Alison: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. The Oscars are this Sunday, and we've been speaking with some nominees in anticipation of the award ceremony. In previous weeks, we talked to Blue Moon screenwriter Robert Kaplow, Hamnet production designer Fiona Crombie, Sinners cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw, among others, as part of our series, The Big Picture. Today, the political thriller, The Secret Agent. It tells the story of a researcher who was caught up in the crosshairs of a corrupt Brazil in 1977.

Now, the film has received four nods: one for International Feature Film, Best Picture, Casting, and my guest, Wagner Moura, is nominated for Best Actor in a lead role. In the middle of a military dictatorship, Wagner's character is desperate to reunite with his young son, but he's been forced to leave the boy with his grandparents because he knows he is a wanted man. While in hiding, he finds a kind of sanctuary in a small community of dissidents, overseen by a tiny but mighty matriarch named Doña Sebastiana.

There's a slow escalation of tension and danger that begins almost immediately. What makes the film stand out is its thread of magical surrealism and humor. Wagner and director Kleber Mendonça Filho are known to make political films with a message. The Hollywood Reporter called it one of the best films of the year, while Variety described it as dazzling. The Secret Agent is showing in theaters now. The Oscars will air this Sunday, March 15th, at 7:00 PM on ABC and Hulu. Wagner and Filho joined me to talk about the film shortly after its release. I began by asking the director about filming in his hometown.

Kleber: I actually live there.

Alison: Oh.

Kleber: All of my films so far have been shot in Recife, in the northeast of Brazil, which is far to the northeast in the Atlantic.

Alison: What makes that a good place for your storytelling?

Kleber: I think every city has its own personality, its own secrets, and I happen to come from Recife. It's a coastal city. It has a lot of personality, and that's where I have been shooting my films and telling the stories. I'm happy that after five films, Recife gets quite a lot of recognition because of the films that I have been making there, and it's a fascinating thing.

Alison: What kind of films are you making? The way you said it that way. I think people know, but--

Kleber: I made Aquarius with Sônia Braga in 2016. Neighboring Sounds is my first feature in 2012 and takes place in one particular street. The Secret Agent, of course, takes place in the 1970s. My previous film was a documentary called Pictures of Ghosts about the movie theaters of the past. I think that when you make a film and you put a lot of yourself into the film, it might work in terms of giving people an idea of what the place is, what it feels like, and what it looks like.

Alison: Wagner, people will recognize you from Netflix's Narcos playing Pablo Escobar, but you were able to film in your native language.

Wagner: Yes.

Alison: What does that do for you creatively to be able to speak in Portuguese?

Wagner: It's great. It's very liberating. I hadn't done a film in my own language for 12 years, and that was a lot. That was a long time. There's many reasons for that that I don't want to waste your time with all the explanation.

Alison: Oh, we're on public radio. You can keep going.

[laughter]

Wagner: It's enough to say that it was very liberating to do something in Portuguese.

Alison: Does it help you emote more or dig in more?

Wagner: You know what? I like to say that I did Narcos in Spanish, and I've been working here in English as well, but when I speak Portuguese, it feels like that the words, they come out of my mouth with memory. You know what I mean?

Alison: Yes. My sister speaks Portuguese.

Kleber: She does?

Alison: Yes.

Wagner: Why?

Alison: Because she moved to Martha's Vineyard, and they have a large Brazilian population there, and she wanted to speak to people.

Wagner: Oh, that's great.

Alison: We speak Spanish a little bit in the household, but it's very different.

Wagner: Yes, it's different.

Alison: It is very different.

Wagner: It sounds different, especially. Sometimes the grammar is sort of similar, but it sounds very different.

Alison: Give me an example in the film of something that is a Brazilian moment in the film that you would have to be from Brazil to know what that moment means.

