An Infinite Dialogue

Margarida Cordeiro Interviewed by Anabela Moutinho

Anabela Moutinho: I would start by asking how you met António Reis? How long ago? And where? 

Margarida Cordeiro: I was studying in Porto. I went to high school and then did medical school there. One day, around the end of my degree, my brother Francisco invited me to a concert and poetry reading. I was bored and went along. My brother introduced me to a friend of his, the poet António Reis, who was a well-known person but whom I didn’t know personally. I immediately disliked him (Laughs). 

Why? 

Because he said something he shouldn’t have said. I was turned upside down that day. Although I was very young, I always had tremendous dark rings under my eyes, and I was very pale. He told me “You look awful!” That was in no way insulting, it was sincere, in a way even caring, but I took it as an attack on my physical appearance, and I treated him badly. Time went by, and one fine day, my brother brought me a book by Rainer Maria Rilke, a gift from António. That was the beginning of a very strange story. Only a Nabokov, or someone else, would be able to tell such a complicated story, full of twists and turns. 

Complicated, yet very strong... 

Indeed. From the beginning to the very end, which was unexplainable, and I still feel it very strongly. Six years have gone by, I still can’t look at his portrait or those of my brothers, who also died in tragic circumstances. In Ana, my brother plays a small role and I still can’t watch the film. António also appears briefly in Rosa de Areia – I’m glad I thought of telling him to play a little part. He had excellent diction. He was a good speaker and conveyed his thoughts well. People loved him... I’m glad he took part in the film. I’m the one who can’t watch it. I am no longer able to watch my films.

An unexplainable connection, you said...

Yes, like all intense relationships. It was and it is very strong. Like the connection with a beloved daughter or mother. We were both very affectionate people, yet completely different in character and in the way of expressing our feelings. When we met – in the 1960s, probably ’64 – I was an extremely shy person: I spoke very little, I was afraid of the public, of expressing my feelings. António, on the contrary, was an extrovert, although he had an intimate side as well. 

António opened up my horizons completely. There was a lot that he taught me, sometimes from his point of view, sometimes by awakening my own – I’m also a very active person, with my own interests in science. He wasn’t a scientist, but he liked to hear me talk. 

At that time, António had already written the so-called neorealist Poemas Quotidianos, about workers, dockers, rural women, and housewives. Later I also took a course in sociology and ethnography: I liked studying things outside the psychiatric field and I wanted to be at António’s level. At first, I was ignorant, although from a young age I read everything I could get my hands on. But I was far from having access to the things António knew. He was a revelation to me. 

We exchanged ideas about what we were both doing individually. We were a great pair. And so we had a thirty year relationship, always different, always intense, and always new. There was no chance of us getting bored, tired or saturated. In fact, even if we lived to be a hundred, there was no chance of that happening. 

Going back to when you met, did you live in Porto for a long time?

No, at that time we were living in Gaia – I had to cross the bridge from Gaia to Porto every day, to go to work. It was a time when I devoted myself to photography: houses, roofs... We’d walk for hours to Cabedelo, to Areinho, we’d eat shad, I learned to swim in the Douro river. It seems like a long time, but it was really four or five years. We moved to Lisbon. 

In your work, there’s a lot of references to Trás-os-Montes and the North. How did two people like you adapt to a city like Lisbon? 

Staying here was a choice. We were cut off from our family by a kind of “moral” punishment. My family cut me off because António was a married man. I didn’t see them for fifteen years. As for the fact that we only made films in Trás-os-Montes (we were thinking of making another one there), it was only because things were closer to us there and easier to translate into the art of cinema. We wanted to make another one in Trás-os-Montes and then explore other things, but we didn’t have the means. And after all these years I’ve been trying to make another film without being able to. 

In the art world, if you make a film a year or every two years, you naturally cover a wide range of interests. We, who were “rich inside” (and there’s no immodesty in me saying this), would inevitably have come to address other subjects. Because we were limited to four films and this region, we became associated with Trás-os-Montes; I don’t mind that at all, but there were other projects. 

During those years in Porto, before you two met, António directed some short films. Did you watch them?

