Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa is beloved by cinephiles from all around the world. The most recent proof of the allure his aura exudes was the large audience at the masterclass he recently held at the Elvire Popesco Cinema as the special guest of the Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival (September 26 – October 1). The festival honored him with a retrospective, which will remain one of the major film events of these years.

His unique and hypnotic cinema, devoted to the life-challenged and the disadvantaged by the colonial history of his country, along with his uncompromising, publicly expressed vision of the film, seen as the intimate and mysterious work of an artist freed from the pressures of commercial success and any conventions, have turned him into one of the most fascinating voices in international auteur cinema.

Pedro Costa began his career in the late ’80s with O sangue (1989), and since then his great films have graced the most important festivals, from Chicago and Locarno to Venice and Cannes: Bones / Ossos (1997), In Vanda’s Room / No Quarto da Vanda (2000), Colossal Youth / Juventude em Marcha (2006), Horse Money / Cavalo Dinheiro (2014), and Vitalina Varela (2019).

In his interview for Films in Frame, the Portuguese director shares his personal thoughts on less debated aspects of filmmaking and contemporary cinema: how fear of a new film can actually be a source of energy, how cinema should teach us to hear and see things that we wouldn’t normally pay attention to, how financing mechanisms disrupt cinema, and how Hollywood superhero productions are fascist in the way they dominate their audience and hold them from thinking.

You said somewhere that for you a film begins with mystery and desire, not necessarily a script, and that every time you make a film it is very frightening for you. How do you overcome this fear, if you overcome it?

No, I do not overcome the fear. Actually I could say it is the opposite, it becomes like a motor. It becomes another source of energy. Fear can help you where maybe other feelings and emotions don’t work. Fear works in a strange way. It makes you audacious, sometimes very courageous or very irresponsible. You need a lot of things like that to make a film. You need a bit of irresponsibility, even irrationality. Having some people around a camera, which is documenting death, is very irrational work. Jean Cocteau said that: What cinema does is filming death 24 times a second. You die, you grow old, you spend time in front of this machine that captures a lot of yourself sometimes. This machine is, of course, a source of fear, anxiety. Everybody knows that some Indian and African tribes don’t like to be photographed at all, because there is something very dark in this. I don’t want to fight the fear. It is natural. If you have a machine in front of somebody, it’s not a nice movement, it’s always a bit aggressive. You have to fight against it, try to be a bit more human and try to make people forget the camera. But even if you succeed in creating all these conditions for the work to be better, the fear stays. But it can work for you. One of the greatest filmmakers, Hitchcock, was always in panic.

You also said that the beauty of cinema is that it makes us see something. What do you mean by this?

The first thing that cinema should do is not propaganda or talk about something or tell a story. The first thing cinema should do, and it’s good at this, it’s to be an instrument to make you see and hear things that normally you don’t see or hear. To make you pay more attention to some parts of reality in a city or in a far away country. It can teach you, it can do a lot of things. But the first one is to make you see things. I would even say that  normally the first thing you see if the film is serious it’s probably something that is not quite right, because the world it’s not right, it’s not perfect. Usually what you see in a film or what you should see is that things could be better. I think that it’s one of the tasks or functions of all great films and filmmakers.

You also declared somewhere that in cinema you need intimacy and solitude, both in making it and watching it. Could you elaborate on this?

I think you should not do a show around a film. Cinema has begun in a certain way, it has its own life and history and memory, but more recently cinema has become very frivolous. Cinema implies and needs a certain kind of secret. It’s something of a secret when you see a film in the dark, there are a lot of people around you, you all see the same thing, but it’s different for everybody. Everybody individually has its own idea about the film or what they are seeing, and this is a kind of secret. Sometimes, when the film is really great, you even have the feeling that that film is for you. There are a few films like that. That happened to me a lot when I was young and watching all the films I could see. It happens to everybody more or less, at least once. And today I think things are a bit more superficial. So many magazines of cinema. There is no secret, no mystique. And I think that is bad.

There is something that annoys and disturbs me a lot. I talked about this in two or three film festivals and it was not well received. I understand that young people today want to make films. But they need to go through a lot of bureaucracy, especially in Europe, where cinema is a little bit helped and funded. So a young guy has to go to the European script fund and the European documentary fund etc. etc. And in those places there is something that exists and I have seen it and we all know it: the pitch. You have to go sometimes in front of dozens of potential financiers. I saw that the other day and I was terrified. I can say this, because I have a little bit of history now behind me and people know a little bit about me. I told them: it should be a secret, it’s in your heart, it’s in your soul, maybe you can tell it to your best friend, your lover, your wife, but to go up and tell this to 50 guys from ARTE and ZDF and British Film Institute… I understand, they need the funds, they need the money, they do the best they can, but it’s terrible. I think you lose something. I am very tragic… (laughs – n.r.)

