Obsessed With Film’s Kate Weir recently caught up with Walter Salles, the awarding Brazilian director, to chat about his latest movie LINHA DE PASSE - which goes on release in the UK today. The movie follows the story of four brothers from a poor background who face a battle to follow their dreams.

‘Daniela Thomas works on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays’ says Walter Salles of his co-director of new film Linha De Passe (which is already garnering award nominations), and previously Paris Je T’aime and Foreign Land, when asked for perhaps the umpteenth time that day how easy it is to work with another director.  Clearly there is no clash of ego however, and Salles is full of praise for her stating ‘Daniela has a more radical and edgier perception of what the film should be than I do, she challenges me to progress.  If I hadn’t done Foreign Land with her I probably wouldn’t have done Central Station (his previous film which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Awards) as I did it; Foreign land is much more improvised and that was very precise.  With Linha de Passe we tried to do everything together from the prep to the editing room, which was challenging and destabilizing because you don’t always have the same perception of things.  Although it opens your mind to other ways of filming.’

Clearly influenced by Salles’ documentary film background (his father and brother are also documentary film makers), Thomas’s guerilla approach and his experiences with improvisation on the acclaimed Che Guevara biopic The Motorcycle Diaries; Linha de Passe, tells the bleak yet touching story of four brothers (Dario (Vinicius de Olivieira), Denis (Joao Baldasserini), Dinho (Jose Geraldo Rodrigues) and Reginaldo (Kaique Jesus Santos)) and their pregnant, single mother Clueza (Sandra Corveloni), who are struggling not just to survive in an increasingly unsteady and violent city but to go beyond their destiny.  Linha de Passe splices into the skin of the country’s problems, laying open issues of racism, fatherless families and desperate unemployment with brutal honesty.  Says Salles, ‘There is a statistic saying that 30% of families in Brazil are fatherless, and I believe the problem is historical - the fathers (colonizers) who gave the name to the country were the first ones to flee from it.  We have, since the beginning, had to deal with the idea of being fatherless and I think this has reverberated through time, and the film shows this happening in the next generation, through the story of the character Denis and his son who cries at the sight of him’.

The four brothers each seek out an alternative route to the crime that has come to characterize Brazilian slums in recent Latin American cinema such as City of God.  Religion, football tryouts and dangerous courier work all offer escapism and surrogate father figures. ‘The process of developing Linha de Passe started almost five years ago, when we read stories in the newspapers about young kids trying to reinvent themselves in one way or another’, says Salles whose dedication to realism in his films meant the use of real churchgoers, neighbours, bus drivers and more, alongside breathtaking camera mobility which saw the crew filming on motorcycles which lightweight equipment.  None of the streets were closed for the road scenes and Central Station star Vinicius de Oliveira (the only actor who had previously worked in film) trained for four years for the role.  With 60 percent of the completed film unplanned and improvised, Salles allows for everyday life to seep in to the plot, describing it as ‘like jazz’, ‘the more structured the screenplay, or better the melody, the more you can bifurcate from it, because you can find it again when you want to go back to the core of the narrative.’

To keep the film fresh, Salles wanted to use non-professional actors and went to schools, drama groups and charity educational groups to find three actors to play Dario’s brothers, in a marathon of auditioning which seems similar to Dario’s football tryouts, ‘We tested almost 1,000 people for the film and the drama was that every for single role there were many talented actors.  When we chose the final actors, we had to immerse them in their characters so that the crew would be imperceptible.  What they did bring was a sense of authenticity, when you film their faces it is a virgin map that’s never been explored before, which is something quite thrilling. We decided not to block the scenes so they were free to move back and forth in the frame and follow their intuition, this is why sometimes the focus comes in a little late on the camera.’, says Salles of the trials of ‘opening the windows’ and allowing improvisation to occur freely.

Salles’ work has frequently been compared to politically motivated movements of the 40s and 50s such as Italian Neo-realism and Cinema Novo.  Whilst this is certainly true and Salles’ work contains an exact balance of grit and empathy, Linha de Passe seems to have more in common with British social realist cinema, such as directors Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, not least for its kitchen-sink colour palette, which sets it aside from the exotic sun-drenched cinema apparent in Latin American films of late.  Salles anticipates these comparisons saying with a laugh, ‘Are you going to ask me if I like Ken Loach?’, before expounding his cinephile credentials by listing influences such as John Sayles, Xiang Ke Jia, Michael Winterbottom and Alan Clarke.  I ask Salles if he thinks that filmmakers have a responsibility to highlight socio-economic problems, as he has done in previous films, ‘I think that film should entertain but it’s also about generating a discussion about who we are and where we want to get to. This isn’t occuring nowadays in American cinema but it’s descriptive of a larger trend in cinema you can find in other parts of the world and in some American independent cinema.  The documentary style of Linha De Passe might possibly make the film less accessible, but as a film-maker you have to investigate forms of narration’.  Salles and Thomas plan to return to the same area twice over intervals of ten years to document how the regeneration of the city has affected the area’s youth; an ambitious and lengthy project which rather than being a vanity project shows Salles’ tenacious desire for change and patriotic integrity which shows through the way he often lovingly portrays his country.  Voicing his hopes for the Linha De Passes’s foreseeable follow up, he says, ‘Brazil’s structural problems remain the same and the violence that comes with it is palpable, especially if you live in the centre .  Hopefully 20 years from now, when we go back to the areas where we shot, the transformation will be completely different.’