Walter Salles "A Conversation with Walter Salles" March 4, 2005

Film director Walter Salles speaks in Berkeley on March 4. (photo: Meg Stalcup)

Walter Salles and the Journey Inward

“Wandering around our ‘America with a capital A’ has changed me more than I thought,” wrote Ernesto “Che” Guevara in the opening paragraphs of The Motorcycle Diaries. Guevara’s Diaries are more a memoir than a diary, having been rewritten and published several years after his 1952 trek across Latin America “The person who is reorganizing and polishing [these notes], me, is no longer me, at least not the me I was.”

Brazilian film director Walter Salles seems to have embarked on a similar journey with his 2004 film adaptation of the Diaries. During a visit to Berkeley in March 2005 to show footage and speak about his work, Salles eloquently described the process by which The Motorcycle Diaries was made. And for a moment in time, a standing-room-only audience was transported and, perhaps, transformed. What follows is an excerpt from Walter Salles’ talk.

The first time I read The Motorcycle Diaries, I was very taken by the fact that it was a very honest and very direct narrative. You read biographies where people are telling stories about themselves, and it’s always a little bit embellished here and there. This wasn’t. It was extremely honest. And what you have is the impression that you were not only traveling with these two young guys, but you were invited to change with them. And they changed because they went beyond the frontiers of what they knew: the frontiers of their social classes, the frontiers of their country. They were transformed not only by physical geography, but also by what I call the human geography: by the faces they encountered on the road.

In doing the film we tried to go through the exact same process. We decided that the only way to do this film was by going through the same motions that these guys went through. It was about meeting the people who were there, living in those places. So, whatever was set in the southern part of Argentina, we shot in the southern part of Argentina; whatever was set in Chuquicamata, we shot in Chuquicamata. The miners that you see in the film are miners. They worked in that place, their fathers worked in that place, their grandfathers worked there. And they are not really performing; they are just reenacting their own lives. I did the journey of the Diaries throughout Latin America three times: twice to select the places where we were going to shoot and to find the non-actors who would be part of the film.

The second scene that you see in the Chuquicamata mine, that was shot in six hours, which is very fast for cinema. When we arrived, there was a strike in the mine. Of course, considering the film we were doing, the last thing we wanted to do was to cross the picket line, so we just waited. Around noon, we were authorized to come in and shoot in the mine. But they only had given us one day, and by that moment I think that they had an idea of what film it was, so I knew they were not going to give us more time. We called everybody, actors, non-actors, crew and said, “Everything here has to be done like a take one. We won’t have the time to do it many times, so let’s completely concentrate.” And the result was a scene shot with a real sense of urgency. Without all of these non-actors that you see in the film I think that we would never have found the sense of authenticity that the story required. If we had done this with actors coming and going to trailers at the end of the day, it would have been completely impossible. The film really crystallized around the idea of taking the journey, of going to the exact places that these guys did.

Mr. Salles spoke about the film-making process, including behind-the-scenes stories from the set of The Motorcycle Diaries. (photo: Meg Stalcup)

When you do a film like this one, which was based on a journey that really changed the lives of these two guys because of the encounters they had, we also had to be completely open to the encounters that we would have. Arriving in Cuzco the first person we bumped into in the streets was this little kid. We were a very small crew when we arrived in Cuzco. There were twelve of us, including the two actors, no production designer, no art director. You don’t need them in Cuzco. The actors were responsible for their own clothes. And the camera was hand held. It was a Super Sixteen camera, hand held, and there was a second Super Sixteen camera which I sometimes operated. So, we had a very small crew. Just one guy with the sound. It was almost like shooting an independent short film. And that granted us a lot of mobility, so the people we met weren’t afraid of getting in contact with us. They didn’t feel the barrier of a film set.

So as we were going out to the streets for the first time, this little kid came and said: “You want me to show you the city?” And I said, “Yeah, of course, but can we bring the camera along?” And he said, “Yeah, bring your camera.” And we had no idea what would come of that. At that point Gael and Rodrigo were so immersed into the characters and the screenplay was so well-structured that it was possible to improvise and not lose the characters, not get lost in the improvisation. It’s a little bit like jazz, the stronger the core, the more you can divert and then find it again. The more solid the structure of a screenplay, the more you can actually bifurcate and then go back. And this was one of these cases where we actually were able to film very rapidly while staying true to the heart of the film, to what had happened 50 years before to these two young guys, and it was just the result of our encounter at that very specific moment.

The second scene, with the four Indian women who, with one exception, spoke Quechua and not Spanish, also reflects that. The stories that they started to tell about their lives could have been the stories of 1952. We realized then that very few things had changed in that continent in 50 years. The structural problems were still the same: problems linked to a bad distribution of wealth, bad distribution of the land. And these people that we were encountering seemed to be coming out of the book we were adapting. And that granted the sense of urgency to what we were doing.

We didn’t know what was going to happen. So, when Gael is given the coca leaves to taste, he’s really tasting them for the first time on camera. You have to trust me. It does change the texture of the film, the fact that we were looking for that, to not only to invite people into the film but to get invited by people. When you film with non-actors, that’s extremely important. You cannot arrive there and just set up a camera and start to film something. At first you should not bring out the camera. You have to observe; you have to wait. And then at some point somebody invites you in and a dialogue begins. In filming you have to establish that kind of two-way rapport.

