Walter Salles Talks Personal Ties To Political Disappearance Drama ‘I’m Still Here’; Cinema Family; Soccer Doc & Future Projects – Venice & Toronto

Melanie Goodfellow
·10 min read

Walter Salles’ drama I’m Still Here enjoyed a buzzy world premiere in competition at Venice, with Fernanda Torres’ lead performance putting her among the hot contenders for the best actress prize, and now arrives in Toronto for its North American debut before heading to San Sebastian.

Torres plays the real-life figure of Eunice Paiva, whose husband Rubens Paiva disappeared in the early years of the 1964 to 1985 Brazilian military dictatorship.

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The civil engineer and former leftist congressman had initially gone into exile after the coup but returned to Brazil to reunite with his wife and children, taking up residence in a beachfront house in Rio de Janeiro. He was abducted from his home in 1971 by military forces and never seen again by his family.

Eunice Paiva relentlessly pursued the truth about what happened to her husband at the same time as keeping a roof over the heads of their five children. She would become a symbol of resistance against the dictatorship, going on to reinvent her life in an unexpected way.

Salles adapted the screenplay with Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega from the 2015 book ‘Ainda Estou Aqui’, in which Eunice Paiva’s son Marcelo Rubens Paiva revisits his mother’s journey, at the same time as recounting what he and his siblings went through.

The story also has personal resonance for the director, who was a childhood friend of the middle daughter Nalu and a regular visitor to the family’s bohemian home.

Salles and Torres previously worked together on Strange Land (1995) and The First Day (1998), while the actress’s mother Fernanda Montenegro, who is considered one of the greatest Brazilian actresses of all time, also briefly shares the Eunice Paiva role, appearing as the protagonist in her final years. They are joined in the cast by Selton Mello as Rubens Paiva. The project also reunites Salles with his regular collaborator, the director Daniela Thomas, who takes an artistic producer credit.

Scheduled for a theatrical release in November in Brazil, the film is likely to spark debate at home and is also a strong contender to be selected as the country’s submission to the Best International Feature Film category in the 97th Academy Awards.

Deadline sat down with Salles the day after the film’s buzzy premiere in Venice.

DEADLINE: Can you talk about how genesis of the film, which is also related to your personal connection to the Paiva family as well as the book.

WALTER SALLES: The source of the project is really based on this overlapping between the personal, the memories I have of adolescence in the house in the heart of the film, and the fact that in 2015, Marcelo Rubens Paiva wrote a very singular book, retracing the story of his family, but also understanding the extraordinary journey of his mother at the centre of that family.

This is when he realises at 50, that she had been the real heroine of that family. The humanity in that book, the existential depth of what he was sharing with us, the audience, really struck a chord in me, a very deep one…  I was at the same time enamoured by the idea of adapting it and a little bit shy, in that I was asking myself whether it would be possible for the filmic translation to be at the same level of the book. Books are generally better than the films.

DEADLINE: Given that you knew the children at the heart of the story, did that put extra pressure on you to get it right?

SALLES: Yes, but what really freed me was the fact that Marcelo not only embraced the possibility of the adaptation, but as he’s also a screenwriter – even he didn’t write this screenplay – he was close to it and close to the several lives of the screenplay, and commented here and there. There was a compass there that really helped us, but not only from his input, but from the family input as a whole.

The five children, now adults, talked extensively to us, to the screenwriters, to me, and collectively we got to where we were. It’s a film about a family, made by a family of cinema, because this is the third film that Fernanda Torres and I do together, and the second film with Fernanda Montenegro, after we did Central Station together. Looking now retrospectively, I think the only way to do a film about the family is to bring your own family of cinema to it.

DEADLINE: Last night at the premiere, you, Fernanda Torres and Melton Sello went down to the lower circle to embrace Marcelo Rubens Paiva who could not join you in the upper gallery because he is wheelchair bound. Who was the blond-haired lady with him?

SALLES: That was Nalu. The middle daughter.  I needed to go to her because she was the source of all of that. I mean, she brought me to that house. She was my dear friend and is a dear friend still.

DEADLINE: A sense of loss and nostalgia permeates the film. Was that your aim?

SALLES: The first 30 minutes of the film are really informed by the book, but also by glimpses of memories that I have of that space, that family, of the friends that were in and out of the house all the time, the smell I have of that house even. This translates into really fluid camera going from group to group and giving a sense of mobility and constant evolution. There was a world of possibilities in that house, in a sense, and I wanted for that to be present in the beginning.

