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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. If you tuned into the Golden Globes on Sunday, you saw my next guest take home a statue. Fernanda Torres won for her role in the Brazilian film I'm Still Here as fellow nominees like Nicole Kidman and Kate Winslet applauded. If you had a chance to see the film, you know how well deserved that win is. I'm Still Here is based on the true tragic story of the Paiva family. It's 1970s Brazil, and they live in a beautiful house right on the beach. Eunice and her husband Rubens are in love and they are devoted parents to five kids, but still, this is Brazil, and the country is in the grips of a military dictatorship.

One morning, mysterious men turn up at the house and demand that Rubens come for a deposition. The next night, they come for Eunice and her daughter Eliana, and though Eunice and her daughter are finally returned home, her husband remains missing. The film focuses on Eunice's fight to find out what has happened to her husband and her attempts to protect her family through terrifying unknowns. I'm Still Here is directed by Walter Salles, who grew up with the Paiva family. It's his first feature film since 2012. Now, some of you may have seen the film at Lincoln Center Festival or at MoMA, but it will be in theaters starting January 17th. I'm joined now by director Walter Salles. Hi, Walter.

Walter Salles: Hi, Alison. I'm very happy to be here.

Alison Stewart: So happy to have you all as well. And newly minted Golden Globe winner Fernanda Torres. Nice to meet you, Ferranda.

Fernanda Torres: Hi, Alison. Thank you for having us.

Alison Stewart: So, Walter, you were friends with the Paiva children growing up. How did you decide you wanted to tell their story?

Walter Salles: Yes, you know, I was not only friends with them, but enamored by that family at the heart of the film. There was so much life in that house they rented. Imagine five kids with their friends, father and mother with their friends as well, so it was a house full of life. There was a lot of political discussions roaming around that place, music, Brazilian music that was censored at the time that was playing constantly. And it's that joy, that possibility to resist with joy that was robbed when the father was taken for the position.

This story, I always stayed with it inside. Then in 2015, the second youngest kid in the family wrote an extraordinary book called I'm Still Here on the memory of his family. At the same time, he offered the possibility to see a reflection of the country during the decades of the military dictatorship and this is when the film became a reality.

Alison Stewart: First of all, though, the music in the film is mwah. It's the party scenes. Fernanda, when did you first become aware of the Paiva family?

Fernanda Torres: I think in the first book that Marcelo wrote when he had an accident when he was like 20 years old, and he lost the movements from neck down, and he wrote this amazing book about his recovery. We all knew that he had lost his father during the dictatorship, but that was just the headline. We never knew. So the first contact I had with Eunice Paiva was through the first book of Marcelo, and for me, she was the widow of Rubens and the mother of Marcelo. I think I just discovered Eunice in this second book about their lives and then through the film. That's when I think I had like a deep grip of what an amazing woman she is.

Alison Stewart: I was going to say, you said the wife, the mother of, but there was a lot more to her than just that. How would you describe her?

Fernanda Torres: It's someone who was raised to be the perfect housewife from the '50s. Not a silly one, an intellectual one, but the great woman behind a great man. What is interesting, her character is that she suffers a huge tragedy. I mean, her husband is killed, tortured, and she couldn't even bury the body. They disappear with the body with five children and a woman that, when she was facing tragedy, was when she started to found herself as the true Eunice. So is someone that said goodbye to utopia and reinvented herself in a very tough moment. This, I think it's a good tale to everyone nowadays, to face reality with a smile and be brave. Then she became a lawyer and a great defender of the human rights. It's a hell of a woman.

Alison Stewart: Walter, what kind of conversations did you have with the Paiva family? What concerns did they have? What concerns did you have?

Walter Salles: Yeah, it's a good question, because how do you make justice to your own memories from what you remember, but also to all the layers of the story that Marcelo had offered us in his book? I think that the way to do this was to stay very close to Marcelo throughout the whole process and also to interview every single person who was connected to this story in a way or another, his four sisters and the friends of the family. This is what took us seven years to really reach a screenplay that somehow embraced the story in all its facets. It took a while. I never took as long to do a film to tell you the truth, but here, there was so much to make justice to.

Alison Stewart: For a film to take seven years, wow. Well, first, how did you keep going?

Walter Salles: Good question. In fact, it took seven years also because we suffered a double pandemic in Brazil. We went through the COVID pandemic without vaccines and then the second thing is that we went through an extreme right wing government during that time, so it would have been impossible to film the film, to shoot the film at that point, because we would never had the authorization to film in the streets of Brazil at that point.

