ortuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa makes flinty visual poems
addressed to the disenfranchised and disenchanted. He projects
empathy and envelops himself in the world of his subjects.
He tries to make films which transmit something truthful about the inner-
lives of others. Vitalina Varela is his latest masterpiece, a portrait of a
Cape Verdean widow who arrives in Portugal in search of her estranged
husband. Its story is carefully ripped from a tragic reality.LWLies: You usually come to London for screenings a few times in
between production on your films, but not this one. Costa: No, this was
very hard work. Very intense, long and difficult. [Costa regular and muse]
Ventura had two heart attacks over the last three years. That was very
serious so we had to stop.Was there healthcare provision for him? When he came to Portugal in
1971, he was very lucky to find a big construction company and, at that time,
they took care of the workers. They had everything. It’s not that savage.
He has a pension. We were about to start and we had rehearsed a lot and then
he has to go to hospital two times in one month. He had therapy and he was
very tired. Vitalina, while working, was not in great shape either. She could do
the work and she was interested and ‘there’, but the film is exactly what she was
experiencing, and sometimes she was very depressed and down at having to
face that. All his scenes were with her. It is very about her. This is her.Do you have insurance when you make films with fragile people like this?
No. We tried for different reasons. Most of the actors can’t do contracts,
because they have no papers. They’re not legal. One of the guys in the film
had lost his passport and his ID 15 years ago. So I asked, ‘why don’t you
take care of that?’ In a sense, they don’t need it to live where they live. It’s a
ghetto. Everything they need is there. They’re all bricklayers and masons.Have people been wary to work with you in that you’re part of an
institution? Vitalina said that when you first approached her she thought
you were the police. No, she thought I was with this guy she knew from the
neighbourhood. He said to me, ‘I know this house that I think you’ll like
for filming,’ and we went there and she thought both of us were from the
police. She was closed in to that house. She was in a prison. She didn’t open
the door. I remember saying that we’re doing a film, and this guy lives here.Are there places you won’t go in the ghettos? Not really, no. Let’s say, I
wouldn’t go at night to certain places without a reason. You have to havea reason. You could go to Fontaínhas in the old days when it was really
dangerous and dark and strange. You had to have a reason. See someone, buy
something, sell something. Just hang there with no one would be difficult.
It’s changed. Now, Lisbon and Porto have been living a sort of stable moment
of progress and development. But it’s all an illusion. Drugs are back. Heroin
is coming up again. That’s what they tell me, the dealers. We had a moment
of reflux, and now, because of the economic situation, it’s all coming back
a little bit. Now there are gangs. It’s not the old knife and alley thing now.
There are codes for this violence. It’s silent.You’re known for your work set in these ghettos, but there’s a striking
scene in Vitalina Varela that takes place in an airport. Well, yes, it was
Vitalina’s arrival. I can’t remember what I originally had in mind, but we
cut the scene to the bone. The door of the plane opens, the passengers
come down and she’s among them. Then she meets this group of cleaning
ladies who are working in the airport. This is more or less what happened
to her in reality. The dialogue and the ideas is exactly what happened.
They tried to send her back on the next plane, saying, ‘Don’t stay, this is
awful’. The way she looks, the way she appears in the plane, it was done very
quick. Nobody was looking. It’s one of those moments. I asked the guy, ‘I need
the door open and I want to see her there before the stairs come’. And he said,
‘No way, it doesn’t happen like that. People might fall.’ I remember telling
him, what about Tom Cruise? And the guy looked at me and said, what about
Tom Cruise? If it was Tom Cruise you’d let him stand there with the door
open. I told him, there’s no safety in those kind of films. So he went, ‘Well,
yeah, okay.’ And then he said he’d go and see if his boss needs him. And then
we shot it. So basically you can see that Vitalina is Tom Cruise.Shooting in these places must be strange for you. It’s exactly like in
Colossal Youth, Ventura sits down in the Gulbenkian museum. He sits down
on a 17th century French chair. There are signs all around it. Alarms go off.
Beforehand, the guard was looking at our work and he said it’s boring, eh?
Then we talk about football, Benfica. Then Ventura sits down and we do two
shots very quickly.Are your collaborators conscious of class disparity? Yes. I think they are
always conscious. Ventura, Vitalina, all of them. It’s not only museums, it’s
everywhere. It was worse before, now it’s a little better. They still belong to
the ghetto. They were all a little bit protected in Fontaínhas, and all the places,
because it’s the fear of getting in, but also getting out, anyone. It’s not the best
of worlds. The community is brokenPedro Costa
The poet of the Portuguese ghetto returns with Vitalina Varela,
a nakedly heartfelt paean to its heroic lead actor.
P
Interview by DAVID JENKINS Illustration by MARINA ESMERALDOINTERVIEW 059IN CONVERSATION