Quotes

[press conference for Aquarius (2016) at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival] It's a film about resistance, a little bit about survival, and maybe above all it's about the energy that you get from trying to survive. Technically speaking, you're spending energy and getting exhausted trying to survive but I actually believe it gives you more energy to go on and fight and defend yourself and, in my mind, that's what's in the script and something that Sônia [Sonia Braga] responded to extremely well. She understood it right away. She actually finds it interesting, the whole situation, because she gets a kind of adrenaline or a kind of a tension that makes her tick, and I think she got that very well and she did it very well in terms of trying to defend herself and at the same time reacting.

[Cannes press conference for Aquarius (2016)] I thought that the viewer should be able to draw the apartment once he or she leaves the screening. It's almost like a game - I'm going to give you so much information on this place that you should be able to at least on a paper napkin draw Clara's place from what you remember from seeing the film. We had to turn a real location - that's a real apartment - into a film set, which is extremely complicated because the walls don't move, we have to put practicals outside the windows and it becomes a little bit of a logistic nightmare. But we rented the place from this wonderful woman who lives at the building and she let us use her place for something like twelve weeks and we completely re-did the apartment to match Clara's sensibilities, so the apartment is completely redone from scratch, down to the smallest details - we brought the whole record collection! - and I'm very happy that over the last 2 days we've been getting a lot of reactions from people saying how great the apartment is and an American journalist said it felt very much like the place that his father used to have back in Connecticut and it's wonderful to have this lived-in feel that seems to work for the film and for Sônia to do her thing.

[press conference for Bacurau (2019) at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival] We actually started developing or thinking about the film back in 2009 and it shouldn't sound dramatic at all, but I went on to do other things. I did Neighboring Sounds (2012) and then I wrote Aquarius (2016) and shot it and edited it and we had other things that we did. And sometimes we would get together to keep developing Bacurau, me and Juliano [Juliano Dornelles]. We wrote the film very obsessively together for all these years. After Aquarius we really concentrated on working on the film and that's when we finally came up with the final version of the script - the version of the script we felt comfortable to shoot. But it's been a very long process and a very enjoyable process as well.

[Cannes press conference for Bacurau (2019)] I don't think the film is an accurate scientific projection of where things will go but we do work with certain feelings, a certain atmosphere of society, and it's not restricted to Brazil. If you look at the world today, it does feel like the kind of thing I would see in a film in the 80s or the 70s or some novel from the 60s - science fiction. There are elements which have come into the film during the writing process which have surprised us in terms of development - it was almost like reality was catching up with the script and then when that happened we kind of went up to 11 and went a little over the top, which we enjoy. But yeah, it's tough. Brazil right now does feel like dystopia in many, many everyday aspects.

[press conference for The Secret Agent (2025) at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival] The film began with a series of very personal notes which I jotted down in the course of several years, which I wanted to develop. I thought I wanted to do a historic film, a period film, which entailed recreating a whole time - it was a huge technical challenge - not just based on archival footage, but on very personal memories. 1977 was the first year I recall very clearly because I was nine years-old at the time, and for a whole series of family reasons it was a very important year for me, '77 and '78. And the more I wrote, the more I managed to plunge into this universe and it was like opening up a portal - I was totally immersed in Brazil's past, in Recife, in Pernambuco, and that's how the film came into being.

[Cannes press conference for The Secret Agent (2025)] What motivated me most when I decided to make this film was that Brazil, my country, has a problem of amnesia, loss of memory, compounded by the amnesty introduced in 1979 and proposed by the government itself. Since 1964, the government had committed endless acts of violence against the civilian population. It actually caused psychological trauma amongst the population. It became normal to commit all sorts of violent crimes and then you could just wipe the slate clean with a sponge and forge ahead and look towards the future. It's not always nice to talk about certain things but I felt we had to speak these times. That's what made me want to make the film. Of course, there's a whole universe, a whole set of other ideas behind the film but this idea of memory and retaining memories is a very powerful theme.