This also stretched the length of the prep, but when I see it today, I think that we all gained a certain maturity and the possibility to actually really polish not only the screenplay, but every single character and add meaning to the story in all its layers.

Alison Stewart: I'm speaking with Fernanda Torres and director Walter Salles about the new film I'm Still Here. So much takes place in this house, this beautiful house. Fernanda, what does the house mean to Eunice?

Fernanda Torres: Not only to Eunice. You see, that house was just like the house of my youth. I-- Ooh, sorry. I could be one of those children, you see. My mother looked a lot like Eunice, so that was our youth. That was Rio de Janeiro at its best, even in a very tough moment. Also, our set designer, he created a house that didn't look like a set. I always say that the kitchen smelled like garlic. He kept extinguishing cigarettes in the ashtrays so the house smelled black house and that gave us a sense, it's almost documentary, and Walter is a great documentarist.

It's the first time, I think in my acting career that the thing was to do not act, but just to be. And Eunice, in her restrain the fact that I had to restrain emotions, that created this kind of a very realistic way of acting, and that's Walter Salles' touch.

Alison Stewart: Walter, you begin the movie, the family's on the beach, they're having a great day. It's disrupted when the older daughter is stopped. She's frisked by police. What do those opening scenes tell us about what life was like in Brazil during this period?

Walter Salles: I've always said that we could not be completely innocent at that time, even when we were 13, because the first image is of this woman in the water, and yet in the same frame, there's a military helicopter flying too low. You could be in a car, but be interrupted, be stopped by a roadblock and where different forms of violence could enter into play.

This constant, I would say, interaction between the light of the tropics but the danger of the regime at that point is one that really defines the whole first part of the film. There was always something that could be lost. I think we were aware of it, yet we tried to survive that moment by living, by making life, by embracing life as a form of resistance. This was it. But then there's a moment where it's not possible anymore in that house that you just referred to, the house that is truly a character of the film.

Alison Stewart: I wondered about the house, Walter, the choreography of the kid, the disappearance, the kidnapping, because the kids are coming in and out, it's happening, Eunice has got a smile on her face during it. What was that choreography like? And you can jump in too, Fernanda.

Walter Salles: The very beginning of the film really corresponds to the memory I have of the house where there was a sense of immediacy almost, a tactile quality. The people intermingled, so the camera is very mobile at the very beginning. It's very fluid, and very organic, and it just drifts from group to group of people. As music is written, the whole thing, there's a vitality that exists in that house that is almost like the reverse angle of the dictatorship itself.

That movement, that possibility of being in the world is what is interrupted when the military police enters in that house. From that moment on, what you have is subtraction, subtraction of light because the windows are shut, subtraction of movement because you can't move anymore from one place to another, you just stand. Then there's also a factor, there's language itself, because in a dictatorship, you cannot speak freely.

Alison Stewart: And the kids, the kids don't know it's happening, so they're just coming and going. They're very free to move with everyone else is frozen.

Walter Salles: Yes, yes. Then at a certain point, when they realize, they also have to deal with it. Then the narrative becomes much more subjective because they have to look at each other's eyes to understand what's going on. That movement that defines the beginning of the film is halted and the camera also stands still. It's almost like a body that ceases to move. That was very interesting to actually articulate a film. Think about a film in which the grammar of the initial 30 minutes would be completely different from the grammar, from the moment the father's taken on.

Alison Stewart: Fernanda--

Fernanda Torres: But you have mentioned the smile and this is a key thing in the film. The smile was a political statement of Eunice. From the beginning, we wanted to be faithful to her. She's a woman that never wanted to pose as a victim, because she thought that by posing as a victim, the dictatorship would have win. And it's a very contradiction character because she never told the children what happened to the father. In a way, I think it was unbearable to tell them what happened, and on the other hand, I think she wanted to save the innocence or the believing life in their children.

What she does, and this is real, it's in the film, it's when they were posing to a very famous newspaper or a magazine, they asked them to look sad and she says, "No way, you're going to smile." When I was researching on her interview, she always had that smile. The smile and the joy as a weapon, I think she used it as a weapon. So the film tells a very sad story, but at the same time you leave the cinema with joy, with a sense of hope, because this family has survive, so it's a very interesting woman. I think we could have done a melodrama out of this movie, you see, and we fought a lot not to do it.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting, because she does go through a bit of an arc at the beginning, because at first she's very polite to the men who comes to the house. "Would you like to have lunch with?" Almost as like if I'm overly polite, maybe they'll go away somehow.

