Central Station: heartbreak and miracles

“Beware of charm” should be the film critic’s motto. It takes charm to persuade other people, as filmmakers must, to part with large chunks of money. But so often do actors and directors pretend to open their hearts to our tape recorders that professional steeliness can corrode into cynicism. We become wary as soon as someone seeks too easy a connection.

The Brazilian director Walter Salles put my guard up in this way – and just as soon disarmed me. In November, during the London Film Festival, Sight and Sound receives dozens of unsolicited interview offers, usually with directors in whom mainstream publications have no interest. Salles is much better known than that: his thriller Foreign Land had been at the LFF in 1995 and his new film Central Station has won prizes at festivals in Berlin, Toronto and San Sebastian and may yet be nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. To win so many accolades, though, Central, Station must have charmed a host of dignitaries – and that usually signifies something with the sweetness of the dessert menu (think of Cinema Paradiso). Having agreed to meet Salles, I dreaded that Central Station would be Victorian in its sentimentality and that its director would gently gush.

On paper the storyline does not allay these prejudices, though it toughens as it goes along. A ten-year-old boy, Josué (Vinícius de Oliveira), goes with his mother to see a professional letter writer at Rio’s Central Station. The mother wants to send a letter to Josué’s father to persuade him to send for them or to come home. Immediately afterwards the mother is knocked down by a bus and killed. Dora (Fernanda Montenegro), the letter writer, sees Josue loitering about the station and takes him home with her. She places him with an adoption agency, but finds out the agency is actually harvesting children as disposable organ donors. She rescues him and they flee by bus into the Sertão centrelands in search of Josué’s father. Their encounters with each other and with the scattered populations of the new Brazil take on ever deepening psychological and metaphorical significance. It’s a movie designed partly to be read on a symbolic level, with nods to religious imagery, but it’s also an acute psychological drama.

Central Station does indeed have a direct, emotional mode of address that is, let us say, not very Anglo-Saxon (though far from saccharine). And Salles in person similarly adopts a quiet but full-on eagerness. Yet he somehow makes cynicism impossible. He very soon persuaded me that his multilayered road movie – which holds the attention as much through its photography of desert bus halts and shanty towns as through its subtle performances – is more important than I’d guessed. It’s become a touchstone movie for Brazil, and its marvels (some of which passed me by on first viewing) are extraordinarily vivid in memory.

To some extent Josué represents Brazil’s future, and Dora, an ex-teacher turned writer of messages which she sends or not as the mood takes her, the authorities. The couple’s journey of “resensitiation”, as Brazilian critic José Carlos Avellar puts it, threads through the ragged communities of a nation regathering its strength and identity. In one scene, where they arrive at Josué’s father’s address and find a fearful mother with two resentful boy children who look unnervingly like Josué, the sense of mute suffering and solitude is palpably raw.

Salles’ film is the clearest evidence yet of a Brazilian film renaissance that, according to Avellar, relates to the groundbreaking Cinema Novo movement of the 60s as writing does to speech. “Let’s say that today’s camera, almost always on the tripod, writes just as yesterday’s camera, almost always hand-held, spoke; that stories like Dora’s and Josué’s write not what was said but the way things were said in Brazilian cinema in the 60s with the same passion.”

Nick James: What’s been happening in Brazilian cinema in recent years? 

Walter Salles: There’s a rebirth of Brazilian cinema after five years of total silence. From 1990 to 1995 we made virtually nothing – we were in political and economic chaos. Then a pluralist film industry sprang up in different parts of the country. This had never happened before – production in the 60s and 70s, when we used to make 70 films a year, was concentrated in Rio and São Paulo. Most of the recent films talk about national identity, which is being redefined in Brazil. And the public are returning to see their own reflection in the movie theatres, which shows how television has failed to supply this reflection. Central Station has been seen so far by 1,300,000 Brazilians and the film has the best per-screen average of the year – Titanic is second, Godzilla third. It shows that size doesn’t matter!

Which other films are having an international impact? 

What makes this renaissance so wonderful is that there’s no clash between the generations. Masters such as Nelson Pereira Dos Santos and Hector Babenco are making good films alongside former assistants in their 30s. We have a sense of family very similar to that which existed with Cinema Novo and the nouvelle vague – we’re constantly in contact, we help each other. It’s as if you hadn’t been allowed to speak your own language for five years and suddenly, when you can speak it again, you take pleasure in every syllable. There’s a lot of diversity, but the common denominator is a collective desire to talk about this country known as Brazil. 