But once there’s the loss, when the military police invade that house, I had to imagine how that space was without light, with muffled sounds, you know, it was completely the antonymy of what I knew. What informed us was Eunice’s way of being in the world. At the heart of the story, you have a woman who never allowed herself to be victimized, who never bended towards the government. When she took public photos, she smiled. She didn’t combat the military regime that had assassinated her husband in a frontal manner, but she corroded it. The restraint that she has is part of her strength… The fact she doesn’t share immediately that the husband is dead gives you the sense of the depth of the loss.

I’m Still Here
I’m Still Here

DEADLINE: That could have also been to protect the children?

SALLES:  You’re right, she is definitely thinking that she’s doing the right thing by not sharing the loss with the children, but she’s also processing it for sure. The narration from the loss onwards becomes much more subjective. It’s a family from the loss on, that communicates non-verbally, more than verbally, by looking. The daughters understand, looking at each other, that something has happened in that restaurant [scene] for instance… Eunice is looking around at life that ensues, but hers is not. This is why I wanted the life to burgeon at the beginning of the film, so that you could have a sense of what that family could have been.  That family that you see in the Super 8 at the end is what that family should have been.

We were at the brink of being such an inventive country. Culturally, everything was happening correctly in Brazil. We were developing new forms of public education, new ways of developing land reform. There were incredibly cultural movements in music, in cinema, in literature and this was completely imploded by an authoritarian regime. You have the sense of her personal loss, the sense of loss of the family, but also the sense of loss that a country went through…But that doesn’t mean that you can’t reinvent yourself and that you shouldn’t reinvent yourself. That’s the beauty of the book.  That’s what I really wanted to relay about that character, because this is what she taught us, in a way.

DEADLINE: You were 14 when all this happened. Did you ever go back to the house after the Paiva family left?

SALLES: Yes, and I saw the house closed. There was the opposition of a house open to the world, to a house that was completely shut down. And then there was something also traumatic in that it became a restaurant.  And then one day, the house was demolished, and I also saw that. I live in Rio and every time I walk in that part of the city, I cannot refrain from going back to that reality, Now, there’s an immense skyscraper with luxury apartments where the house once stood called Juan-les-Pins.

DEADLINE: This is your first fiction feature film since On The Road 12 years ago. What have you been doing in between?

SALLES: Well, first of all, after a feature, I always go back to documentaries. I’m actually editing a five-hour documentary right now. it’s on the converging point between football and politics. It’s about a Brazilian soccer player from the seventies named Sócrates (Sócrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira) like the Greek philosopher.  He was one of the players who launched a movement for democracy in a soccer team. That was unheard of. He was an extraordinary character. He was the result of the internal migration in Brazil. His parents were self-taught public servants. He studied to be a doctor, and was a soccer player at the same time, which is very rare. He was both. He had an extraordinary life as a soccer player and was very tragic at the end of the life. it’s coming out in the beginning of next year.

I did a documentary on Jia Zhangke (Jia Zhangke, A Guy from Fenyang), a director whose work I love, and I also worked on two other screenplays, one of them is ready to go. I’m a slow writer or a slow developer of projects. I like to allow time to decant things so that I’m sure that the project is the project to be done.

DEADLINE: Can you say anything about new project that more advanced?

SALLES:  It’s also set in the seventies, this time in Argentina, and is written by a really incredible journalist. She brought me the project and it’s something that I embraced and hopefully that’s going to be the next project. It’s the story of really large kidnapping that occurred in Argentina, but with political ramifications. But also, again, it’s a human story. Fernando Montenegro taught me many things, but there’s one line that I will never forget. She said, ‘The only way we can be saved are through the human and the existential.’  I’m drawn to stories that have a kind of possibility of expressing something from a specific personal story, much more than something that is plot driven. I’m much more interested by the human experience that then informs a plot, rather than starting with the plot and then creating the characters.

DEADLINE: Going back to I’m Still Here, the film is coming out in Brazil in November, what kind of response do you think it will get there and how does the Paiva family’s story chime with what has been happening in the country in recent years, with the presidency of far-right politician and ex-military officer Jair Bolsonari from 2019 to 2023?

SALLES: When we started the project in 2015, I envisaged it as an extraordinary story of a woman and a vivid portrait of a period that wasn’t sufficiently filmed in Brazil. I never thought that it could also be about our present. But then in three years, the extreme right-wing gained so much presence and visibility in Brazil, that I realised that the film was also about the zeitgeist that, frankly, I didn’t anticipate. It’s going to come out in the middle of this moment where Brazilian society is really torn in two. The fact that more films come to shed light and perhaps offer reflections of that period for people to think about is something.

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