por sérgio Carvalho - From GT3.comAbaixo uma entrevista com o brasileiro Walter Salles e sua participação na série FIA-GT3 e outros assuntos sobre sua vida fora das pistas.
25/08/2009 Interview with Walter Salles
Since the first race in 2006 the FIA GT3 European Championship has attracted some of most promising racing drivers from across the globe. While some race full time, others have some very interesting ‘day jobs’ and 2008 Brazilian GT3 Vice-Champion Walter Salles must rank as a driver with possibly the most interesting. When Walter isn’t at the wheel of the Matech GT Racing Ford GT he is directing award winning films and when we say awards, we mean Oscars, Golden Globes and BAFTAs. Possibly the most famous film to date is Diarios de Motocicleta (The Motorcycle Diaries), the true story about the early life of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara , which was nominated for 37 international film awards and won 26, including an Oscar and two BAFTAs.
We spoke to Walter about his film career and, of course, about his racing.
Q: What interested you in film making in the first place? What was your influence?
“The possibility to get to know my country better than I already knew. My father was a diplomat and I ended up living in different latitudes in different countries that were quite different from Brazil and I missed a lot of the Brazilian culture in general but mostly the street life that we have. The possibility to play soccer and the thrill of the city, all of that was very much part of my earlier life, at 9 or 10 that is what we would do and then when my father went to the US and Europe all that world was gone and the references were completely different. So film making came as a way to dive again into my own country and get to know it better. This is why I started doing documentaries and then much later, 10 years after I started doing documentaries, I went into fiction.”
Q. One of the things I picked up when I saw The Motorcycle Diaries was that some of the people in there are actual people, that's their lives even in the 21st century but this is a film about the 1950's. Was this part of your desire to show ordinary lives from around South America?
“The fact that I come from a documentary film background creates the desire to actually grab life as it is as much as recreating it. So what I try to do in my work is to blend those two tendencies, those two possibilities and the fact is that South America has remained pretty much a last frontier. That's what I actually realised in doing scouting for the film within the journey twice before shooting it the third time. During the shoot within the twenty thousand kilometres of the film we put everything together it’s more than fifty thousand kilometres throughout the continent and it was amazing to see that it was still unchartered territory in many ways. Just one example, if you're in Peru in Cuzco, which is an historical city near Machu Picchu, as soon as you're thirty minutes away from the city you're bound to find people speaking Quechua but not Spanish. It’s really fascinating because the original roots of the country prior to the arrival of the Spaniards in the sixteenth century is very palpable, much more than in any other country and those people that we bumped into during the shooting we invited them into the film.
Q: I looked at it from a very European point of view, not understanding the culture, I've done some Latin American history but not a huge amount and it was very educational for me to see how the people in South America are today, as well as were in the 1950's when Eduardo and Alberto did their trip.
“That's one of the beauties of cinema. Cinema, depending on how it is understood, can be seen as a way to understand the world better than we did before watching specific things and I'm sure that when I first saw Mike Leigh and Ken Loach's films in the UK I got a much better perception of what society was than I knew that I had before. It’s the same thing when you see Iranian cinema you understand that there's much more at play there, the culture's much more complex than it appears on television. I think cinema should, beyond entertaining people, I think cinema should be entertaining as well but beyond the entertainment part of it, it should allow you to connect with people you would never have met otherwise and cultures you would never have visited if it wasn't for cinema.
Q: The Motorcycle Diaries was a long time in preparation, I think you said nine years?
“Nine years and several incarnations but from the moment I was invited to do it until it was ready was around four years.
Q: Did it come about because it was a human interest story about two guys learning about their culture, their continent, going on an adventure to find themselves or was it because one of them was a very famous revolutionary, who obviously everyone has an opinion about - Che Guevara?
“I think both things were in play. First because it’s always interesting to know the moments in life when you transition from who you were to who you will be. These guys were young men who like many other young men of 18, 19 didn't have a full understanding of the society they were part of and the journey is what allowed them to have an adventure into the unknown; it’s what allowed them to make decisions and to decide what their future would be. In this sense it was very tempting to tell the story about the transitional phase but also tempting because it allowed us to understand Latin America at the same time. So from a film makers point of view we were able to cross a whole continent from south to the north; actually see the cultural differences and actually meet people that are going to be part of the film. So the experience of doing Motorcycle Diaries was by far the most impactful one I've ever done. I've done 6 or 7 feature films and that one is, I would say, an unforgettable one from a personable standpoint. Film families form and then dissolve themselves, pretty much like race teams, but the family that did that film is so much together still. There is rarely a week when I don't get emails from Argentina. Peru, Chile, people who have been part of the journey and who give us news, where they are at that moment of time, what they are doing. So it was an important moment for all of us, an important journey for all of us.”