Only Painés do Porto, nothing else. He told me later that he preferred not to claim these early films. 

Why? 

I couldn’t tell. I watched them and thought they were documentaries. I don’t know what date it is. António was very good friends with the photographer António Mendes, who made Douro, Faina Fluvial, by Manoel de Oliveira (1931). That passion he had for images, for shadows, for photogeny... António showed me those films at a time when we hadn’t yet thought of directing. He said he’d like to make another film in a more complex vein. When we both started directing, he said those didn’t count for him. 

Was there something in Painéis do Porto relatable to the films you and António directed together? 

Not really. There was something humorous and ironic about it, which we never had the opportunity to work on. António was a person whose sense of humor was not very noticeable, although he had a fantastic sense of humor, and in Painéis do Porto this facet came to the fore. Then there was sometimes a tragic sense of life. We didn’t have time to go into the ironic and perhaps “playful” part of life. 

As a member of the Cineclube do Porto, António also participated in O Auto da Floripes. 

I don’t know much about it. I remember that he was an assistant in Acto da Primavera.

What did he tell you about that experience?

António loved the filming because they were real peasants. I think the making of the film was more interesting to him than the film itself. Oliveira was a bit tyrannical, not very communicative about what he wanted to do, and António noticed that. But he really enjoyed filming because of people’s daily lives. 

That attention that António devoted to others was also noticeable in his work at Escola Superior de Cinema and in his work collecting popular poetry. 

He liked teaching. He had a special way. He didn’t talk much about the school at home, but as he loved the students, he talked a lot about them. There was an exchange with them. He was a great friend and companion even outside of the class. António loved talking to people. Instead of taking notes, he preferred to talk. It has always been his biggest “flaw”: “The moment is what matters.” Actually, I don’t know if it’s a flaw or not. He didn’t systematize anything, just collected this and that, like this extraordinary quatrain he collected from an illiterate poet called Joaquim António Lança, a little man from Alentejo who plowed a field: 

Every living being cries 
A complaint runs through.  
When one day life dies  
Death dies then too. 

And what is your opinion about António’s poetry? Do you think it was a social poetry, attentive to people, just like him?

Thinking retrospectively, I would say he was a neorealist at the time, in a way like some architects, painters and poets from the Porto area with whom he got along very well. António already had a certain culture that I didn’t have. His environment was made up of friendships. He was a member of the Cineclube do Porto, had a political activity. He spoke to the workers, went to the factories. He also did poetry readings, and was an enthusiastic promoter of poetry – his own and that of other authors – from a very young age. In addition, he would talk about many other things as he was a born teacher. He gave a lot of himself, and was an extremely cultured person, who studied sociology, sculpture, painting every day... In my opinion, he was the best art critic we had. 

Did he write criticism? 

Only some columns in newspapers and magazines. For a period, he worked in journalism, as a special correspondent. He went to the Nordic countries and wrote some columns there. He wasn’t ambitious. António promoted poetry because he thought there were a lot of people who didn’t have money to buy books (the most typical example was himself, who, having been born into a reasonably rich family, suddenly became poor due to an issue of forged inheritance papers, resulting in him being left with nothing). In his youth, he walked from Valadares to Porto, and returned, with just a loaf of bread to eat. Hence his authority to speak. António copied books by hand (there were no photocopies at the time). Friends who had money for books lent them and he even copied books of five hundred, a thousand pages... It was a poor time that he went through, but it didn’t stop him from deepening his knowledge. Once he did something live for TV (he only participated because it was live, as he was afraid of cuts). His appearance wasn’t very long, but from then on people got to know him. 

Do you remember what he talked about? 

Not really. I remember he ignored the context of the conversation and took advantage of being on air to address people directly. Since we were living with a certain difficulty, I thought it would be good for him to work on television, using the skills he had and talking about art, culture and other important things. I never managed to convince him. 

Moving on to your film practice, how did you go about it? 

