Director Kleber Mendonça Filho Breaks Down Key Scenes in ‘The Secret Agent’ | Exclusive Video

In a very competitive year for international films, the Brazilian drama “The Secret Agent” has made a statement by winning in the Best Foreign Language Film categories at the Critics Choice and Golden Globe Awards, and adding a Globes win for Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama award by star Wagner Moura.

Director Kleber Mendonça Filho, a former film critic whose previous films include “Neighboring Sounds” and “Bacurau,” stars Moura as Armando, a man who has run afoul of powerful figures during Brazil’s military dictatorship of the 1970s, and who returns to his hometown of Recife under the assumed name Marcel. He broke down four of the film’s crucial scenes in a conversation with TheWrap.

The gas station

The sequence that introduces Wagner Moura’s character takes place in a remote gas station, where the lead character played by Wagner Moura stops to refuel and spots a dead body covered with cardboard not far from the pumps. While he chats with the gas station attendant, a police car pulls up – not to investigate the body, but to quiz Moura’s character about where he’s going and what he’s got in the car. The scene, short on concrete information but long on a sense of paranoia and dread, was shot next to a sugar plantation about 100 kilometers north of Recife. An abandoned police checkpoint was used as production base, and a small gas station was built from scratch to match the look of stations in the 1970s.

FILHO: “Besides being interested in shooting in a remote location with this wonderful character who happens to work at the gas station, I was interested in using the sequence to introduce Wagner’s character. It’s quite an extreme situation. There’s a dead body rotting away under the sun, it’s carnival time, the police are too busy…

“It’s a wonderful human situation and in this remote location, which makes me think of Brazilian films from the ’60s and ’70s, or Australian films. That sequence, for example, I thought a lot about ‘Wake in Fright,’ Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 film shot in Australia. And then I wrote something that actually happened to me one Ash Wednesday, maybe 30, 33 years ago in the city.

“I was a very young driver, and I was stopped by the cops. They kept going through a checklist of things that could possibly be wrong with me or the car. They never found anything. So in the end, they gave up and said, ‘Please give us some money.’ (Laughs) I instinctively found myself writing that situation.

“The opening sequence is about nine or 10 minutes. And I always thought that even friends would say, ‘Well, this is a good sequence, but I don’t think you’ll need it in the film.’ But nobody ever said that. And once the film was shot and edited, I expected the same reaction: ‘I like the film, but I’m not sure you need that opening sequence.’ (Laughs) But nobody has ever said anything like that. The sequence seems to be strong and it seems to have its own place in the film.”

The researchers appear

Almost 45 minutes into the film, the action suddenly jumps into the future, to a pair of young female researchers who are listening to audio tapes from the 1970s. Deliberately disorienting, the sequence puts us at a remove from what we’ve been watching, and introduces characters who will be vital as the film goes on.

“I think the usual procedure is to open the film in the present, and then at some point you zoom in to somebody’s face and we go into the past.  In my mind, it is stronger if you immerse yourself into the past, and then at 43 minutes you realize that this is actually a story being told from the future. And the people observing the story are not particularly close to the story. It’s not like in Titanic, where the main character is 97 years old and she remembers.

“That generates an interesting distance from the story that we were following.  We are very much with Wagner’s character, very close to him, and now we find out that there are two young ladies, researchers looking from the future, but they’re not particularly close to the story. So they can be very pragmatic and very … I’m not sure if distant is the word, but very matter-of-fact in the way they’re discussing the story. And I think that’s a little disturbing, I think, because it makes me worry about what happened in the past. And of course, we go back to the past and we keep following the story, and it keeps giving you more detail and more information. And at some point we realize that yes, she’s still listening in from the future.

“This is an interesting thought for me ,because I grew up in a house where my mother was a historian. She would come in with a tape recorder and a box of tapes. I grew up to be a young journalist, and then I started making my short films and I became a filmmaker. So I always had a lot of media around. I find it fascinating to think that this conversation we’re having now could be archived, and maybe somebody could be listening to it in the future. Let’s say 85 years into the future, we are long gone and this conversation is found somewhere in some archive.

“I find that thought both beautiful and disturbing. Disturbing because I know that I won’t be here. Beautiful because it might mean something, it might be interesting. I hope we are having an interesting conversation today, but it might even be interesting in the future.

