“Hollywood has been knocking on my door for many years” – 11/01/2025 – Mônica Bergamo

Pernambuco filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho, author of “The Secret Agent”, his fifth feature film, chosen as Brazil’s representative at the Oscars, says he finds it very provincial when people say he is the Tarantino or Fellini of Brazil. “I am the films I make.”

“No one says that this director is England’s Spielberg, that doesn’t exist”, says Kleber Mendonça Filho regarding a recurring analogy between his work and, mainly, that of American director Quentin Tarantino and Italian Federico Fellini. “That’s very provincial. There’s always something about rich countries and poor countries embedded in this comment.”

“My films occupy the same spaces as the films of directors from any country, they are shown in the same cinemas that show the films of Paul Thomas Anderson (director of ‘One Battle After Another’, with Leonardo DiCaprio, still showing and considered one of the favorites for the Oscar for Best Film)”, he says. “I don’t think I’m a reference to another director’s films, I’m myself.”

“There is an association with Tarantino, but I find it very curious because we are filmmakers from the same generation (Tarantino is only five years older than Kleber), we probably watched the same films and had interesting relationships with the same type of cinema, despite me being Brazilian.”

If there is a director who fascinates him and whose films made the young Kleber believe that it would be possible to become a filmmaker, his dream since forever, it is the American John Carpenter, 77 years old, author of horror and science fiction classics from the 1970s and 1980s, such as “Halloween” (1978), “Escape from New York” (1981) and “Starman” (1974). A thousand times less known and popular than Tarantino.

Carpenter’s career has many more failures than successes, his last film is from 2010, “Terrified”. Nowadays, he dedicates himself more to music, which he composes and performs alongside his son, Cody Carpenter. “These are songs for films that don’t exist,” the American said in an interview when asked about the style of his compositions, all instrumental.

“Once I came home from filming ‘The Sound Around’ very suspicious, so I put on the film ‘Someone’s Watching Me!’, by Carpenter, and I had just done a scene exactly like the one in the film”, remembers Kleber. “I mean, actually the scene has nothing to do with mine, but the way of filming does. It’s the arrival of a character who comes walking, walking, walking.”

Kleber was born in Recife on 11/22/1968 – he turns 57 in three weeks. When it came time to take the entrance exam, he chose journalism because there was no film school in his city. “I was bad at math, but good at writing, and journalism seemed like the closest gateway to where I wanted to get. And I wasn’t wrong.”

He says that it was cinema that led him to read newspapers as a child. “I started reading the movie ads, and then I realized that, turning the page, there were other things to read too, like the horoscope”, he recalls. “Little by little I expanded my perception of what the newspaper was.”

Newspapers and magazines, dear readers of the 21st century, were only made of paper until the end of the last century, in which Kleber lived his childhood, adolescence and the beginning of his adult life. And, despite all the difficulties involved in the operation of producing, printing and distributing around the world, they had the advantage of not competing with the internet, which was still in its infancy until almost the end of that millennium.

The images shown in newspaper and magazine reports were much more marked in the memory of readers, who were not bombarded with thousands of images a day, every day, as happens in our times. And Kleber remembers some of them clearly.

“When I was about 8 years old, I remember an edition of Manchete magazine with many black and white photos of the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, former Prime Minister of Italy, in 1978, which was extremely violent. The terrorists killed five security guards with machine guns and I never forgot those photos, very frank, the dead guys covered in blood”, says the filmmaker.”Today I no longer see that type of photojournalism. I think there is a certain code of ethics. The photos of the operation police officer this week in Rio de Janeiro are shocking, but not in that style. It’s a hand, a foot. From a distance, it’s not a body slaughtered in your face. At that time, even the newspaper in Recife had very candid photos like that.”

In the film “The Secret Agent”, which Kleber has been releasing around the world since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May this year, where he won two of the most important awards, Best Director for him and Best Actor for Wagner Moura, he has been thinking a lot, and answering many questions about a very striking passage in the feature film that has to do with this, a newspaper image of a murdered body in the middle of the street.

The film takes place in two periods, but the main action takes place in 1977, during the military dictatorship. In current times, two researchers listen to cassette tapes with recorded conversations of characters from that time and try to unravel the fate of Marcelo, Wagner Moura’s character who arrives in Recife driving a yellow Beetle in the middle of a carnival.

The period reconstruction, as well as the costumes, the characters’ slang, the music and even some cinema effects are so well cared for and realistic that even those who didn’t live in the 1970s will be transported there. Wagner Moura, for example, who was born in 1976, a year before the main plot takes place, reinforced this.

“You know those things that you’re not sure if you experienced or if someone told you and you created a memory?”, asks the actor, when I ask about it. “I remember very well men wearing those short-sleeved shirts open at the chest, without a shirt underneath, their hairy chest showing and a pack of cigarettes in their left pocket.”

I comment to the director that the film seems to have a smell, and he agrees. “The smell of the time was in my mind while I was writing the script. It reminded me a lot of going to the city center when I was a child. It was very noisy and had the smell of the car engines of the time, which were all petrol or diesel. Over the years this has all changed because of engine technology.”

During the filming, at one point Kleber found himself surrounded by cars from the 70s, Beetles, Brasílias, Chevettes, Corceis, Kombis, Mavericks, and they had to drive back and forth on the city streets. “At one point everyone had their engines running, and it was making that noise, blue smoke was coming out and there was that smell, which I think is from the carburetor. I don’t know anything about cars but I don’t think there are any carburetors anymore.”

“And you know when a smell takes you back decades? It’s stored somewhere in your brain, it’s really like a madeleine,” he said, referring to the shell-shaped French cupcake that is part of a classic scene in literature.

In the work “In Search of Lost Time”, by French writer Marcel Proust (1871-1919), the narrator drinks tea accompanied by a madeleine, and at the first bite the flavor takes him back to his childhood, when he ate the cupcake at his aunt’s house. The madeleine became a symbol of involuntary memories awakened by a sound, a taste, a smell, an image.

Kleber’s references come from every possible source, be it films, books, newspapers, magazines, music. “Culture, films, music, are markers of time, right? We hear a song and remember what was happening in our lives when we heard it.”

“The Secret Agent” is specifically set in 1977 because of this. “77 has always seemed like a very interesting year to me, because it’s a year of great films. It’s the year of ‘Three Women’, by Robert Altman, it’s the year of ‘Lúcio Flávio, o Passageiro da Agonia’, by Hector Babenco, it’s the year of ‘Star Wars’, by George Lucas”, he says.

So will the year 2025 be the year of “The Secret Agent”? “I’m very interested at this moment in the film being seen in Brazil, which is my country, for young people in Brazil to see this film, students. I love talking to students. And I’m fully aware that the film has a huge international prestige. But I’m calm about what lies ahead, and I’ll go wherever this film takes me.”

Until the Oscars? “I’m an audiovisual worker and I believe in the film I made. I’m safe and talking calmly here with you, just as I talked with The New York Times, with Le Monde, with Cahiers du Cinéma. I’m curious to see what comes next, but at some point the pressure may increase, right?”

Kleber says that he has already received several proposals to direct films in other countries, even before this nomination for a place at the Oscars, due to the prestige of his previous work, which was also seen around the world. “But you know when you receive a wonderful outfit as a gift, a purple suit, like that, full of sequins? I think it’s cool, but it’s not who I am, so I’m not going to wear it.”

“I prefer to have control over what I can do and write my scripts myself. But, who knows? The thing is to find the right clothes”, says the director.