With Lower City released this week Sergio Machado makes his feature debut as director. Lower City chronicles the fallout from an incendiary love triangle between best friends Deco and Naldinho, a boxer and a hustler, and Karinna, a prostitute, set amid the seamy underworld of Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. Born in Salvador, Machado began working in the cinema in 1993 directing award-winning short film Changing Heads. After making a number of video documentaries he began working with director Walter Salles in 1996 and was Assistant Director on Salles’ international breakthrough film Central Station. Salles is the co-producer of Lower City. The film’s scalding depiction of its ménage a trois leaves a vivid after-image of desperate cohorts driven to love like moths to a flame.
Sergio, in your opinion why is the relationship between the central characters in Lower City so intense?
Well, the three of them live in such a hard environment. They don’t have any kind of support from the government or from family and in this relationship - this love - they find something to hold in the middle of this sea that can help them survive. The question I was asking myself was, ‘When someone has no perspective and no support at all, why does this person keep on going and trying to do their best? What’s the reason for a prostitute in the lower city to try to go on living?’ The reason is that just like you and me she’s trying to carry on and to be as happy as she can be. Sometimes love is something that you can hold onto. When I was writing the screenplay we spent two weeks discussing what the film was all about and what we wanted to say in the script.
We found that when someone is far away from you – this can be a prostitute, or a dead person or the English Queen, anybody – the first thing you notice is the difference but when you get really close to them you’ll find that the most important things are the same. Everybody loves, everybody has desires, everybody has fears, has nightmares. So that’s what we wanted to say. These are people that you may not even notice most of the time, you may just see a prostitute when you drive past them, but if you were to stop and really look into their eyes then you’d realise that in all the essential things they’re just like you.
You mention in the production notes that you wanted to concentrate on people rather than customs; can you talk about why you wanted to do that and whether you were reacting against anything in particular?
I don’t think that I was reacting against anything. I think that the main reason that I make films is because of my interest in meeting people and getting to know them. That’s something really natural that interests me. I’m much more interested in human beings than these big stories. The films I like are films that have much more complex characters.
How did you prepare as a director to achieve that?
It’s an interesting paradox because I prepared in such an obsessive way. I wrote a big book of about 500 pages with notes about each scene of the film, drawings, photographs and some paintings I collected, maps of each scene, each movement. I was so well prepared that the producer said ‘I’m scared because I’ve never seen anything like this.’ The paradoxical thing is that I prepared so much over two years that I didn’t use anything. I just left the books because I was so confident and so prepared that I felt that I could create something deeper. The actors didn’t read the screenplay.
Instead they were doing exercises prepared by Fatima Toledo [the acting coach]. For instance, for all those moments of suffering for the character Karinna, Alice would lie down on the floor and we would have a strong guy in the crew who stopped her from moving so that when we filmed her we would be filming the emotions that Alice was really feeling. I tried to get the actors to bring their own personal feelings into the film. I didn’t want them to seem as though they were acting. I just wanted them to be.
Did the screenplay change completely for the final film then?
That was the amazing thing because it seemed as though we were improvising but everything was so much in my mind that I would say, ‘no, how about this?’ so we went around in a circle and ended up at the same place.
And how did your intention to concentrate on the characters as people affect your way of shooting the film?
We wanted to be close to them. It’s not a big story. It’s a story about human beings who love and who suffer. That was the big motivation. Then we decided to have the handheld camera to follow the actors. They aren’t doing anything really so the camera can be totally free. Since we wanted to have that very close look, the camera is always near them and we used a telephoto lens a lot of the time [which compresses the perspective, achieving a ‘close look’]. That decision influenced everything else. For example it affects the sound design you can always hear the breathing of the characters and it effects the editing because I told my editor, ‘let’s cut the film in the rhythm of the heartbeat of the characters. So when their hearts are beating really fast in scenes like the cockfight for example we cut really fast and then at other times when they’re resting we hardly cut at all.
Why did you cast these particular actors in the film?
Originally I wanted to have three black actors but what moved me towards Wagner, the white guy, was that I went to the birthday party of Lazaro, the black actor in the film, and in the middle of the party Lazaro made a long speech to Wagner because they’re best friends, like brothers in real life. They’re both very well known actors in Brazil and they have grown up together. I thought that I couldn’t lose the opportunity to make a film about two friends with two best friends in the roles so that’s why I cast Wagner.
We tested many girls to play Karinna: almost a thousand actresses, real strippers, everybody, and we didn’t find our Karinna. Then two months before shooting the acting coach said ‘let’s try Alice. I worked with her on City of God so let’s see. If it doesn’t work then we can postpone the shooting.’ Then she came. I went to pick her up from the airport because I wanted to meet her. When I met her I noticed that she was really nervous because it’s such a demanding role, with all this sexual stuff, and she was scared. I said ‘look, just close your eyes, hold my hand and let’s jump. I promise that I won’t let you down.’ I spoke to the whole crew and the actors: ‘let’s make this film together with Alice.’ It was amazing. Ten days ago she won a best actress award in Brazil, at the age of twenty-one, competing with all those older and more experienced actresses. It was a victory for the whole crew and we were very proud.
Do you think that this is a particularly good time for Brazilian cinema and perhaps Latin American cinema more generally and if so, why?
At the Rio film festival there was a kind of unanimous opinion in all the newspapers and magazines that this was the best selection of Brazilian films in the last twenty years. Everybody was writing that there had never been so many good films in just one year. So I think that it’s a particularly good moment for Brazilian independent films and also I very much like Argentinean films at the moment. It’s a particularly good year but why is that the case? It’s a good question. I think that it’s such a demanding time. There are so many things going on in the streets. You just have to go out there and see. It’s right there. You just look with an interested eye and there are things to be shown.
Peter Fraser
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