All roads in the Brazilian film industry seem to lead to lead to Marcelo Rubens Paiva, and he considers many of the people he has worked with in the last 40-odd years of his life to be family. By coincidence, family is also the subject of the film that has changed his life dramatically over the last six months. Based on Paiva’s 2015 autobiography Ainda estou aqui, Walter Salles’ film I’m Still Here tells the story of his mother, Eunice Paiva, whose politically active husband Rubens was taken by military police in January 1971 and never returned home.
Paiva is no stranger to drama, having overcome tetraplegia after diving into a shallow lake at the age of 20, an incident that informed his first bestseller, Feliz Ano Velho (AKA Happy Old Year) in 1983. But he admits to being overwhelmed by the international goodwill that has followed I’m Still Here since its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival last September, resulting in two Oscar nominations for the film and a Best Actress nomination for Fernanda Torres, who plays Eunice. In fact, he doesn’t even mind that Salles’ film is only a partial adaptation of his book, which goes on to document his life with Eunice after her later diagnosis with Alzheimer’s. (As his girlfriend says, “The book is bigger.”)
This interview took place at the end of last year and has been edited for clarity.
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DEADLINE: When did Walter Salles first suggest that he wanted to make this movie?
MARCELO RUBENS PAIVA: I’ve written about 10 books and some plays, and 50% of them have been adapted for a movie. I don’t know why, but the way I write is attractive for people involved in cinema. Ever since my first book, Feliz Ano Velho. As soon as the books were in the libraries, the phone calls started, and the first phone call [for this book] was from Walter Salles, who was a very good friend of mine, and my family. He read the book, and he was very touched by it. He was part of that [extended] family, that group, that crew that was around us in ’71. His father worked for the [former president], João Goulart, who was exiled. He was a friend of my sister, and I remember my father taking him and his brother and myself to see a big stage show when I was 10 or 11 years old. After that—he as a filmmaker and me as a writer—we were always in touch.
He used to live in Rio de Janeiro, close to where I had an apartment in the ’90s and 2000s, and we met each other sometimes when we’d get together for dinner. And when he called me to say, “I loved this book”—he was very impressed with it, because a lot of things came to him from the past, and he started talking about what these things were—I realized then that he was the guy to do it. Nobody else would be able to do a film with so many details but still take the essence of my story and respect my family. After that, a big network came to me, trying to make a serious TV series [out of it]. All I could think of was an image of my mother and my father kissing—like a soap-opera melodrama. And I said, “No, sorry, Walter is the guy.” Since then, we’ve been in touch constantly. Almost every two months we talk. We have lunch, we have dinner. I live in São Paulo now, so he comes to [to visit me there].
DEADLINE: How did you feel about handing your work over to another team of writers?
PAIVA: I love [Murilo Hauser, co-screenwriter with Heitor Lorega]. The first thing that he told me is that he’d read The Infinite Jest, and David Foster Wallace is one of my favorite writers. I can count on one hand the number of friends that read The Infinite Jest until the end. Usually they read until page 40, 50. So when this guy said that to me, I said, “OK, this guy is a genius already. He’s the guy.” After that, I saw a movie that he was the screenwriter of: A Vida Invisível by Karim Aïnouz. I love that movie. I love the way it uses melodrama, and I’m very afraid of melodrama. There is a fine line between melodrama and drama—drama as Aristotle defined it and melodrama as we see in those soap opera/TV shows.
So, I said, “OK, this guy has potential. And with a little help from me and Walter, we can do a great film.” Because I’m one of those guys that thinks that the screenplay is the most important thing in the movie. I’ve studied the theory of screenplays. I studied Syd Fields, Robert McKee, all of the manuals, so I know that you must give freedom to those guys to work. But not too much, because I had some bad experiences of books that were adapted in the wrong way. And so, Walter and I, we spent seven years — through Bolsonarismo, Covid, kids and divorce—working together. It was a very good partnership.
DEADLINE: How did the writing work out?
