In crafting the story of “I’m Still Here,” which chronicles the forced disappearance of a husband and father during the military dictatorship in Brazil, filmmaker Walter Salles didn’t have to imagine much: Growing up in Rio de Janeiro, Salles was close with the man’s family. “I had a very personal link to the story,” he told TheWrap Editor-in-Chief Sharon Waxman. “When I was 13 years old, I [knew] this family at the heart of the film.”
That family is the Paivas. In 1971, the regime that was in power from 1964 to 1985 arrested patriarch Rubens Pavia in his home on suspicion of political dissidence. His loved ones never saw him again. In the film, which is Brazil’s Oscar entry for international feature, Fernanda Torres plays Rubens’ wife, Eunice Pavia, a formidable woman who became a human rights lawyer and devoted her life to uncovering what happened to her husband (played by Selton Mello). She did not receive his death certificate until 1996; only in 2014 did a government report confirm that Rubens was one of hundreds of citizens who had been murdered by the regime.
The screenplay, by Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega, is based on the 2015 memoir (“Ainda Estou Aqui”) written by Rubens and Eunice’s son, Marcelo Rubens Paiva. He was one of five children growing up in the Paiva house in Rio de Janeiro — a warm, welcoming bastion of culture and intellectual curiosity in Ipanema that Salles remembers vividly.
“I became very good friends with the middle sister of the five kids, and I was enamored by the family,” he said during a discussion following a showing of “I’m Still Here” that was part of TheWrap Screening Series at the Ojai Playhouse on Friday. “I was enamored by their passion for life, by the the fact that in this house, in the middle of a dictatorship, there was freedom of thought. You could discuss politics. You could discuss culture. Music was playing all the time. … It was the reverse angle of what a military dictatorship stands for, which is censorship, the lack of possibility to express yourself.”
Though Torres — who just a few days before had won a Golden Globe for her performance — did not know the Paivas personally, the movie resonated deeply with her. The daughter of renowned actress Fernanda Montenegro and actor-producer-director Fernando Torres, she too grew up in an artistic environment in Rio de Janeiro during the dictatorship. “My house was just like this,” she said, adding that censors always loomed over her parents’ plays, cutting content or shutting them down completely. “And I remember we were always afraid of the police. … Everybody was being taken. [“I’m Still Here” producer] Daniela Thomas, who works with us, her father is a very famous cartoonist. He was taken just like Rubens, for three months. Everybody was being taken. Everybody was terrified.”
The discussion took place in Ojai as wildfires continued to rage through Los Angeles. Torres said she and Salles had discussed whether it was appropriate to talk about their film when a tragedy was unfolding around them. “And he told me, ‘No, perhaps this movie, it’s a good message because this is a woman that reinvents herself and becomes herself after a tragedy,’” she said. “And her choices of not telling her children what happened to their [father] … I think by doing this, she kept the innocence of those children. Today, I saw some children on television grabbing some new toys, talking about the toys they lost. So I think this whole process of reconstructing… This woman has this power of facing a tragedy, reinventing herself, smiling. So it’s a hell of a good character for now, I think.”
Torres and Salles also spoke about how “I’m Still Here” relates to the Brazil of today. After the film’s release in Brazil in November, a police report revealed a plot by former president Jair Bolsonaro to kill the current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in a military coup.
“As we started to adapt the screenplay,” Salles said, “we realized that the zeitgeist was changing. The extreme right was rising in Brazil, as it did in so many different parts of the world. And we realized that the film was not only about our past, but was also about our present. And this somehow actually textured the film. Everybody became very conscious that the film was not only about who we had been, but who we were and who we eventually wanted to be. It was a film about an identity in motion, you know. And again, this, I think, gave us a focus and a sense of urgency to the film.”
Production on “I’m Still Here” took place in a house that Salles described as the “Xerox copy” of the Paivas’ home. There, he encouraged his cast — many of whom were just beginning their careers as actors — to inhabit their characters: They cooked together, decorated their bedrooms and improvised scenes of domesticity. “When I saw the film for the first time, I was getting shocked because we didn’t look like we were acting,” Torres said. “Walter is a documentarist. … And in this film, it’s all there. It’s filming, but with the the sense of a documentarist. It was wonderful.”
The casting of a character who appears in the movie’s final moments added yet another personal dimension to “I’m Still Here.” In a moving coda, Torres’s mother, Montenegro, plays Eunice as an elderly woman with Alzheimer’s, her memory largely gone but her family still rallying around her. Montenegro was nominated for an Oscar in 1999 for Salles’s “Central Station,” so her appearance here is rich with meaning.
“It was not CGI,” Torres quipped.
To which Salles replied, “How lucky I was to have the two Fernandas in one film!”
Watch the full discussion here.
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