Walter Salles

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

“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.”

“I'm much more interested in living specific experiences in films.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“I went to Cuba maybe eight or nine times.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”