Q: Let's talk about the success, the awards that your films, not just Motorcycles Diaries but all your other films, have received across the world. Is it important to you that South American cinema, Brazilian cinema or films are being watched and analysed in other countries that don't speak Spanish or Portuguese but they watch your films and understand your films, they transcend the language?
“When a film receives a prize that ends up having an effect on the whole cinematography that you represent, it becomes easier to finance your next project but it also puts the focus on Latin American cinema and that hopefully would help other films to exist. It is very important that an Argentinean film gets a prize in a festival, then a Chilean film, as occurred in Berlin this year winning the Golden Bear eleven years after I won it with Central Station and I was so pleased with that because it brings attention again to the continent as a whole as opposed to just one film.”
Q: Of all the films you've done have you got a personal favourite?
“It’s very difficult, it’s like you're asking me which child you prefer! I have two children, one is three months old so it would be very hard to answer that question as well. Central Station is the one film that allowed me to do the other films that came after it, so I have a very close connection not only to the film itself but to everybody who allowed me to make it possible. This is where car racing and cinema converge is that you should realise that you are just one small little cog of a much larger world in which collaboration between individuals is what creates a possible success. It’s not just the director who does the film; it’s the screenwriters, the actors, the director of photography, the editors, the music composers. All those elements potentialise a film and if just one of them goes in the wrong direction 50% of the film will be jeopardised. In car racing its not that different, in that chain if one element is not correct you will feel it at the end of the day, at the end of the session.”
Q: You've made a film involving two wheeled vehicles, what about four wheels?
“I'm working on a few ideas but I would say that it’s very complex to do a film today about car racing or a film that is partially focused on car racing for one reason. When Steve McQueen did Le Mans or when Grand Prix was premiered you didn't have live coverage of car racing on television and therefore you were either there or you would hear about it or you would actually read about it, as I did most of the time by trying to find magazines, so you would know what happened. You'd normally hear about race results much later in the 60's and 70's and that's why I started to go to the circuits from pretty early on as a way to get that information if it wasn't first hand. Today a five year old child has seen more images of car racing than my generation saw for ten years and therefore to invent something that hasn't been told yet and to make it as credible, to transcend television, to go beyond what television does, cinema has to go beyond what television already shows you. In the world of live coverage of Formula One and other events the task is much more complex than it was 30 or 40 years ago, but I'm working on two different ideas so let’s see what comes out of it.”
Q: So what's your latest film? What's the next one?
“I've been working for a while on an adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, one of the men who created the Beat Generation in the 50's in America, and it’s a movement that redefined your understanding of the culture of that time. The first white guys who incorporated jazz into their day to day practice who redefined sex, marriage, they were a really bold bunch of pioneers. Francis Coppola has had the rights for twenty-seven years and different directors are involved with it, and I’ve been working on it for four years. Hopefully when this crisis is over, I will be able to do the film, but when that happens I'll have to quit motor racing.”
Q: You obviously enjoy your racing is it an extension of your day job or is it an escape, a way of putting the film director on the shelf and becoming a racing driver for the weekend? Is this your hobby or is it something you take very seriously and want to succeed?
“I think I am an enthusiastic amateur who has been passionate about car racing for many, many years and actually never thought that I would be here sitting here today. Interestingly the concentration it requires, the understanding of tracks I don't know, all of that is not too dissimilar to film making when you are doing location scouting and you are deciding where you want to go with your crew and how you can do the best possible work in those circumstances that change all the time as they do here at the track. We're confronted with such difficulties on a day to day basis in film making so in this sense this is both a hobby that allows me to depart from the tension of my day to day life but on the other hand it helps me to increase concentration. I'm not actually racing against anyone, it’s more against myself. Paul Newman said in an interview, much more poetically than I am doing here, when you do a film there are so many elements that you don't control but in a car it’s really you against yourself and you have to improve based on your potential. I'm 53, I'm a bronze driver my potential is limited in comparison to what it could have been 30 years ago. I just try to do what I can and try not to compromise the team too much.”
Further reading
Link to Walter Salles’ entry on the Internet Movie Database
Link to the official Motorcycle Diaries website
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