LUCIA MURAT > DIRECTION
As a journalist, Lucia Murat worked in the most important newspapers and TV channels in Brazil. In the 80's she started her career in the cinema and founded Taiga Filmes. She is now known in Brazilian and international festivals for her award winning feature films: How nice to see you alive (1989); Oswaldianas (1991); Sweet Power (1996); Brave New Land (2000), Almost Brothers (2004), Foreign Eye (2005). Her last film is Another Love Story (2007). de amor (2007).
INTERVIEW
How did you get the idea for a musical?
I did classical ballet for many years when I was younger, and I always loved musicals. As a cinematographer, it is agonizing to think that Brazil, with all its music and dance, doesn’t have this tradition.
About four years ago I had access to some social projects in some of the communities, including dance. It was then that I thought to combine this old desire with my life story, and the political and social questions that I discuss in my films.
At first the idea was more a documentary reproduction of one of these groups. Then when I started the screenplay I had the idea to do a free adaptation of the Romeo and Juliet story. Maré has a sort of Gaza Strip and the story would be perfect to show this.
How did you come to choose Graziela Figueroa?
Graziela means a lot to Brazil for all she did in the 80s, bringing dance into the public space, democratizing the very idea of dance. I didn’t want to do a musical exclusively with hip-hop, which is today dominant in the communities and from where we get most of the dancers. I wanted the film to reflect all the dance experiments that exist in the communities, such as capoeira, samba, ballroom dancing, classical ballet... So I needed someone capable of working this mix to create something different.
I knew that Graziela could bring originality, a style of movement that could surprise. However, she also had to adapt to this world. The group was extremely heterogeneous and we would only have a short time to work together (Even though this was the initial idea, we knew it would be complicated). She needed first to understand who those people were, know the difficulties in order to define the group and know the virtuosos who could solo.
In defining choreography, my training in classical ballet, and my knowledge of modern dance were fundamental. As was the help I got from Silvia Sotter, my dance consultant, Sonia Destri, who took rehearsals and did some additional choreography, and Áurea Hamerli, who was responsible for the classical part and for training the solos.
We didn’t want a folklore film. If needed I could film jongo, “folia de reis”, the samba... We wanted a contemporary mix. Hip-hop comes from the USA, but in Brazil it got modified and mixed, with much more swing and rhythm and sway than the original.
How did the tests go?
None of the dance groups in the communities could provide the 30 dancers we needed to form our dance group. We needed not just the best, but also a mixture. We tested around 500 dancers in Rio. Later, before deciding the main cast, we did some tests in São Paulo for the main parts. We ended up deciding on some of the boys we had been working with since January. Our selection criteria included age, biotype, and some subjective items relating to drama. My greatest surprise was to discover that at least 200 out of the 500 we tested were capable, as dancers, to do the film.
How did you come to use the Linha Vermelha Expressway?
It seemed like madness to close the Linha Vermelha, but production was very careful, and we had the cooperation of the authorities. Cinema is like that all over the world. They close Brooklyn Bridge, or the main streets of Los Angeles, and everyone cooperates.
However, filming the scene was very complicated. We had to film from a high ranger, with lots of movement, and we needed to be quick. The time we had was too little for the length of the scene. Obviously we couldn’t rehearse the choreography there. We rehearsed in sheds using cars to give us a notion of space. But filming it was completely different. I think we were all a little freaked out and inhibited. It took two hours to get used to the area and start to film. The team worked well and we finished within the time limit.
The film required photography and art direction, because of the differential esthetics. The great difficulty is that it has one foot in reality and the other in fantasy.
OThe film required photography and art direction, because of the differential esthetics. The great difficulty is that it has one foot in reality and the other in fantasy.
Gringo Cardia created fantastic solutions, of incredible beauty, at the same time respecting what we could call marginal urban esthetics. He worked local material and brought details into the foreground, which in general stay hidden in the general pollution.
How did you choose the colors?
The choice of colors was made after plenty of research. Before starting the film, we filmed some dance numbers on location to analyze the results. We discovered that the result was very dark. The alleyways are small, with little light, and the brickwork was dominant. This didn’t reflect the reality of the favela or what we wanted to show. A vibrant musical. We needed to use the colors well to achieve this vibrancy. The costumes are very colorful, with the exception of the ‘Pneu queimado’ (Burnt tires) dance. The colors also provided a dramatic function, highlighting the differences between the two rival groups.
What was the strategy for filming?
Working with non-actors and lots of dancers, we needed greater freedom with the camera. Lúcio Kodato illuminated 360º almost all the time, so we could work with minimum restrictions. Free filming done by Fabrício Tavares was fundamental, because being non-actors, they had no experience of foreground and background, nor of repeating the scene the same way on a second take. This actually provided a vitality, a major energy for the film.
How did you integrate the musical and dramatic scenes?
The great challenge of this film was take advantage of the level of reality that the actors – all of them from communities – brought with them, and at the same time maintain the sensation of fantasy. Step out of reality, into a dance, back to reality ... without losing the notion of identity. We couldn’t move into total fantasy, nor fall into reality pure and simple.
Of course in filming a war we couldn’t just have everyone dancing. The violence really exists, with guns, bullets, police, and you can’t lose this dimension and the audience must believe in what it is seeing. At the same time, we didn’t want to make an action film. What we tried to do was to bring together these two worlds, because this line between being a bandit or a ballerina is tenuous for those living in a favela. And in a scene such as the “Pneu Queimado” you feel this in a way that almost hurts because the movements of war come close to those of the dance.
How did you integrate actors with non-actors?
This was another difficulty in directing. Nobody in the dance group had ever acted before. On joining the non-actors and the actors there could be no estrangement, nothing that could stand out. This was a big challenge for Marisa Orth who acted with them throughout almost all the film. To achieve the integration, we worked for around five months with the dancers in drama workshops coordinated by Christian Duuvoort, who did an excellent job. There they worked without screenplay or text. Ideas were thrown out and they had to invent. Much of the final screenplay came from this work. Later, the actors joined the workshops. One of the ways of integrating the two worlds was to ask the actors, whenever possible, to also use improvisation.