Kleber: There is a sequence I'm particularly proud of and it's during the carnival and Wagner's character has just received some very bad news. As he steps out of the cinema where he was, there was a carnival parade or there was a carnival band and people dancing outside, and it takes him a while to adjust. Once he does, he just goes in and parties along with everybody else. I think in Brazil, we have a very strong carnival culture, and if you have a problem, you'll think about it after carnival. That's a very classic, I think, Brazilian thing.

Alison: I was thinking of the portraits, all the pushes in the portraits, I'm like, "I wish I knew who that was. I wish I knew who this person was."

Wagner: Yes, there was a dictator. Brazil was under a very heavy dictatorship from '64 to '85, and that guy was one of those.

Kleber: They love to hang their pictures in public buildings to remind everybody who was in charge.

Wagner: Who was the boss.

Alison: Who was the boss. Wagner, how would you describe Marcelo?

Wagner: I think he's a man that's sticking with the values that he has when everything around him is saying the opposite of what he believes, which is something that resonates a lot with me. I think that because this film comes from our shared perplexity, Kleber and I, under the government of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil from 2018 to 2022, we were both very vocal against that particular government, and we both suffered the consequences of that.

It's hard to keep yourself believing in the things that you believe and saying the things that you believe when you know that you're going to suffer consequences for that. I think this is who Marcelo is, a man who had the courage to-- and a regular man, not someone that was trying to overthrow the government or do anything like that. He was just trying to be who he was, and that's something that happens all around the world. Sometimes people are persecuted just by the fact that they are who they are, just because of the color of their skin or their religious beliefs or their sexual orientations or things like that.

Alison: If you are comfortable telling me, you said that you had problems during the period. Could you give me an example?

Wagner: Yes. I directed a film back then called Marighella. Marighella, this guy was, he wanted to overthrow the government. He was a real character and a real person-

Kleber: In the late '60s.

Wagner: -in Brazilian history. He was the leader of the armed resistance against the dictatorship in Brazil. He got shot. He died. I directed a film about him because his name was erased from Brazilian history, and I wanted to bring him back to our imaginary. Bolsonaro praised the dictatorship. He thought that the dictatorship was great. He brought back the values of the dictatorship during his government. He loved torturers and killers and all those guys that did despicable things to civilians in Brazil. Therefore, my film was something that he didn't connect with. My film premiered in Berlin in 2019, and I could only release the film in Brazil in 2021 after a big fight. He just made it impossible for us to release the film there.

Alison: Kleber, how would you describe Marcelo as a character, and what were some of his flaws that you had to build into the character?

Kleber: I always thought that Marcelo should be a classic hero. I even thought, and we discussed, there was a Hitchcock film called North by Northwest from 1959. Very different kind of film and very different tone. Cary Grant in that film, he's always reacting to the most absurd situations which he finds himself into. He's very easy to relate to.

This is something that I always saw in Wagner Moura as an actor and as a star. He has the charisma, he's easy to relate to what's happening to him just by looking at him behaving and reacting to situations, which in the beginning are quite mysterious and which the film will gradually reveal. I think he's a good man, he's a scientist, he's an academic, works at a university. Everything he does is right, but when things are turned upside down in a regime where the notion of democracy is kind of lost, he can be in the crosshairs of--

Alison: Off balance in a way.

Kleber: Everything is off balance, but you're still behaving and you're still thinking straight, the way you think things should be done. He's a regular man, and we're talking about a film that takes place 50 years ago. I really wanted some of the roughness of society and the way that people behave would come through as a piece of history.

There was a wonderful discussion with his father-in-law at some point, which puts a big question mark about his behavior as a husband. Of course, in Brazil, it became a huge discussion because people say, "No, he was great, no, he wasn't." That is, I think it's an interesting discussion about behavior. I think he's a great character, and in my mind, he's Wagner's best character. He has done some very iconic characters in his career.

Alison: Wagner, do you think Marcelo has flaws?

Wagner: I think he does, yes. Of course. Otherwise, he wouldn't be such an interesting character. One thing that I like about Kleber's films is that he never spoon-feeds the audience with answers. Like this one, it's a question. Was he faithful to his wife? Maybe. I myself, I don't want to answer that question as well. I think that there's so many things that's great to allow people to have their own takes on it.

