Biography

Walter Salles was born on April 12, 1956 in Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He is a director and producer, known for Central Station (1998), The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) and I'm Still Here (2024). He has been married to Maria Klabin since 2004. They have one child.

I don't think we can say what the Latin American identity is, but I think we can try to look for it, and look for the reverberations from it.

I'm completely uninterested in what you may call a career in film-making. I'm much more interested in living specific experiences in films.

You have to be careful not to open all the windows and be totally free and unprepared, but you have to try to capture reality as it happens. You see that very much in a refined and yet very simple form in [Abbas] Kiarostami's films, and I'm so impressed by the immediacy and the truth that you find in his films that it just transports you to a completely different level, as if nothing is truly staged.

I come from a country and also a continent whose identity is in the making. We're a very young culture, and I think that things are not yet crystallised. So the films that are made in our latitudes, I think, carry that sense of urgency. It's as if the people that you meet on the street and the stories that they bring can influence you directly.

I think I turned to documentary film-making very early on as a way to know a little bit more about my country and my roots. My father was a diplomat for part of his life and I jumped from country to country and culture to culture. So when I was very young, I longed for Brazil. I really wanted to know the heart of it much better than I did.