Interview with Negro Leo at the 20th Mostra Filme Livre
On rumor, technology, and independent cinema
Interview conducted near the MAM Cinemateca, on September 23, 2023.
How long have you worked with film as a mode of artistic expression?
Well, I started using music since I was a kid, a really small kid. But actually, my first works, or my first artistic aspirations, were more tied to film, you know? So much so that I made a short film that screened at the Mostra Filme Livre, I think one of the first editions, I'm not sure if the second or the third. It was a short called Tropa de Elite 4, which I made with a fellow actress of mine named Barbara Vida — I don't remember exactly if we made it around the release of the first Tropa de Elite (2007), I don't remember the exact year.
And we made that film because at the time there were street vendors selling pirated films, I was studying at the Institute of Philosophy and Social Sciences at UFRJ in Rio de Janeiro, and I remember these vendors were already selling several different "versions" of Tropa de Elite. And these versions were either real police raid footage, or clips lifted from other films. So there was a Tropa de Elite 2 DVD that was actually footage of a real police raid on a favela in Niterói, and there was also a copy of a Tropa de Elite 3 along the same lines. So around then I thought, "well, let's make the fourth one, then!" And so we made this film that screened at one of the first editions of the Mostra Filme Livre. So what I mean is that film actually entered my life as a professional inspiration before music did, you know? Even though I'd been playing guitar since I was 15, 16.
What was it like working alongside filmmakers Gregório Gananian (Nenhuma Fantasia, A Guerra de Michael) and Paula Gaitán (É Rocha e Rio, Negro Léo), on these three films screening at the 2023 Mostra Filme Livre?
Ah, Paula is my mother-in-law, I have enormous admiration for her and we have a family closeness that makes things flow very naturally, you know? And Greg is my friend, we've known each other for many years, more than a decade, and I also have great admiration and respect for him and his ideas. So it's natural for me to work with Paula and Gregório, and they're different processes: in the films with Greg we work by splitting the creative process, you know? And in the case of É Rocha e Rio, Negro Léo (2020), I'm, let's say, the "documented one." So it's a different working relationship in these films.
I wanted to ask you about the question of genre film — when Gregório presented Nenhuma Fantasia at the opening of the Mostra Filme Livre he called it a work of "entertainment," and I wanted to ask, because there's a brief mention of yours in É Rocha e Rio, Negro Léo of the writer Philip K. Dick, and I know you're currently working with filmmaker João Dumans on a science-fiction feature set in China. How do you see the question of genre, or of science fiction, in your conception of cinema?
In Nenhuma Fantasia we planned to make a science-fiction film, but we found that everything we were going to address in the film is happening right now. Brain transfer to servers, to machines, to computers. Memories stored on company servers, like the case of Nectome (an American company that proposes to digitally store memories after a person's death). So the film lost that quality of being fiction about some idea of a technological future, because these things are already happening. So it ended up being super current, actually.
And you know, if you look at the science-fiction literature being produced in the '50s, for instance, the things those guys were thinking about are things that are happening now, right? In our case, we started out thinking about ideas that went a bit beyond that kind of fabulation, and now they're actually pretty real elements within our world. So I don't think I can talk about science fiction, within this specific film, because it isn't about science fiction anymore.
Actually, I don't even know if I have much interest in science fiction as such — what happened is that Greg once lent me a book of Philip K. Dick short stories and I loved that book, I thought the stories were incredible, that imaginative capacity the author brought. How he managed to imagine such unbelievable things. And those texts he wrote in the '60s and '70s ended up becoming films, like Total Recall (1990) and Minority Report (2001), and I think there must be other titles slipping my mind, but his work has been adapted for the screen.
I found it interesting to raise this genre question because one thing about Nenhuma Fantasia is that, to me, it's a pretty funny film. So I wanted to ask about the question of humor, and what Gregório had brought up in his interview about a concept of "rumor."
Right, the "rumor," right? We named these films rumor because, in a way, we live in a society... and when I say "society" I'm trying to put things on the same plane, the same layer, however large the cultural differences may be, you know? There are aspects of infrastructure in the world that overlay all these different realities. Like, the Chinese drink hot water, but their hot water is produced by the same kind of machine that produces ours. So this concept of "rumor" came out of that idea of relation, that thing about society and information and so on.
And what is "rumor"? The humor is obvious, it's right there in the film, but the rumor is the stories the film tells, stories that aren't quite pinned down. In rumor, you don't know exactly whether a thing is that thing or not. Things are indeterminate. It's almost like the vision of someone nearsighted, my vision — you can't quite make out exactly what you're looking at. If I take off my glasses, I can't gauge distance, I can't tell if that shape is a person or a painting, you know? Then you have to say the person is, I don't know, almost 10 meters away from us, or more, maybe. So it's about that moment of total imprecision, of not knowing whether these things are what they are.
For instance, the other day I was talking with a friend of mine, and he told me a really interesting logic puzzle: imagine a person dies and arrives in heaven, this person left their family, their children, behind on earth. And suddenly God appears and this person tells him they want to go back, and God answers that they have the choice of going to hell, going to heaven, or returning to their family. And the puzzle is this: if the person makes a true statement, they go to heaven; if they make a false statement, they go to hell. And if they say something God can't determine to be true or false, they go back to their family on Earth.
