`I wanted this film to be an optimistic vision of who we are and what we can be but I also wanted to show what's wrong with Brazilian society, the violence and the injustice, and the inhumanity of the way people must live." For Brazilian director Walter Salles, his film, Central Station, is both a personal story of redemption and a metaphor for the present condition of his country, caught between a disillusioned past and a hopeful future.
Central Station tells the story of Dora, a cynical woman in late middle-age who makes a living writing letters for the illiterate in Rio's huge central train station, but who finds herself reluctantly undertaking a journey with Josue, a small boy who has just lost his mother. The film takes us from the harshness of Rio to the stark landscapes of the inland Sertao, as Dora and Josue come to understand each other.
It's the sort of story that could be predictable or maudlin in the wrong hands, but Salles's direction and the two excellent central performances make it a quite wonderful experience. The film has won awards throughout the world, culminating in two Oscar nominations: Best Foreign Film and Best Actress for Fernanda Montenegro, Brazil's most respected actress. Suddenly, Salles finds himself deluged with scripts and job offers from around the world.
"I never expected the film to travel the way it did, and never anticipated the reception it would get, but I'm too drawn to telling personal stories to want to go to Hollywood," he says.
Central Station is a beautifully-made, affecting film, but I wonder whether some of its references to modern Brazilian society and culture have passed me by. Salles doesn't think that's particularly important. "Paraphrasing Tolstoy, the more local you are, the more universal you are. Also, there are themes within the film - the quest for one's origins, the quest for the father, the re-sensitisation of Dora, and the fact that she grabs a second chance - that everyone understands. These are themes that really hound me, also. I wanted to show all of that, but I also wanted to say that it's worth discovering affection and solidarity, and the possibility of a second chance."
He does agree, however, that the film represents a new energy in Brazilian culture in general and film-making in particular. "For the first time in years, we're in a period of renaissance, after the chaos of the early 1990s when the Brazilian cinema came to a complete halt. We're experiencing a wave that we couldn't anticipate.
"There has been so much political and economic adversity, that now it's as if we're being allowed use a language which was prohibited for eight years. The country was in a shambles - we faced inflation of 5,000 per cent a year. But in the face of this adversity, a counter-movement grew up that we see now, a cinema that is very diverse, but has one thing in common - all of the films talk viscerally about Brazil and what it means."
It's hard not to be won over by Salles's charm and his deep commitment to this film, which he believes was marked throughout its production by signs of serendipity. "Some very strange things happened. The story came to me as a whole in just one morning, and a few months later, I heard that the Sundance Institute was running a competition for screenplays to celebrate the centenary of cinema in 1996, but the script had to get there within three days, and in an English translation." Salles decided to send the script in Portuguese, the only entrant out of 2,000 not in English, and it ended up winning the $300,000 production prize.
The same kind of luck applied to the casting of nine-year-old Vinicius de Oliveira. "We did 1,500 tests for the boy but I wasn't satisfied with anyone. I wanted a boy who had the toughness of the streets, but who had not lost his innocence. Three weeks before we were due to start filming, I was in an airport, and a shoeshine boy came up to me, asking for a sandwich. I told him he had to do a screen test for me, and he said that was impossible, because he had never been to the cinema. He insisted that we test all the other shoeshine boys at the airport as well, but he was the one. He was incredibly intuitive and responsive to direction.
"Everyone else thought I was totally insane, to choose someone with no experience, but he brought a certain kind of honesty to it, which Fernanda understood, and she showed great altruism in getting rid of all her technique, and found this incredible honesty, freshness, which I think comes from the kid."
Salles's background is in documentary (the idea for Central Station came from a film he made about the correspondence between a woman prisoner in central Brazil and an elderly Polish artist), and his technique combines meticulous preparation with a willingness to respond to what he finds on the ground.
"In Brazil, the budgets are limited, so this obliges you to shoot in a certain manner. I rehearse a lot, as if it were a stage play, and when we've worked through all the characters and defined the motivations, then we're ready to go. But you become so sure of your characters, and of how those lines work, that once you start shooting, you can find these other miracles, and improvise with so much freedom, because you have a safety net. Fifty per cent of the scenes are partly improvised."
Particularly striking are the scenes in the huge train station, a gigantic concourse through which hundreds of thousands of people flow every day. "For most of it, we just used a hidden camera. You have to learn how not to be intrusive, how to blend in with the people. A Hollywood film crew would just block everything, and lose that spontaneity."
Later in the film, he incorporates some of the remarkable religious ceremonies and pilgrimages typical of the Sertao. "When politics and justice don't work in a country, those who are deprived of the basic conditions of life look to religion as some kind of shelter. That part of Brazil is completely ignored and neglected by the state, and that's where religion is stronger than anywhere else. It also transcends politics, because it has to do with faith."
Salles drove for more than 5,000 miles while making Central Station, an experience which strengthened the sense of solidarity within his young, inexperienced crew. "The desire to make cinema is much more important than having experience. One of the most important things about the film-making process is the element of sharing and collaboration. Your co-workers on a film are also co-authors. The rigid, Hollywood system is a terrible way of doing things, and it doesn't work very well in Brazil, because we're not very good at hierarchy - just look at the way our soccer team plays! But that doesn't exclude the importance of hard work and preparation. Everything that happens behind the camera shows up in some way on the finished film."
Central Station is now showing at selected cinemas
