MakingOf: In casting you used non-professional actors and you went to schools, drama schools, charity, educational groups to find the three actors that played Dario’s brothers. In the end, how closely did those actors, because they weren’t as experienced, how closely did they match your original vision of who the character would be?

(Walter Salles): That’s an interesting question. You know, I was coming out of ‘Motorcycle Diaries,’ in which we had the privilege of blending such incredible actors as Gael Garcia Bernal and Rodrigo De la Serna with a number of non-actors that we ended up finding, not only on the road, but on the margins of the road in Argentine, Chile, Peru. And that was such an extraordinarily inspiring journey that we, in doing a film again in Brazil, that we opted for this really starting point, that was: lets try to work with actors that have the talent of being in a film but hadn’t had this chance before. The film was above all about reinvention, about a family trying to reinvent itself, so we thought that this was a good moment to find actors who are in that position. So there’s in fact a lot of actors, its not that it’s all non-actors in this group of people that give life to the film. You have a number of young actors that had never had a chance to be in cinema before, but they had such a desire for cinema that that somehow came ahead of experience. And I think we learned a lot from them… the capacity to always be inventive and to bring ideas. I don’t think that we selected due to the…we didn’t type cast.  We didn’t try to find in the non-experienced actors or the actors the physical traits that wanted the character to have, but on the opposite we tried to find the talent that they should posses in order to make the film possible. And then we rehearsed the film as though it were a play and we shot it with the urgency that the film needed to have.

MO: I’ve heard that the crew was also fairly inexperienced or fairly new. What was that like? What kind of director are you like onset? What are the magic tricks you use to run a tight ship?

(WS): Jean-Luc Godard the French pioneer of the Nouvelle Vague movement said that: “Cinema is for those who don’t know everything about the language or about the grammar.” And I think he’s right because this mean that you always have to be in search of something that you don’t know yet and somehow if you are fully equipped all the time and you are not on the border of the cliff then filmmaking becomes a profession like many other professions and it ceases the capacity to unveil the unknown… which  I think is one of our many missions. So in shooting with these very young actors we though it would be interesting to have behind the camera a very young crew that would have that kind of desire also for cinema. That wouldn’t say ‘oh this cant be done’ or ‘you’re jumping the axis.’ Because its beautiful to jump the axis when you need to bring some chaos into the narrative. So the idea that they wouldn’t be limits that would be predetermines was pretty much at the origins of this project. I like to say the film is also the result of a desire that Daniela Thomas, who is a film designer, and I have to regroup every ten years and talk about the Brazilian reality. We did a film which was shown at the San Francisco Film Festival, it was one of the first to festivals to select the film at a time when Brazilian cinema was coming out of 25 years of dictatorship. San Francisco film festival selected this film we did together called “Foreign Land” and interestingly we come back fifteen years later with another film that talks about Brazilian reality. And Brazilian reality is so dynamic that we felt like the film and the crew should somehow mirror that.

MO: To the new crop and up-and-coming generation of new directors and filmmakers, after all your experience in film, making great visually stunning, what wisdom would you impart to this new generation of filmmakers? And where do you hope to see that new generation of filmmakers take their films?

(WS): A really great writer that I admire called Jorge Luis Borges, and Argentinean writer, he used to say that was interested him in literature was to name what hasn’t been named yet. And what I would like to see from young filmmakers is an invitation to see what hasn’t been seen yet in the very same sense. I hope that they will use cinema not only to entertain, and that is very important, but also to help me understand and help us understand that the world is larger than we though before watching that film.

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