Fernanda Torres: I don't know if it's that. I think by saying, "Do you want to eat something?" she's saying, "I'm in charge in this-

Alison Stewart: Oh, interesting.

Fernanda Torres: -house and you are invited here. You are not invaded. I'm allowing you to stay and I will treat you like people," so she's very intelligent.

Alison Stewart: When is she scared? When is she scared in the film?

Fernanda Torres: Oh, I think when she's taken to the prison with a 15-year-old girl and she understands. She listened to the people being tortured in that prison and she asks for a lawyer and they say it's not necessary. She almost, I think loses the faith in any form of legal existence. That's when she's afraid, I think. Don't you think, Walter?

Walter Salles: Yes. No, I, I agree. It's then when she realized that the Kafkian reality she is in and that is a defining moment in her life. When she comes back from the prison and she looks at herself in the mirror for a long time, this is when she really tries to make sense of everything that she went through. This is when she decides that she's going to start to resist that and offer a form of reinvention that could embrace the whole family. It just starts in that moment immediately after the prison.

Alison Stewart: I want to ask you about some filmmaking choices. You use Super 8 in the film a lot.

Walter Salles: We made so much research about the period, and there were so many Super 8 films that came, and they revealed two things. First, the human geography of the time, faces, bodies that were much leaner than they are now. Then behind those faces and those bodies, there was in fact the regime. You could see the police cars, you could see-- so they were very revealing of the intimacy of the families at that time, but they were revealing of a political and social circumstances that those guys lived in.

This is when we immediately said, "Okay, let's embrace this as a form of relaying something fresh and very descriptive of that era." And actually, the actors shot most of those Super 8 images. There's a certain beauty of the imperfection of those images because it's in the cracks, it's in the imperfection that somehow life erupts in cinema.

Alison Stewart: The other question, you had five kids, five individual children and a dog. How did you want to give them each to have their own moment, and was it difficult with that many young actors?

Walter Salles: First, the screenplay does a really wonderful job in defining each one of those kids rapidly. They have the one scene that truly takes care of understanding who they are, but we also did two other things. We shot in chronological order, which helps tremendously with children and we also rehearsed what would be the prequel of the-- we created scenes that could have happened before the beginning of the film with the family. We occupied that house. We stayed in that house for weeks and we somehow created a texture in that family that truly existed before we started to shoot.

That, I think is a result of what I had done in Central Station, a film I shot with Fernanda's mother exactly 25 years ago in which I had on one hand a young kid who had never acted, and the most extraordinary actress in Brazilian cinema, Fernanda's mother. To blend that, we also make-- did spend time together and created texture between the characters, and we did the exact same thing here.

Alison Stewart: Fernanda, your mother makes--

Fernanda Torres: I remember in the beginning I had difficulty even by remembering the names of the kids. It was too many kids, too many nicknames. By the end of the movie, they were like my children. I had no doubts of who is who in this family, and with each one of them, the two kids brought us like freedom. They were so spontaneous, they were just playing. And the other actresses, they reminded me so much. I saw myself in them. We're doing a film with Walter Salles, an amazing script, an amazing story for the first time, and so I created really a very maternal feeling to each one of them.

Alison Stewart: I don't want to give anything away, but your mother is in the film as well. What was it like to have her be a part of the film?

Fernanda Torres: Me and my mother, we are like the Fernandas. We're like an entity in Brazil. We exist separately, but there is also the Fernandas entity, and we are in the movie. Her presence, I think, together with the fact that Eunice Paiva raised Marcelo Rubens Paiva, that one day would write her story, it means-- that's what I find it so meaningful that art has endured in me and my mother, in Marcelo and Eunice. That besides the dictatorship, the right, right, right wing governments, the economical crisis, we managed to exist and to produce a wonderful director like Walter Salles, who once in a while saves Brazilian cinema.

Alison Stewart: The name of the film is I'm still Here. It will be in theaters January 17th. I've been speaking with actor, Fernanda Torres and director, Walter Salles. Thank you so much for making this film. We really appreciate it. It's a great film.

Walter Salles: Thanks, you guys.

Fernanda Torres: Thank you very much for having--