In your “road movie” Central Station Brazil is a place where community and family have been torn apart.

From the beginning this film was built around two searches: a boy searching in the heart of the country for a father he had never met and an old woman searching for a second chance. But it’s also a film searching for a physical and human geography that has been absent from Brazilian cinema for a long time. The journey of the boy trying to redefine his future and find his roots is emblematic of a country trying to tackle these same problems. 

Which came first: the desire for a story that would convey these national feelings, or did the story appear in which the themes were there to be picked out? 

The story came to me in a block in the course of a single morning and the characters were already emblematic of a larger situation. Dora represents old Brazil: that culture of indifference and cynicism we had in the 70s and 80s, which arose from the idea that we had to become industrialised and any means were acceptable to reach specific ends. The character of the boy is exactly the opposite: he represents the possibility of a certain innocence, of refusing a deterministic future and granting yourself another destiny. Through his fierce desire to meet his father he rebaptises himself and grants Dora a second chance, so he is the transforming angel of the story. But he also has to do with a collective desire in Brazil today for change. He represents the possibility of refusing what is granted to us and defining through action what we might want and are free to be. 

How did you make sure the story could carry that kind of metaphorical weight?

By fleshing out the characters to make them as multi-layered as possible – we worked a lot on the screenplay even after it won the 100th Anniversary $300,000 prize at Sundance. We also rehearsed the film as though it was a play for five weeks before shooting, a method we developed on my previous film, which was shot very fast – over four weeks – on a low budget, so we really had to know the material. We shot Central Station in nine weeks, but two were used for transportation because we drove more than 3000 miles through the country. We had the most respected Brazilian actress, Fernanda Montenegro, but we also had the boy Vinícius de Oliveira, who not only had never acted but had never been to a movie. We needed to create a common denominator in acting. And though the story is about the discovery of affection and the possibility of change, the characters had to keep their toughness to the end, to break the sentimentality. 

Mother/son can be a very sentimental dynamic.

There’s nothing worse than a bad film on that theme, so we realised she could never mother him. The only moment they touch is in the inverted pietà scene where the boy shelters the woman, who has fainted from exhaustion and hunger – so for a few moments the ten-year-old kid becomes mother to the 65-year-old woman. 

Given the Brazilian audience, how important was it to use religious imagery? 

When I was location scouting I was struck by the relation between need and religion in the heart of Brazil. These communities have been abandoned for so long they don’t expect anything from earthly powers. They have to rely on something else, and this explains their incredible religiosity. As a sometime documentarist I forgot I was an atheist and tried instead to be faithful to what I was seeing and to integrate those elements into the film. The Virgin Mary of the Candlelight pilgrimage brings the possibility of a ray of light in the darkness which in a way is emblematic of cinema itself. 

We integrated the pilgrimage scene into the film for many reasons. First, to show how much these people were in need of communication with loved ones who were far away, in internal exile. Second, it was the perfect occasion for Dora to understand the consequences of not having sent the letters: she had to grasp the incredible need these people were enduring to realise how unethical she had been. Last, the scene is very descriptive of that particular region of Brazil and we were trying to put a human as well as a physical geography back on the screen. 

Which regions did you visit? 

We started in Rio, but we wanted to avoid the clichéd image of the city so this might be the first film shot there in which you don’t see the beach or the middle-class resort areas. Instead you have the reality of the suburbs and of an underground society rarely portrayed. Then we tried to find the Sertão, a part of the country abandoned by official politics, because though this might be the most backward area of Brazil, if innocence and solidarity still exist anywhere it is here. The land structure is so impossible that the government has to create towns – like the ones we see at the end of the film – that are absolutely artificial. They’re in the middle of nowhere and there’s no work around so they become ghost towns in five or six years. It’s like an immense parking lot for humans. 

Are there traces of your background in documentary in your fiction work? 

When you do a ‘road movie’ you are constantly coming into contact with the unknown. I love road movies because they allow the characters to change as they are confronted with things they can’t control. They have to abandon their initial perception of the world and face up to things they don’t understand. When you’re on the road you either accept what reality and destiny bring you or you fight against it, which is suicidal. I tend to try to incorporate it as much as I can.

For instance, when we installed Dora’s table at the train station on the first day of the shoot several of the 300,000 people who pass through that station every day came up to ask her to write letters for them. We used a small camera and we hid it as much as possible. Those people really needed to dictate letters and most of them were camera-innocent. And we realised that the letters they came out with had a much more raw and honest quality – or should I say poetry? – than the ones in the prize-winning screenplay. Our letters had a kind of Brechtian distance; theirs were dictated by a need to be heard and they brought an incredible emotional charge we never expected. They broke through all the frames we could put on reality.

