Kle­ber Mendonça Fil­ho: ​‘John Car­pen­ter is always a ref­er­ence point for me’

Brazil’s Kle­ber Mendonça Fil­ho used to be a film crit­ic, but his move into the director’s chair has been spec­tac­u­lar­ly suc­cess­ful. Aquar­ius, about an age­ing female music jour­nal­ist being ter­rorised by prop­er­ty devel­op­ers, is his fol­low-up to 2012’s aria of urban para­noia, Neigh­bour­ing Sounds.

“Some things make you hap­py about the idea of cin­e­ma, and you remem­ber them. Cin­e­ma cre­ates fond mem­o­ries, like when you first saw Raiders of the Lost Ark, for exam­ple. But Raiders nev­er inspired me to make film. I didn’t see it at 13 and think, ​‘Oh, I real­ly want to be a film­mak­er so I can do some­thing like this!’ For me, Raiders is just a hap­py mem­o­ry, and noth­ing more. But John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 is some­thing that actu­al­ly told me, ​‘You can do some­thing like this.’ It’s very well made and very pre­cise, but the scale is mod­est. It looks doable. On top of that it’s the per­fect mix of dif­fer­ent elements.

“It’s part­ly Hol­ly­wood, part­ly west­ern, part­ly about life in the big city, and it is all tremen­dous. To this day it keeps com­ing back to me when­ev­er I’m writ­ing. Even though there are no guns in my films, it keeps com­ing back. In Aquar­ius, the flat itself is like the police sta­tion and there are peo­ple out­side try­ing to force their way in. Not as aggres­sive­ly, or course, but it’s a dif­fer­ent type of aggres­sion. It’s fas­ci­nat­ing when you’re think­ing about a film and the gen­er­al out­line is still very famil­iar in terms of that film that you have in your mind. Assault is always a ref­er­ence point for me, and I’m afraid it’s going to be com­ing back in my third film.

“I also watched Rio Bra­vo back when I was writ­ing the script, which is inter­est­ing. When you watch stuff, it’s all about scale – that’s the inspir­ing thing. Hitch­cock has that effect. Those films are still inspir­ing. It’s not like they’re easy to remake. You look at some­thing like Rear Win­dow and in terms of scale, you think, ​‘Fuck, that’s doable!’ With some­thing like Star Wars, it’s fun, but I always think, ​‘I can’t do that, it’s too much!’ I appre­ci­ate scope, but I also appre­ci­ate craft. Die Hard is one I love. I saw it when I was 19 and was real­ly inspired by it because it was just a fuck­ing real­ly great movie expe­ri­ence. I still remem­ber the screen­ing of that. A sup­pos­ed­ly stu­pid action movie I picked to see turned out to be very strange and special.

“I am 48 now. I have two kids and it’s almost impos­si­ble not to have to deal with nos­tal­gia in your every­day life. When you have kids it’s like a lot of mem­o­ries and feel­ings that were buried inside you self start to come back. They are recy­cled because now you’re look­ing at someone’s child­hood and mem­o­ries of your own child­hood come back and that’s just part of life and it’s real­ly up to you to analyse and see how you deal with all that infor­ma­tion which is emo­tion­al, it’s fac­tu­al and it’s per­son­al and it’s very mov­ing and it can be dis­turb­ing. It’s vital for you to live your own life and try to under­stand life, but in my case, because I write and I try to sift through inter­est­ing ideas and maybe use them in some lm that peo­ple might want to see, nos­tal­gia some­times has a bad rep­u­ta­tion because it feels like some kind of sickness.

“Too much nos­tal­gia is bad because nos­tal­gia rhymes with depres­sion. There is a healthy amount of nos­tal­gia that you can go for in your life and I am some­body who respects the past, my moth­er was a his­to­ri­an and I’m fas­ci­nat­ed by the past. I find that a lot of peo­ple despise the past. I’m not one of these peo­ple, I’m inter­est­ed in the past and I love ele­ments in the past, you know objects mem­o­ries, piece of paper, doc­u­ments and that’s what I think Aquar­ius is about. It’s about doc­u­ments and archives. It doesn’t real­ly come out in film reviews over the past eight months. Most of what comes out is the resis­tance and the politics.

“Talk­ing of nos­tal­gia, Cin­e­ma Par­adiso is a strange film. One half is built on true feel­ings of nos­tal­gia and the oth­er is built on cheap feel­ings of nos­tal­gia. That is con­fus­ing, but you usu­al­ly get either a mas­ter­piece with heart­felt feel­ings about the past and obser­va­tions on time, or you get some cheap knock-off evok­ing mem­o­ries like one of these cheap Christ­mas cards that you buy with cheap thoughts about the past. I don’t know why I men­tioned Cin­e­ma Par­adiso but it’s a film that brings me some good ideas about nos­tal­gia and manip­u­la­tions about mem­o­ry and the past.”

Aquar­ius is released 24 March. Read the LWLies Rec­om­mends review.