PAIVA: I don’t remember anymore what I wrote and what they wrote. I do remember when they sent me the final draft. I read it and I said, “Oh, there’s too much talking. We don’t need it.” The main priority of this movie was to not be… I call it Wikipediano. We don’t need to explain the story to the people, just show the feeling of that time. I was inspired by Argentinian movies: they are very subtle; they are very metaphoric. So, a lot of the time, I was saying, “It’s too much like Wikipedia,” and they respected that. They cut most of the dialogue in the first part of the movie.
DEADLINE: What other influence did you have?
PAIVA: They asked me about the scene where [the government heavies] go into our house. They said, “Did they make the place a mess?” I said, “No, no, no, no, no. They didn’t touch anything.” They were very respectful, very cool. They were bureaucratic guys, following orders. They were just following orders, without violence, controlling the situation with their guns. We were just a family. Some young kids and a couple in their 40s, in a house that did not present any kind of threat. It was not a bunker or anything like that, with secret doors to hide kidnapped diplomats. I studied a lot about that time. My master thesis was about that time, and later on—not at the time, I was only 11 years old—I realized that there were three [factions] involved: there were the guys who would go into the house, the guys who would ask the questions, and the guys who would do the torture. These guys were just doing their job, and they didn’t know what was going to happen after that.
And so, I wanted to [emphasize] this idea to [the writers] during the shooting, because we could have had a kind of Mel Gibson movie there, with a lot of shooting and violence, but I said, “No, this is very important for the movie.” [Pause.] There’s one scene in the movie that tells you exactly what I am trying to say here, when the guy says to my father, “Let’s go,” and my father asks if he can change his clothes. My sister arrives, and he tells her, “It’s OK, Don’t worry. I know it’s a holiday, but we still have to go to work.” This is exactly what happened. You can criticize that. You can say, “Oh, it’s so soft. It’s impossible. The dictatorship was not like that.” But it happened exactly like that. My father changed his clothes to calm everybody down. And the guy had a gun. My sister didn’t realize that. So, this was very important to respect these details, otherwise, you’re just making a movie about the dictatorship.
DEADLINE: Did you visit the set while film was being shot?
PAIVA: Yes, twice.
DEADLINE: And did it bring back memories?
PAIVA: I was shocked. I was absolutely shocked. My sister remembered the couch, the sofas, the tables, the kind of wood, the color of the walls. I remember the house in detail. They found a house that looked like very much our old house—at the time, the neighborhood was different, because most of the buildings were houses. It was a middle-class neighborhood, upper middle-class. They sent me pictures and I said, “Oh, incredible.” Even the smell was the same. In the kitchen, there were the products that we used to have in the ’60s and ’70s. The bills were the same bills, in the name of my father or my mother.
DEADLINE: Which scenes did you see?
PAIVA: First, I saw a scene with Fernanda as my mother with the kids. The kid playing me, that little kid was exactly like me, very curious. He asked me questions like, “Oh, were you a boy like me?” I said, “Yeah, exactly like you.” We talked about it—his childhood and my childhood were the same. And I also saw a scene in an apartment of my parents’ friends, [in which they conclude that probably Rubens is probably dead].
Walter shot the film chronologically. I don’t know if you knew that. It’s fantastic. If I was a filmmaker, I would do that, because I can’t understand how you can shoot [any other way]. I can’t understand that. It was very brilliant, because the actors were preparing themselves, they were living the drama. And there was a third scene that I saw. It was set in my building where my mother lived, in the building next to me. But I had Covid, and I couldn’t go because Fernanda Montenegro was there, and she’s in her 90s now. So, I just watched from the window. But I think that was enough. I’m not keen on shooting. They start very early. The actors said that it’s time spent doing nothing, and you’re only working for two minutes. I couldn’t stand being there.
DEADLINE: Did you already know Fernanda? What did you think about her playing your mother?