“There is a moment that is rarely mentioned in the film in reviews or by audience members. In the long sequence (in the upstairs office of a movie theater) where Wagner’s character is explaining what is happening to him and Elsa is recording on a Panasonic tape recorder, you can hear the audience watching ‘The Omen’ screaming in the adjacent cinema auditorium. And then Flavia in the future, she’s listening to the tape and trying to understand, what is that? There is a cut between five decades.  For me, that’s one of the defining moments in the film.”

The hairy leg

At the beginning of the film, a severed leg is found in the belly of a shark in the waters off the Brazilian city of Recife. And in one of the movie’s strangest sequences, the severed leg reappears in a park at night, hopping around and attacking the lovers who are using the park for illicit sexual activity.  In a work that seems grounded in reality, it’s seems to be sheer a flight of fantasy. But it isn’t.

“I love when I’m writing a film or watching a film and I realize that there is a moment where cinema meets reality in a threshold kind of way. You can step forward and now you are into the fantastic, and one step back, you were in realism.

“The whole idea of an urban legend is very much like that. You have a real city where people live, and then the city begins to dream and to fantasize about its own problems, its own traumas and fears. That’s when you go into urban legend mode.

“In the ’70s, the hairy leg was developed as a code by a couple of journalists. They couldn’t really write or talk about violent acts related to the police or the military police, because there was censorship or they would be threatened. So they came up with a hairy leg. The hairy leg would stand for police violence and military police violence. And that became a phenomenon in Recife. Kids would be afraid of the hairy leg. I was afraid of the hairy leg as a little kid in the ’70s. Radio dramas were produced about the hairy leg and cartoons were published. There were stories in the newspaper that felt straight, but it was kind of a tongue-in-cheek, irreverent way of dealing with censorship.

“It was as crazy to shoot as it is to watch. We had abut 30 meters of dolly tracks, because the camera would be on a very low angle behind the leg as it hopped along. All of that was done with the very specific camera movement from left to right, low angle, so the focus would be on the leg, which would be added later.

“We had a prop. We had a life-sized prosthetic leg, and one of the assistants, or even myself, wearing green gloves because it would be easier to remove later, would basically be clobbering actors over the head and attacking them with the prop. (Laughs) The crew would just crack up because it was one of the most ridiculous things.

“And of course the actors had to look terrified, but it was just a rubber leg being pushed into their faces. We had a great time. And I have a lot of respect for the extras, because they were really fun to work with. I said, ‘I need somebody to be naked from the waist down so that the leg can kick you in the balls,’ and four guys were like, ‘Me, me, me, me!’

“It’s amazing how you can do strange sequence with full cooperation from so many different people: actors, camera team, assistants and special effects people and stop motion animators five months later in Holland.”

Assassin in the streets

The climactic scene in the 1970s-set portion of the film comes when Vilmar, an assassin hired to kill Armando, locates him, shoots a couple of police officers and begins a lengthy cat-and-mouse chase through the streets of Recife. To make it work, Filho made use of a split-focus diopter, a technique popularized in the ’70s that allows two different parts of a scene to be in focus.

“I come from Recife and I know the downtown area so well, I wanted it to somehow make sense geographically. It makes sense in the script, but a year later when we were looking for the locations, I realized that my imaginary locations wouldn’t work practically.  It looked very bad, and we would need a lot of work from art direction.

“I abandoned the idea of making it work geographically in relation to what the city is. And I began to understand that there were amazing locations that I could make work through editing, even if geographically it made no sense. Probably the toughest part for me was to let go of the original thought that went into the script, and understand that I could still do the sequence, but in a crazy shuffled way of mixing different locations.

“But of course action and suspense comes from information. Each shot has to be backed with tension, because otherwise you will rely only in editing for tension, and I don’t think that’s, that’s a good thing. So the whole idea that Vilmar, the hired assassin, is getting closer and closer to Wagner’s character is one interesting element.

“We had a wonderful location to get it right, a school from the mid 19th century that so many great writers and poets and musicians have attended. We had a great time working there and I had all the time I needed to get that sequence right, with all the extras and the actors and the camera setups and the dolly tracks and the practical effects, the blood effects. It was a great moment.”

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