The Garbage Man: An Interview with Eduardo Coutinho

Abstract

This interview took place on August 2, 2009, in New York City. Translation by Marilia Martins. The Brazilian director, producer, and screenwriter Eduardo Coutinho walks by the streets of Manhattan searching for an open space in a bar where he can smoke. After a nine-hour flight from Sao Paulo to New York, he sits at the table of a 54th Street restaurant and tells the waiter: desperately need a cigarette ... That helps me thinking. The waiter says okay, but alerts him that if any other client complains he will have to stop smoking. Coutinho agrees and comments in a low voice: They forbid smoking even in open areas ... That's fascism. He says he will suffer staying three or four days in the city because it's so difficult to smoke in New York. But he so wanted to come to see the retrospective of his movies showed by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), his first one in the United States. The 2009 program of Premiere Brazil showed eight of his movies, from his first, Cabra marcado para morrer/Twenty Years Later: A Man Labeled to Die (1964/1984), until the most recent film, Mouscou/Moscow (2009); others included were Santo forte/Mighty Spirit (1999), Babilonia 2000/Babylonia 2000 (2001), Edificio Master/Master, A Building in Copacabana, aka Master Building (2002), Peoes/Metalworkers (2004), O Fim e o principio/The End and the Beginning (2005), and Jogo de cena/Playing (2006). In this interview Coutinho, born in 1933 in Sao Paulo, talks about his works and how difficult it is to be a Brazilian filmmaker. Marilia Martins: Let's begin with Moscow. Why this title? How did you have the idea of filming the rehearsals of Three Sisters, by the Russian author Anton Chekhov, with a Brazilian street group of actors named Galpao, directed by Enrique Diaz? Eduardo Coutinho: The project started while I was filming Jogo de cena, in 2007. I was interested in discussing what is an actor, what is a character, a plot, what is fiction and what is reality. I wanted to discuss the documentary's language. So I decided to discuss those subjects during the rehearsals of a play. We had three weeks of rehearsals, so I could have material to choose the best moments. We read the text, we talked, we created scenes ... until the time was over and we said good-bye. We didn't plan to produce the play. We only wanted to rehearse it. We filmed for eighty hours with two cameras to select the best scenes. The title, Moscow, was an idea of my producer, Joao Moreira Salles. MM: You wanted to show the process of rehearsing and not the final production. EC: We did not want to get anywhere. There was no process, no final production. We just wanted to spend some time talking about actors and characters, fiction and reality. There's no process. The film is a collection of fragments. And we only selected the images because making the film is itself the subject matter of Moscow. We were not interested in the making of ... We were interested in discussing the play while filming the discussion, so the movie's language is also discussed by us, but everything is fragmented on purpose. There is no beginning, no ending. In the last scene, the light is turned off, but we still hear the voices. The images are over, but the narrative goes on. There is no conclusion. Before I decided the film was ready, I showed it to lots of friends. MM: What did they say? EC: Well, they said Moscow was my most difficult film, the hardest to understand. Then, when someone says, like I always ask: Why? If the reason is good, I'm interested in it. Sometimes I am surprised-I hadn't thought of that. But the why doesn't interest me, if I think that person liked my movie for the wrong reasons. It's difficult to say what will be the reaction of the audience. The movie does not explain itself; it doesn't have a story. The movie is the invitation for a trip. If you accept it, you can be surprised. MM: What do you expect from an American audience? …