Alison: Wagner, from the very beginning, the audience senses there's danger around. Even though you're kind of stoic, there's danger around, but he's going to go home and see his son, his son Fernando. What is driving him to see his son?

Wagner: He's a father. For me, every time I play a character, I tend to think that I'm sort of playing a version of myself, or at least I'm bringing a lot of myself to the characters. Being a father is the most important part of my own life. I could say that being an artist also defines me somehow, but being a father is bigger than anything else.

He is someone who his drive is to protect that kid that he was forced to be away from. I think the kids is the most important thing. That's why his behavior throughout the film, he can't call attention to himself. He cannot react to all the injustices that happened to him in an explosive way. He has to be stoic, like you said, somehow, in order to protect that boy.

Alison: He takes refuge at this home for people who need a place to stay. There was this one moment in the film where they use the term "refugee," and he says, "We don't use that term." What does that term mean at this time to those people?

Kleber: There is this wonderful house, which is actually a small building run by a mother hen of a character. Her name is Sebastiana. She's a wonderful character in the film. She's a star now in Brazil.

Alison: She's like this 80-year-old woman, she's tiny, she sounds like she smokes 14 packs a day.

Wagner: That's what she does, yes. She smokes a lot.

Alison: I'm sorry, I wanted to give people a visual of her. [laughs]

Kleber: Yes, and then she takes care of people who find themselves in difficult situations. In those times, you could be a student and become persecuted. You could be a wife with a child, which is the case of Cláudia, played by Hermila Guedes in the film. She probably had some domestic violence issues because of disagreements in politics. There are a number of characters, and they all find themselves in this place. So many people react to that part of the film.

Because the film is a thriller, some of it can be quite tense, and at one point, there is some violence and brutality. There is also a lot of love in the film, and the love comes from those people being together and finding solace and finding support in each other. It was so amazing to work with those characters and with those actors. Of course, with Sebastiana, she's quite a character as a person, a wonderful non-professional actress who is a success all over the world where the film screens. To see her interact with Wagner in her scenes is always such a pleasure. You can see Wagner reacting in the most natural way.

Wagner: Like myself. The first scene that I shot in the film was the scene where she shows me the house, and you can see me in the film. It's me like in awe with that woman. She's just wonderful.

Alison: What did she teach you, Wagner, about acting or about life?

Wagner: She reinforces what, it's like the cliche of what it is to be an actor, which is to be present, to be there, and she's just that. She just brings herself to the character, and she's just there as herself. She also doesn't get stuck in an idea of what a scene should be. She can go anywhere. Every take was different because she was like, "Oh, this is different now." She kept everything alive, and this is the thing that I like most when I'm working, of what I do actually as an actor is like to be able, after the director says action, to look at the other actor's eyes and go like, "Oh, let's go," and this can go anywhere.

Kleber: I think she also showed me that the notion of comedy in a film is not something that you should provoke. You shouldn't shoot a scene thinking that it will be funny, but you should be open to someone like her to bringing the humor out of the situation. I was always astonished at how funny her scenes are, but she's never trying to be funny. She simply is funny. There are the funny ha-ha scenes, and then there are the other funny scenes, which you just have the pleasure of listening to her, and that is something that's quite rare.

Alison: It's kind of nice. There's this found family, this group of people who are together.

Wagner: A functional family.

Alison: I'm speaking with Wagner Moura and Kleber Mendonça Filho. We're talking about their new film, The Secret Agent. I want to talk about the surreal humor in the film. I don't want to give too much away about the film, but there's this: you're in it, it's tense, and then you discover, all right, we're going to say it's a dismembered leg. The dismembered leg is going around, kicking people in the butt and wherever. It's part of the lore of the leg, this leg that's been in the paper nonstop. After being in such a real film, such a tense film, and then having this moment, what were you thinking?

[laughter]

Wagner: The leg is hairy.

