‘I was advised not to say certain things’: Secret Agent filmmakers on Oscars, dictators and death threats | film

ShTypically a non-English language political period drama, lasting nearly three hours and punctuating its authentic depiction of military dictatorship with gags and bloody shootouts, Secret Agent turns out to be an awards magnet. Best Picture and Best Actor, for its star Wagner Moura (who recently won a Golden Globe), are two of the four categories he will compete in at next month’s Academy Awards.

The nominations had not yet been announced when I met Maura in a London hotel room, but it was unlikely to have turned the 49-year-old veteran’s head. He has years of experience: he’s headlined the Elite Squad thrillers, played Pablo Escobar in the hit series Narcos, and joined Parker Posey as husband-and-wife assassins in the TV version of Mr & Mrs Smith. He exudes a relaxed, easy-going charisma, as well as the same air of decency and modesty as Armando, his Secret Agent character. A widowed academic hides out in a refugee safe house in Recife at the height of the dictatorship in 1977, Armando plans to flee Brazil with a false passport. To do this, he will need to outsmart the assassins hired to kill him by a vengeful industrialist.

If Moura is cool as ice, that’s doubly so for the film’s enthusiastic 57-year-old director, Kleber Mendonça Filho. Sitting next to his leading man today, he has the intelligent look and thin, amused lips of Peter Sellers. “Yes!” When I draw the comparison, Mora agrees. “I’ve heard that before,” Filho answers with a nod and a grumble, just as unimpressed as Sellers.

Both men have already collected quite a few trophies between them, starting with a Best Actor/Director award at Cannes last year. The secret agent’s enormous success must seem to them as much vindication as triumph. Although this event is in some ways historic, it is also a response to a turbulent and horrific decade in Brazilian politics, and the personal bruises it has inflicted: professional bans, smear campaigns, even death threats.

Their friendship goes back two decades, to the days when Filho was a film critic. He and Moura famously met at Cannes in 2005, and continued chatting once the interview was over. “My wife took a picture of it,” Mora says.

They were linked by their common origins in Brazil’s beleaguered northeast, a region mocked and belittled by the southeast. “There’s still a lot of prejudice towards us. As an actor, if you go to work in Rio or São Paulo with that accent, you’re relegated to the role of the funnyman or the doorman. My attitude, and Kleber’s as well, is: ‘Fuck this. Fuck you.” There is a cost to speaking out, especially when it comes to politics. “The secret agent is the result of something we have in common…” He weighs his words. “I don’t want to say the price we paid, but it was not easy to speak out loud about Bolsonaro.”

The actor and director lost touch. But years later, when Filho’s short films took the world by storm, followed by Neighboring Sounds, his unnerving 2012 feature film about class tensions in a residential suburb of Recife, Moura became alarmed. “The Neighborhood Voices had a sense of danger. There might just be a scene of two people talking, but you feel like something terrible is about to happen, like the ceiling might fall in. I was like, ‘Hey, I know this guy!’” The friendship came back.

In subsequent years, things became volatile for both men, as well as for their country. Filho was mocked at home after he and the crew of his second film, Aquarius, waved placards at the film’s 2016 Cannes premiere to protest the impeachment of Brazil’s then president, Dilma Rousseff. That protest “was one of the proudest moments of my life,” Filho says now. The director’s masterpiece, Aquarius, is about an indomitable elderly writer (Sonia Braga) who stands up to greedy real estate developers; No wonder it was at the time a metaphor for the incoherent crisis. The film was duly banned from Brazil’s official participation in the Academy Awards.

Around the same time, Moura wrote a newspaper article warning of an impending coup and targeting judge Sergio Moro, who the UN Human Rights Commission later confirmed was biased in his rulings. “I was attacked because of this article,” Mora says seriously. “I received death threats. It was scandalous.”

In 2019, Moura made his directorial debut with Marighella, a film about Brazilian revolutionary Carlos Marighella, who was considered by the CIA to be the new Che Guevara before the military dictatorship killed him. After premiering in Berlin 50 years after Marighella’s assassination, the film was excluded by Bolsonaro’s government; It remained unreleased for more than two years. “It was sabotaged ironically and unceremoniously,” Filho says. “And Wagner will never have an explanation. And that’s where Kafka comes in.” Confusion flashed across Maura’s face: “You can’t fight it because you don’t know exactly what happened.”

