‘The Secret Agent’ Director Kleber Mendonça Filho Praises Oscar Nominee Wagner Moura: ‘Everything Came Together Because of the Main Actor Who Believes in Generosity’

“The Secret Agent” director Kleber Mendonça Filho praised Wagner Moura at Rotterdam Film Festival, calling him a generous star. 

“Since ‘Neighboring Sounds,’ I’ve believed that a film is a great opportunity to show faces. Once you do, you say a lot about the country you come from. Brazil has great faces – we are a mix of many different things and anyone who tries to prove otherwise has a problem. Just this week we had a governor saying the whole state is white. Which is not true.”

Related Stories

Jia Zhangke Boards Sundance Title ‘Filipinana’ as Executive Producer, Unknown Pleasures Pictures Acquires Greater China Rights (EXCLUSIVE)

He doesn’t really differ between professional and non-professional actors, he stressed.  

“They are all great actors!” 

“‘The Secret Agent’ has 60-plus characters with lines – and an international star. Wagner was very important in making that whole ensemble work. Everything came together because of the main actor who believes in generosity.”

“The Secret Agent” scored four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Moura. He became the first Brazilian to be nominated in that category. 

“My films are exactly the films I wanted to make. Some people ask: ‘Are you going to release a director’s cut?’ All my films are director’s cut. They are challenging, however, all of them. It’s like having someone say: ‘Here’s our supermarket, you can have everything for free but you have two minutes.’ We shot ‘The Secret Agent’ like maniacs.” 

During Rotterdam’s Big Talk, Mendonça Filho discussed his love for cinema with Spanish filmmaker Carla Simón (“Romería”).

“I grew up in the countryside, so we didn’t watch many films. Then I discovered that cartoons weren’t actually real, which was very disappointing. I member how it affected me. It was like finding out Santa doesn’t exist,” recalled Simón.

Mendonça Filho “was always very curious about films,” he said. 

“My mother was a cinephile. I was lucky. She kept telling me about a Hitchcock film she had seen. She couldn’t remember the title, but she said it was about a woman going up the stairs and falling. It was only many years later that I realized it was ‘Vertigo.’ It was one of my earliest memories,” he said. 

“That and a ‘Tom & Jerry’ marathon – officially my first trip to the cinema.”

They both like to focus on families and their complicated dynamics in their work – as well as very young protagonists. 

“I’m fascinated by children and by trying to capture them with a camera. It should feel life-like and natural, which is tricky. Some films have children play in situations that are unnatural, I think,” said Mendonça Filho.

“You don’t choose your family,” said Simón. “You do what you can. Raising a child is so hard. They have this amazing ability to discover the world for the first time. Now that I have a child, too, I see how they accept the mystery of life. Just like an audience that’s open to discovering a universe [in a cinema]. It’s a very similar experience.”

Although “children never give you two takes,” they make adults actors better. 

“They are more in the moment,” she claimed.

“When we made ‘The Secret Agent,’ we looked for kids and some of them were trained, I thought, at the Influencer School of Acting in Front of the Camera. I found it so disturbing to see them already changed like that,” added Mendonça Filho.  

Simón recalled: “Once, during a casting, one girl saw another [leaving a room] and told me: ‘This girl is my enemy.’ Wow. And she was seven or eight years old! So I try not to work with children from agencies.” 

They’re both connected to the places they come from, they agreed.

“It deeply marks who you are: our space, its history and context. Everything intimate is very political,” noted Simón. “I always get this question: ‘Why in Catalan?’ Because it’s my language.”

“I come from a city [Recife] that’s well-established culturally, but the actors still go away to [find] work. They go through a special treatment to lose their accent, which is so 40 years ago,” added Mendonça Filho. Things are slowly changing, however. “I am very much for authentic speaking.”

“In the old days, cinema was so theatrical. Marilyn Monroe could play a British character, which is a crazy example. At the end of the day, I like to mix extreme realism with extreme cinema.”