And in this story, the person states that they will go to hell, and God sees this statement as a positive one, you know? He thinks: "Well, if this statement is true, then I need to send him to paradise." And so she goes to heaven, and then God goes "Damn it!" because that statement would then be false in itself, since she'd said she would go to hell. So God ends up concluding that he doesn't know whether that piece of information was true or false, and he has to send her back to Earth.
So this puzzle connects to the concept of rumor because the whole point of rumor is precisely that imprecision. And I think what we want to make are films about that. In the case of the China film, it's also about imprecision, but more on the level of technologies and the uses of technologies than the implications they carry in themselves. We don't really know anything about what's going to happen once we start something, and that's more or less our thing.
How do you see the question of technology in the film and in your artistic work more broadly?
There's no getting around technology, it's the clothes and the glasses you wear. We're recording our lives, and this interview, using a phone. So technology is an extension of everything nowadays, of all our sensory faculties, and that's unavoidable, you know? Everything around us is technology.
Actually, if you go all the way back to the time of the earliest hominids, when they made cave paintings, they were really creating a technology of representation, right? Because when they painted a cave painting they were creating a connection "beyond the fact." For example: if a painting shows an ox that's suddenly struck by lightning partway through the painting, that's a story being told, but it also becomes something beyond the material "fact" that concretely happened. So it becomes a technology for representing the world.
But what I wanted to tell you about technology is this: technology is right there, damn it, I still make music in a very... of course I use technology, and all that, to make things. The guitar is a technological object, right? Things carry thought, science invested in them.
And technology is always here. The guitar is a technological object, things, these material elements, they carry a thought and a science invested inside them. But that's not something I dwell on much, I don't sit there thinking, "how does technology bear on my work?" because I think it bears on everything, in general. The bus is a technology someone takes to get home from work, you know? Asphalt is technology too, anything can be — this cluster of stones around us... I wouldn't know what to say about technology without saying it's really in everything.
Now, the tools I use to make my music are still tools from the '90s. I don't stay up-to-date with technology itself, I mean, with the new things being used, maybe I'm not too up-to-date. Not just the new things being used to make music, but for recording too. I confess I still have a somewhat anachronistic relationship with these new things.
My last question is about the Mostra Filme Livre itself — you mentioned Tropa de Elite 4 screening at one of the festival's first editions, so I wanted to know how you see the importance of this festival not just for you individually, but for a kind of independent Brazilian cinema? And along those lines: do you plan on continuing to develop new projects specifically for film?
Man, cinema is madness, you know? Cinema entered my life kind of by chance, way back. Because I must have watched something that must have moved me, that's how things go in life, right? I had a group of friends in college, and I can name two important ones: Ricardo Pita and Luiz Augusto. And they were important, obviously, because you always need someone to reinforce or create some resonance around that emotional contact — when something moves you, you need someone to share that feeling with, right? So I'd go with these friends to screenings at the MAM Cinemateca between 2002 and 2009, while Gilberto Santeiro was still curating the Cinemateca and organizing the screenings and exhibitions.
And, like I told you before, I actually started with film even before music. But I don't have big... I don't have big ambitions with cinema in that sense. I made and took part in these films, but it's not something I... I think people, the public itself, doesn't even recognize me socially as a filmmaker, you know? Because in a way you need that kind of social recognition to carry something forward, you understand? Otherwise you're not — you only are what you're recognized as. People look at me and see a musician, a musical artist, not a filmmaker.
So I don't know if I have that kind of relevance in the field of cinema, and I do the things I do because I like doing them, I like thinking about cinema and thinking in images, even though I don't consider myself someone with a visual sensibility refined enough to be able to put one thing together with another, to create signs out of images, you know? It's a paradox: how can a guy with no visual sensibility manage, or at least aspire, to make films? Because that's my case. So I don't have big ambitions in the field of film, I'm doing my things simply because I'm doing them. I don't think I have big ambitions with anything, really, not with music or with film, I just think I'm actually a really lucky guy, that's it.
As for the Mostra Filme Livre, it's been around for many years, right? We must have made Tropa de Elite 4 in 2007 or 2008, so it screened at the fourth or fifth edition of the Mostra Filme Livre. I think its existence is really important, and the number of films it's showing. I just think it's a shame the screenings are so empty, but I think that's a generational thing, each generation changes. In my generation there were people who went to the movies a lot more because, damn it, there were no cell phones! There were no cell phones and the internet was still a precarious thing to use, you know? It was still basic, and it made a horrible noise.
And nowadays people watch films under a minute long, on TikTok, for example. So the public's sensibility has been reformatted for a different kind of experience of time in cinema. Time moves faster for people now, a film with long takes, an hour and a half or two hours, can't compete with something that's 20, 30 seconds long. So it becomes a question of accessibility for this new generation, so much so that if you look at the audience that was here, it was definitely in the 30-and-up age range. So, that's that.
Francisco Vidal is an actor and assistant director, based in Rio de Janeiro.