I think this is one of the reasons why films nowadays look more or less the same.

Exactly. You pitch one, you pitch two, you pitch three. Then there is the sales agent. More than twenty years ago, when I started, there weren’t any sales agents. There were producers, directos, and eventually TV stations. And the money was more or less public, rarely private. Today you have first the financiers, that ask for a certain kind of thing, that works for the producers rentability. So you have to it in a certain style, in a certain manner, something like David Lynch or Béla Tarr, for example. And it’s not even something that a filmmaker has in himself. It’s this group of people that decide how to do it. They are actually much more than sales agents, they produce, they decide, they choose the actors, sometimes they work on the script. I think that is very bad.

It is so bad that you don’t earn your money if you are a filmmaker, because after the money that the producers, the sales agent, all the countries that buy the films they keep, there is nothing left for you. They take a very big part. You’re not even owning the film. I like to be the owner of my films. I own almost all my films. There are still two which I am trying to buy back. I only know one filmmaker who owns his films, Jim Jarmusch. He owns the negatives. 

You also spoke in your interviews and masterclasses about the fact that for you there is no real difference between documentary and fiction. Nowadays there are a lot of discussions about the way documentaries are influenced by fiction and fiction is influenced by documentaries.

In a way, it’s good that the filmmaker is more aware that the film is much more than writing an idea on paper and then giving it to a producer that gives you money to do it, and that when you actually get to do it everything is different. You thought about rain, and it’s no rain, you thought about an actor that in the end can not do it. It’s a series of confrontations. Cinema is a series of fights or encounters with reality, but it has to be that way.

Even though I like his films, I think Tarantino is very dangerous, even more dangerous than David Lynch, because all the young filmmakers think that you can do a film in this kind of vacuum where Tarantino lives: cinephilia plus money. Write something, and everything you write can be shot because reality it’s not there. I mean there is a sort of reality, the reality of Brad Pitt, but everything is camouflaged a little bit. I like Brad Pitt, I have nothing against him, but where is the pain or that loneliness that could appear? This might seem an illusion, but it’s not, because if you see films from the past, it’s always there, very present. If you see a film of John Ford, you would feel a sort of sadness, it’s always there. This profound sadness that comes sometimes. You watch Henry Fonda in a film and sometimes you are affected. This man is sad, it must be something there, and it’s probably his life, or his relation to John Ford, or what happened that day. But that builds a character. And it is not necessarily a sad character. It might seem strange, but this made cinema so great. You had big stars like Henry Fonda or Gary Cooper, but at the same time you saw behind them horses, other people, the so-called extras. In John Ford’s films these extras are amazing. Two or three secondary guys behind Henry Fonda, like they were saying: “Mr. Fonda, you are not alone. You are not the king of this. There is a balance”. It became like a way of doing, a morality, but that is no more today. And I am not even talking about superhero movies. There is complete fascism. 

So I tell young filmmakers: go to your room, the room of your father, or your lover, try to talk, don’t talk, watch the wall. Start small. But I admit that it’s much more difficult today, because everything is broken, and I am not even talking about the images that are everywhere. The attention is dispersed.

How do you deal as a filmmaker in this empire of images of all kinds?

You do the opposite. You do it in a very concentrated way, which doesn’t necessarily mean small. I talk a lot about the past of Hollywood or the present Hollywood because I think the way to get our films to be seen is actually by learning some lessons from the past. Learning that the main thing is to know how to make a film. You have to make us see and hear things in a new way. Not the same cliché, not the same guy that I have seen millions of times. The same love story. The same mystery that is not a mystery. So I don’t really deal with it. I am just sad that there are probably millions of guys and girls that will love to do things, and it’s much more difficult for them. And it’s not even about the financing. They have to be so concentrated and collective.

What did you mean by saying that superhero movies are fascist? 

Fascist in the sense that they do not let you think. You just follow and react. It’s a pavlovian thing. They are using a lot of effects to scare you or to amuse you. All the music in the world to bring you to tears. In fact, if you take out the sound in those films, it’s pathetic, because it doesn’t work. Visually, maybe, because it’s kinetic, but it’s like going into a discotheque. Otherwise, it doesn’t work. You don’t understand anything. There is a fantastic thing that Godard used to say: In the old days, they made silent films and you understood everything, without words. You understood more than the story, you understood how people suffer and why. And then, even more, there were filmmakers that tried to do less. It’s not minimalistic, but concentrated. And you still felt some things, without words, without effects, without anything. And I am not talking about austere things, just about normal ones. It’s a very difficult exercise. It doesn’t happen with this other kind of films, including the superhero ones. Perhaps I was a bit radical in saying fascist, but it seems to me a fascist idea to dominate an audience.

Photo by Claudiu Popescu.

Ionuț Mareș

Journalist and film critic. Curator for some film festivals in Romania. At "Films in Frame" publishes interviews with both young and established filmmakers.