Alison: Hairy leg, yes.

Kleber: At the time, in 1975, the local journalists, they were having a very hard time with censorship, so they couldn't really report on things that the police did or the military police did. They came up with a code. They came up with the hairy leg. Instead of saying that the police last night attacked people in the park, people who happened to be in the park very late at night, they would write, and this came out in the newspaper, and I saw during the research, I found the original articles, they said that the hairy leg attacked people in the park.

This, of course, became a phenomenon. It became an urban legend. That's how urban legends begin. That's how they were born. They were big on the radio, and they were big on people's imaginations. Myself, as a little kid, my mother read one of the hairy leg stories from the newspaper over breakfast to myself and to my brother, and she said, "But this is so odd. This is not in the literary section. This is in the metro section of the newspaper." I think it's a fascinating way of dealing with authoritarians and dealing with censorship.

I say it, you got to tell what happened, but then you can use a crazy character that exists only in the imagination to express truth.

Alison: To wink, wink, nudge, nudge, you know what this is about. The film Jaws is in this movie a lot. It's 1977. Was it just that it was popular at the time? Is it a metaphor for something lurking beneath the water that could drag you down?

Kleber: That's a good question. I think cinema, music, books, they are part of our lives. When I think of 1987, I remember Prince's Sign 'o' the Times, which is an album that I love. 1975 was a very strong year because Jaws came out and it became a worldwide phenomenon, and also in Brazil and also in Recife. Recife happens to be a coastal city which has its own shark problem. I think adding the two elements, I came up with the very loving, I think, mentions of Jaws in the film.

The little boy, Wagner's son in the film, he's pretty much myself. I only got to see Jaws when I was 14 years old. As a kid, I used to draw the artwork for the film, which, of course, is iconic. I think films, movies are part of time. They're like time stamps for our lives, and I think that explains why Jaws is part of the heart of this film.

Alison: Again, I don't want to give too much away, but we find out what happens to Marcelo in a very quiet way. Why was that important to you, Wagner?

Wagner: I think the way we discover what happens to him is in tune with what the entire film is about. Like I said before, Kleber does not spoon-feed the audience with answers. We don't know the three things that Dona Sebastiana said that she did in Italy. We don't know how Armando's wife died. We don't know the past of Udo Kier's character that well.

It's interesting to see that the way we discover what happens to "Marcelo" Armando is not obvious as well. There's another thing. This is a film about memory also, about the lack of memory, and the way we discovered what happened to him. For me, it's a way that Kleber found to talk about infamy as well, because they killed-- I don't want to give too much spoilers here about the film, but it's as if they did two bad things to him at the same time.

Alison: I wanted to ask before we wrap, this was a film you did with Udo Kier, who recently passed away. What would you want people to know about him?

Kleber: WI was lucky, very lucky, because I got to shoot two films with Udo. The first one was Bacurau in 2019. I loved him so much as a person, as an artist, as an actor, that he was back for The Secret Agent, where he has a short but very strong sequence. He came last year to stay with us. He stayed eight days. We were together at the Aero in Santa Monica in late September, where he saw the film for the first time. He was great. We had a great time.

Udo made over 200 films, and he had great taste. He had a great sense of humor. He was the most loving, crazy German I've ever met in my life. I was saddened to hear of his passing, but in a way, I remember him with great fondness, and he was someone who loved life very much, and I love him. Thank you very much for bringing his name in our conversation.

Alison: We got a nice text here that says, "Thank you for spotlighting Brazilian cinema. Going to see Secret Agent tonight at the Angelica. Can't wait."

Kleber: We're going to be there. I'd just like to say something. We just heard that the film got Best International Film at the New York Film Critics Circle and Best Actor for Wagner Moura.

[applause]

Kleber: [laughs]

Alison: We love it.

Kleber: It's a great day.

Alison: That was my conversation with actor Wagner Moura and director Kleber Mendonça Filho about their Oscar-nominated film, The Secret Agent. It is showing in theaters now.