Walter Salles Quotes

We all knew the book well because it`s the cult book in Latin America. For me, this was a sacred territory. I would not have ventured into it by myself.

That`s why I have always admired documentaries, because they open windows that can make you understand much better where you come from, much better than fiction, I think.

So when I was very young, I longed for Brazil.

Also, I knew that the impact of Motorcycle Diaries was going to be so resonant for all of us who went through the experience of making it that I didn`t want to do anything that could reflect it.

On the contrary, I`m a strong believer in the necessity of imperfection coming into the film.

I did documentaries for maybe 10 years before I turned to fiction films.

So I feel a responsibility to help first-time film-makers in Brazil, but also to increase the dialogue between film cultures which are really wonderful and so much closer to us than what we do see on our screens.

Also, there are now new laws in Brazil which create incentives for Argentine and Latin American films to be premiered and distributed in Brazil and vice versa.

And my generation in Brazil was influenced by Cinema Novo. So we`re echoing what`s been done way in the past.

With Central Station, the story was basically about the recuperation of one`s identity and also, an investigation into the country`s identity.

A filmmaker can never be distant from his roots.

It was a complex endeavor so without Robert Redford`s constant support we wouldn`t have gotten to the end.

The Peruvian faces are completely different from that faces in Argentina and in Brazil.

No, I worked a lot for European television, doing documentaries in Brazil.

The Sundance Institute has been vital to the film communities of Latin America.

When I come to London, I always like to see what`s playing at the NFT.

I went to Cuba maybe eight or nine times.

I come from Brazil, which is a Portuguese speaking part of the continent.

So the search for a father in Central Station is also a search for a country.

The necessity to conceptualise has to come very early on, and defining a vector of development for that film also at the beginning of the process will allow you much more freedom as you go along.

But I also think that the more you reason collectively about what the project should be at the beginning of the process, the more you can improvise later.

There are still 500,000 persons afflicted with leprosy in Latin America, so it is still very much present.

My father was a diplomat for part of his life and I jumped from country to country and culture to culture.

First of all, we wanted to be faithful to the two books that inspired Jose Rivera`s screenplay and to the spirit of the original journey.

I come from a country and also a continent whose identity is in the making. We`re a very young culture, and I think that things are not yet crystallised.

I`m much more interested in living specific experiences in films.

So I had this idea for the film but I was shooting Foreign Land and I had written 10 pages on it about what the story should be.

The other aspect is that you become much more aware of the structural problems that pertain to that continent. You feel the need to act to try and solve them.

The films that I`ve done before were original stories most of the time, I did two adaptations before this, but they were mostly original stories where I had complete freedom to evolve in the direction I wanted.