I can’t talk about that. First, because it is very difficult to verbalize the way we worked – it’s difficult for me, since it’s still very close. And, second, there was an erasure of my person in Portugal, which created problems between me and António. There are a lot of people out there who even say that António put my name in the films just because we lived together. The people who filmed with us – and the teams are always big – knew perfectly well that the accusation was false, because I worked at least half. If it weren’t like that, I wouldn’t sign off, as happened with Jaime. I was a director just like him, but I didn’t want to put my name on it because most of the ideas on how to film came from António. The idea for the film was mine, but it was António who practically solved almost all the cinematographic problems. So, honestly, I couldn’t put my name on it. 

But let me say it again: I did at least half of the work, and in Portugal it was systematically António who did the talking – especially because at that time I spoke little. He would ask me to come and speak, but I was so afraid of people and the public... Therefore, it was easy, in a sexist environment like this, for my name to be dropped frequently. And sometimes it created problems because António would say, “Don’t forget to put Margarida’s name.” And they would sometimes repeat it in a loud tone. “Okay, we won’t forget Margarida.” 

One day, the room – huge, in Berlin – was completely full, and I almost stuttered but, after the film, I was able to speak for the first time. But even so, around here, they continued to say António Reis’s cinema. When I said “it was at least half,” I don’t mean 50 percent of it being my work and 50 percent his. We were both, each of us, responsible for 100 percent of each film. 

It was a kind of infinite dialogue. We communicated, not by copying things from other people, but by exchanging small things, comforting ourselves in knowing that there were people (poets, writers) who were our fellow travelers. Things that “rhymed” a little with us (meaning no disrespect), like René Char or Rilke or Jean Follain. Until the end we exchanged experiences, ideas, impressions. 

Did you plan everything? 

Everything. But it wasn’t written. There were “notes” of the most complicated scenes, there were even drawings: the film camera, things related to sound (we always opted for synchronous sound; it is much more difficult to do, but it is also truer). Between us, we talked all the time. Everything was schematized, we even did a stereotaxic scheme before filming. And each scene had its name and within each scene we talked about each shot. So it was between the two of us that we spoke. We had everything prepared in our heads, but since reality is always different from what we think, we had room for improvisation. We were prepared so that, if something interesting happened, we would catch the occasion “on the fly” – and often the unforeseen was incorporated instead of predicted. 

Do you remember concrete examples? 

Watching the films would remind me. When I do it I remember everything, step by step. I consider Trás-os-Montes to be epic because we never saw rushes of any films (we never had the chance), and Trás-os-Montes was put together by us, in black-and-white, step by step, while we remembered the colors. Only at the end did someone else help. 

As for the narrative dimension of your films, it is known that it is not linear at all. 

There were narratives, in all of them. There are several levels of stories and nonstories and there are many counterpoints. We compared our films to music, not in the visual aspect, of course, but in the production aspect, in the structure of the work, which is something unprecedented in Portugal. Our films, except Jaime, are made like music. But this idea only came to us later, when analyzing the architecture of the films we made. We realized that we were doing something new, in cinema, and that people didn’t understand. They said we had no stories when there were thousands. There were sketches – just like in a musical fugue – in which we picked up the theme later or it was modified along with other characters, but in the place where the first ones had been. 

The sound – the sounds – are also designed this way in any of the films. Now even more so in our planned adaptation of Pedro Páramo, which is all done that way. A brother of mine who was a doctor and really liked poetry gave me the book and said, “Take it, I discovered a good book for you.” I read it, then I passed it on to António and we fell in love with it because it was what we were doing. It was a different sort of game, because we had always started from ourselves, from our own experience, from the films we had already made. 

Can you infer – from this idea of “musical architecture” present in your films – that the most important thing in your work was the moment of editing, or, on the contrary, was it the moment before the filming itself, the moment of planning? 

Trying to order it by importance, I would say that the main moment in any of our films is the shooting, which is what gives such great pleasure, so much so that there was no need to pay us to make a film. This is the pivotal moment of any film, in terms of work – the most exhausting, but the one that gives the most pleasure. The second most important moment would be the preparation of the images; the third, would be the assembly. Editing is extremely creative, of course, and I think people don’t realize how difficult it is, but I would put the assembly in third place.