Another moment that you may remember from the film has to do with the leper colony, where they had approximately 100 patients. Well, five of those patients had been patients of the original San Pablo leper colony in 1952 when they were kids. We met them during one of the location scoutings, and they were the ones who actually taught us what it was like, what were the hierarchical lines in that culture. And thanks to them we learned many things that we would never have known if we had just imposed a point of view. It was about sharing a point of view and not imposing one. So, the film was done in this extremely collective manner, not only collective within our group, but collective in what we learned from the people that we were meeting as we were going along. The spirit of the book was about that.

This is about two guys who, different from what you see in today’s political world, thought that those who lived beyond their frontiers were not their enemies. And we live in a world where we do believe at first that those who live beyond the world that we know are a menace. And these guys, they started from the opposite direction.

If you think about Argentina in 1952 or Brazil in 1952, these were societies that were trying to mirror Europe or the United States but had very little interest in the continent that they belonged to. The upper classes were trying to be part of cultures that had nothing to do with their own. So what these two guys did in this apparently innocent journey on a motorcycle throughout Latin America was as if they picked up a mirror and changed its angle. And what first showed maybe France or England or the United States, started to reflect us, our own continent. And this, I think, was the interest of The Motorcycle Diaries. It was not only about two young guys looking for their place in the world, defining their identities as they moved into the heart of the continent, it was about the identity of the continent itself.

You might think, based on where they were born, that these guys knew everything about the Incas when they were twenty. Well, they did not. What Alberto Granado told me personally was that they knew a lot about the Romans, the Phoenicians, the Greeks, but they had a very little understanding of their own roots, their own culture, where they came from, who they truly were. So this journey on “La Poderosa” is really a journey inbound, into a geography but also into the roots that were pertinent to that continent and to all of us who come from that very distant part of the world.

After receiving a standing ovation, Mr. Salles thanks the crowd, including Dr. Teresa Stojkov (second from left, front row), the Vice Chair of the Center for Latin American Studies, and Professors Nancy Scheper-Hughes (front row far left), , and Beatriz Manz (third from left), who acted as respondents to his talk.

Fernanda Montenegro, the actress who made Central Station into the film it was, said to me once that there is a before and after going to Machu Picchu. This is really the heart of the South American continent, if a continent has a heart. She said she would never forget her first time there. And this was exactly what we tried to capture in Gael’s eyes; this was also the first time he had seen Machu Picchu. The scene was shot very early in the morning because we couldn’t close the site for a full day; so we shot from 5:00 to 6:30 a.m. and then we shot at the end of the day, very rapidly. And whenever we thought it was ready, we asked Gael to just come towards the camera. And this is the moment that you capture there; it’s the moment when he is actually seeing Machu Picchu for the first time.

There’s something in this procedure that I think can be felt. Many times in cinema what can be felt is much more important than what can be said. And what exists in between the lines of Gael’s look sometimes has more resonance than the dialogue itself. You need both. You need very, very good dialogue, which we had with José Rivera’s beautiful screenplay, but you also need the moments of silence in between. You need that space in between, in which the spectator is invited to fill the gaps. And this is one of these moments where, without anticipating what we would feel, we just filmed a few scenes where the actors just look and watch because the magnitude of that is so extraordinary.

When the film was launched in the U.S. we had many conversations like this one. The first was in Los Angeles, and it was a very industry kind of crowd. The guys said, “Where did you put the crane, you know, to shoot that?” And Gael said, “No crane.” “What do you mean no crane?” “Stones, man, stones, only stones… You don’t need the cranes.” We just used what was there and incorporated what the geography was bringing to us. The same thing can be said of the climatic conditions that we encountered in the shoot. If you try to control that, you are screwed. There’s no way to control what is way stronger than you are, so you have to try to work in synchronicity with it. And many, many times during the shoot we encountered climatic conditions that had nothing to do with what we expected to find.

Mr. Salles talks with students after the event.

One example: When we arrived in the southern part of Argentina, in Patagonia, at the beginning of the summer, on Sunday, it started to snow. It was very, very cold and we were completely unprepared. But suddenly the geography became completely different. And there was one moment in the original journey where Alberto had said that he had never been so cold in his life; he wasn’t prepared for that. So, we decided to film. If you try to say, in a Hollywood film, let’s shoot on a Sunday, without the proper attire, without the blah blah blah, people make a list of maybe 150 reasons why you shouldn’t do it, starting with the insurance. And we really shot that. And you have that scene where the bike tries to progress in the middle of the snow; that’s a completely improvisational situation in which we tried to blend with what nature was offering to us.

Mr. Salles at a reception prior to the event, with Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Candace Slater (left), the director of the Townsend Center for the Humanities, and Professor of Education and Geography Harley Shaiken, the Chair of the Center for Latin American Studies. (photo: Meg Stalcup)

Mr. Salles talks with graduate students in Latin American Studies during his visit to Berkeley. (photo: Meg Stalcup)