the motorcycle and then you had seven or eight other motorcycles following him, and that was the soundman, the DP, Daniela and I all on different motorcycles trying to follow him through the streets of Sao Paolo! So we were actually experiencing the same kind of danger that character was enduring at that moment. And that was, yes, dangerous, but extremely interesting to go through.