The same thing happened with the pilgrimage scene. We decided to work with real pilgrims and not with extras so half an hour into the shoot it stopped being a re-enactment and became the thing itself. A number of pilgrims started to ask aloud for protection for the group as a whole and we had the option of stopping them and trying to reorganise it or just going with it. So that whole scene is a single take, shot over the course of a night while trying to find as organic as possible a relationship with reality. My background as a documentarist helps me to shoot freely in such circumstances. 

Did this present you with editing problems? 

The editing was not very complex. Rehearsing the film beforehand allows you to improvise much more, because you know the material so well you can judge what you’re getting on the spot against what you had during rehearsal time. A small miracle always occurs when you shoot freely. 

Wasnt it one of your own documentaries that set you thinking about Central Station? 

It was a documentary about a woman prisoner serving a 36-year sentence in the middle of nowhere in Brazil who one day finds an old magazine – the equivalent of Time – with an article about a 73-year-old Jewish Marxist sculptor from Poland who goes to the Amazon, picks up burned wood and reshapes it into something else, granting it a second life. Somehow she manages to relate her own experience to that of the sculptor, and this becomes the inspiration for her to grant herself a second life. Though she is partially illiterate and he lives in the middle of nowhere in a tree house they start to exchange letters and both of them in their respective exiles are changed by the experience. He is a friend of mine, and when he showed me the letters I decided to make a documentary about these two people and their respective worlds and to put them together for the first time. The meeting happens in total silence, to avoid sentimentality. In doing this documentary I started to understand that even in the age of instant communication a letter can still change people’s lives. Then I started to think about what would happen if letters didn’t reach their destinations. 

How did you approach working with Vinícius? 

He was a shoe-shine boy at an airport, whom we found by chance. He understood his character’s plight so well he fought to portray it from beginning to end – he was first on set, the last to leave and he had an incredible capacity to memorise everyone’s lines including his own. I would never have been able to pull that performance out of him had he not had an extraordinary gift – which tells you how much talent is lost in the streets of Brazil.

What has happened to him since the film came out? 

We had to deal with that situation from the beginning, not wait until the film was finished. This is not a street kid – he’s a kid who abandoned school to help his family through honest toil. What strikes you when you see him is his sense of dignity, which he never lost whatever the harsh reality of life in Rio. He built his shoe-shine kit with his own hands and he fought to make it every single day.

When we talked to his mother we said we’d like to invite him to do the film on condition that he went back to school afterwards. The production company would supply a scholarship until the end of university. In eight years from now, if he decides he wants to be a doctor, an engineer or a film critic he’ll be fully equipped to make the choice. Actually he’s working on the local PBS radio – he introduces a 20-minute daily show in which he talks about geography, history or maths for children who’ve abandoned school, who didn’t have the chance he had. He’s making a decent amount of money and he’s supporting part of his family. For many Brazilians he’s the boy who managed to escape that deterministic future. 

Are you tempted now to work in Hollywood? 

I’m not looking for what you might call a career in films. Of course if you stay in the independent arena it’s like the myth of Sisyphus – each time you have to start all over again – but you have the possibility of doing something that’s the extension of your beliefs. If you go into the studio system it might be much easier to put the film together, but you would be miserable at the end.

After finishing Central Station I did a documentary with my brother, Short Lives, about 12-year-old kids who enter the drug-dealing networks in the slums of Rio. It’s the opposite case to Josué becoming a shoe-shine boy – it’s about kids who know they’ll be dead by the time they’re 18 or 20. When it comes to choosing new projects I try to respond to my own impulses. Although dozens of screenplays have been arriving, I’m not interested in doing something that isn’t fundamentally related to me. When a film is ready and you see it in a festival you only sense the glitter of it – and there’s nothing more opposed to that than the reality of making a film. It taxes you so much. It takes two years of your life at least. I can’t do it in any other way than to be so involved with what I’m doing that I sleep with the idea.

It must be to do with themes of exile. The physical frontiers and the frontiers within ourselves are my main interest and I wouldn’t be able just to grab one of those formulaic Hollywood screenplays and plot a good film. If you don’t maintain the integrity of your desire, you’re bound for disaster. And I’m driven by the desire to do work that’s worthwhile.