From this friendship and mutual experience of persecution emerged the secret agent. “In the film, there is an honest man who does not follow the script,” the director explains. I had previously described the campaign against Armando as “low-key”, at least until the killers intervene, but Filho disputes that. “It might not lead to a car chase. Or someone turning the ignition and a car blowing up. But persecution is incredibly destructive. Some people have fun making you lose sleep by planting things in newspapers.”

He speaks from experience. “Stories, for example, about using public funding for a film I made. Even though funding for the arts is in the Brazilian constitution.” “Kleber and I are under attack in Brazil right now,” Moura explains. “There are stories that we have received millions of dollars from the Brazilian government to support them.”

The facts are beside the point. The intent is to promote corruption. “If you speak your mind at a time when democracy is on fire, attacks can be widespread, brutal and cruel,” Filho says. “They’re not low-key at all. I could have shown Wagner’s character being taken to the police station and given electric shocks to his genitals all night long.” Moura raises his finger: “I did this movie!” He laughs. “But the dictatorship manifested itself in many ways,” Filho continues.

Some of them are comically grotesque. In the 1970s, an urban legend spread in Recife about a disembodied leg attacking people at night. As a scapegoat for violence by the military police, it began to be mentioned in the press as a kind of counterculture law. If you are aware, it will be clear when reading these stories in the morning papers that the “hairy leg” surreptitiously refers to the violence of the regime. Introduced in jerky stop motion in The Secret Agent, the hairy leg was a runaway hit — or jump — away. Nine months after Cannes, this is still being talked about. This leg has legs.

Did he expect this to become a kind of shorthand or symbol for his film, like the rabbit in Fatal Engagement or the seminal hair gel in There’s Something About Mary? “It’s one “One of the things people mention,” he admits, then points out that attention has also been paid to the opening sequence, in which Armando drives his yellow VW Beetle to a dusty gas station only to find a body, several days old, lying in the front yard. “Wagner’s stunning performance has also been praised by many,” he reminds me, exercising his particular skill of berating you without doing so outright; Rather, it invites you to feel disappointed in yourself. He apologized to Moura for suggesting that his work had overshadowed one party, but the actor laughed, saying: “What the hell?” That leg is crazy. He’s crazy and he is Hairy. So hairy.” He’s not wrong.

By mixing political commentary and period detail with these B-movie-style touches, Filho works in the spirit of John Sayles, the American independent pioneer who was equally adept at shock exploitation (he wrote Piranha, Alligator, and Howl) and liberal drama (he directed Matewan, City of Hope, and Lone Star). Sayles, Filho’s friend, is thanked at the end of Secret Agent, but the difference is that Filho does not specify his motives. They are combined in his films – especially the new picture and his apocalyptic modern Western Bacurau (co-directed by Giuliano Dornelles). His 10 best films of all time may include masterpieces by Chantal Akerman and Werner Herzog, but they also make room for Mad Max 2, a hackneyed fly in the artistic ointment.

A passion for cinema and politics are vital to the secret agent, but nothing is more integral to his character than an alertness to history, and a determination to commemorate struggle and injustice. At one point in the film, there is a quick glimpse of modern-day researchers transcribing recordings of Armando’s voice. “This gives the story a different point of view, and increases its power,” Filho explains. “It’s the whole idea of ​​making a time-travel film without a time machine. You go in a time machine and the sparks go off and you go back to, say, 1927. But we’re also time-traveling now as human beings. The sounds we record, the images we take – all of this is time-travel for people who find it in the future. My mother was a historian and I think she instilled that feeling in me.”

In an age when government lies and misinformation are too routine to be shocking, the secret agent couldn’t be more important. “The way these authoritarians discredit journalists, people who get information from social media, scares me to the core,” Moura says. So, it is more important than ever that they are not muzzled. “I don’t think you can be a serious artist and go through life without revealing your opinions about things,” Filho says. “If you stay silent, you won’t have my respect.”

Aren’t actors discouraged from speaking out? “They are more sympathetic to those who are not sympathetic to their friend,” Moura says. “It’s not easy. I don’t like actors being pressured to say bad things. Not everyone is ready. I’ve been advised not to say certain things.” Would he be discouraged from speaking out today against the actions of the current US president, for example? “Yes. Right now, I’m feeling very frustrated.” flash. “But I’ll keep saying that, won’t I?”