PAIVA: Fernanda? I knew her. I almost worked with her in the ’80s. We were doing a movie. I wrote the screenplay and she was the actress, playing a musician in a rock band, but it didn’t work out. And we were in the same group of friends. I work a lot with the production company Conspiração Filmes. Fernanda and the brother and husband, I work with them a lot. We were in touch all the time. And I love Fernanda. She’s so funny. She was so worried about doing a dramatic character, but I told her that comedy is so much more difficult than drama. For me, the actor or actress that can do comedy can easily do drama. Like Jerry Lewis. Remember Jerry Lewis? I don’t remember now the names of all of the other actors [like that], but I think it’s easier for them to do drama than for others because they know the hard part of acting, which is being funny. So, she was worried about that, but I was not worried. Neither was Walter. We know exactly her talent.
DEADLINE: Did you have any conversations with her about how to play your mother?
PAIVA: We had a lot of conversations by cellphone. You know why? Because my mother did a lot of interviews, and a lot of people knew her. When Walter started writing, my mother was still alive. He met her here in São Paulo once. [On the other hand], my father disappeared in ’71, and there is only one short Super-8 eight video of him. There are no interviews, because, in 1964, he was forbidden to give interviews. And so, we had to help Selton build this character. But Fernanda, she researched the role deeply, watching my mother’s interviews and trying to behave like her, talk like her. The book is about her, it’s not about my father, so the book helped her to find the character, and she was wonderful.
DEADLINE: What help did you give to Selton Mello, the actor who plays your father?
PAIVA: He was very perceptive. For example, he was not happy with the clothes he was given to wear, the shirt and the pants. He said, “Your father never would wear this.” We said, “You’re right. Exactly!” He was a very sophisticated, elegant man. I inherited his clothes when he died, because my mother put all of his clothes in a box, thinking of giving to me when I grew up. I opened it when I was 17 or 18. And, my God, the ties! The clothes, all of them were from England. The shoes. He was almost a dandy. Maybe not a dandy, but he was very elegant. He was born in Santos, which was a society different there than the one in Rio de Janeiro, and Selton caught that. He said, “Your father was a chic guy, he was a carioca guy.” I said, “Yes, you’re right.” This is one of the things that you remember.
DEADLINE: When did you first see the movie, and what were your thoughts?
PAIVA: I first saw it here at home, on my TV. It was not the final cut, but it was almost the final cut, and I was touched. But the first real time was in Venice, [in the big auditorium]. I was involved completely in the movie, I threw myself into it, with the music, and the colors, everything. Of course, when you see a movie with an audience, everything is different. And so, after the movie, I said, “Yes, we have a movie here. We have a good movie, and a very universal movie.” We were very worried about that, since we were talking about the story of a family in the ’70s, in a South American country. But people came up to us afterwards saying that they were afraid [of the right-wing politics that were gaining ground in Europe], and Trump. Then we went to New York, and the same thing happened. And then we received an award from Toronto, an award from China, an award from Biarritz, and then we said, “Oh my God, yes, it really is a universal film.”
DEADLINE: How about in Brazil?
PAIVA: It was a phenomenal success. I can’t go out on the street anymore. I tried to take the subway yesterday, and… I tried! [Laughs.] I got to the station, and I was surrounded by people taking pictures, and an employee of the subway came to me, crying, asking me to sign in her arm, saying that she was going to make a tattoo of my signature. I was like, “Oh my God, I have to stay at home for a while. Take a vacation.” The reaction here is incredible.
DEADLINE: Why do you think that is?
PAIVA: It’s a film about a mother defending her family, it’s about a mother defending her kids and looking for her husband. It’s a story about a woman trying to overcome that tragedy, and I think it’s a very touching movie. Even today, I went to the swimming pool and the guy on the front desk, said, “Oh my God, I saw your movie!” It’s amazing. It’s unbelievable what’s been happening in Brazil. About 3 million people saw it in two or three weeks. [Laughs.] That’s a lot of people going to the movie theater.
The post Marcelo Rubens Paiva On Walter Salles’ Oscar-Nominated Adaptation Of His Book ‘I’m Still Here’: “It Really Is A Universal Film” appeared first on Deadline.