But what was it like between you when you were shooting? Was there a kind of “click,” a look... 

Not always. But we were in continuous communication. And there was really the problem of the actual filming. For example, I was never the one giving orders on stage; it was a bit strange, but when I tried to do it, there were some smiles... In the last film we made (Rosa de Areia) they called us the Cordeiros, rather than the Reis. This made us uncomfortable. So, although I was upset, I didn’t give orders to the crew. Not because António didn’t want it but because of the other men on the team. And I didn’t want to disturb António. I did it out of love. One day Joaquim Pinto told me something different: “I admire you. I went to make a film in Nicaragua whose director was a woman and no one listened to her. The orders were given by the assistant directors who had nothing to do with the ideas of the film.” That led me to think that I had been doing well enough.

Thinking about the stylistic content of your films, a little while ago you talked about filming the real thing...

Cinema’s biggest mistake is simplifying reality. You need to decide on how to clean up the visual field, how to perform a rigorous reorganization of the real. The reality filmed by us is not simplified, it is complexified – so much so that the film has not one reality, it has many. Our image is not dry. The most common cinema uses dialogue, in a shot/reverse shot system. We never did that. We even had characters with their back turned to the camera in some cases. Therefore, we tried to take reality and create another reality – a complex one. It’s taking the real and adding what we feel, which has nothing to do with neorealism. Cinema is this “giving something”. To give to it what makes us live. Like The Wind (Victor Sjöström, 1928) or L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934): we don’t really watch them, we are “lived” by them. That’s what cinema is about. 

Critics unanimously point out a poetic quality in your work. Where does it come from? 

I think it has to do with our attitude toward art, whatever it may be. “And the greatest art is the art of living,” as Rilke, or Follain, or Lefebvre, or Nazal said. They were people who defended art in life. Their theory is, roughly speaking, that we are imperfect beings, society is imperfect, there are social inequalities and these things concern me as the social being that I am. One day living together will be an art, going for a walk will be an art, cooking will be an art, everything will be an art. Until that fairer society arrives, we have to read books, listen to music... António was a very coherent person, and that’s why he practiced art in life. 

Let us now move on to a more detailed analysis of each of the films. As for Jaime, did you know Jaime Fernandes personally? 

I didn’t know him. When I started working in the hospital, he had died a month before. I saw a ballpoint drawing on the wall – psychotic art – and I realized it wasn’t a reproduction. And I began a search that allowed us to gather a hundred drawings, in pencil, mercurochrome, and other materials. He used all the materials they gave him, even bread crumbs. Jaime had a psychosis, there weren’t the medications we have today, he lived there thirty-odd years and only at the end did his life begin to take shape. He had never drawn back in his village, as we were able to conclude from the research we carried out. His pictorial work only really took place on that occasion in the hospital. And there were a hundred or so drawings. 

You filmed pages handwritten by Jaime, in his idiosyncratic spelling, which you “translated” for the viewer. The sentence that you read as “Nobody, just me” it could also be “Nobody. It’s me.” Were you advised by people who knew Jaime and who understood his way of writing?

No, no. When I arrived at the hospital, there were no modern treatments, Jaime’s care was mere physical restraint. Jaime had passed on from hand to hand and I found his medical history. I don’t think he was well cared for, and no one could really translate his texts. Those are delirious writings, out of reason. We have to take it at face value, that’s what he writes and that’s it – and for us it served to show a different form of logic. We also decided to show them due to the calligraphy, and the paper in which he wrote, yellowed with age; all that had a visual value. 

I would never analyze something like that in a current patient. Jaime had that illness, he had delusions like all schizophrenics. He was born at the wrong time – if he had other support now, he would certainly be living among his own, supported by medication that didn’t exist at the time. 

Is there no connection with the films that followed it? 

There is in the sense of the evolution that I have already mentioned, that is, Trás-os-Montes was our first film, which could be only followed by Ana and Rosa de Areia after that. Because from a formal point of view we were refining, decanting, so that people liked Rosa de Areia less because it is purer and more rigorous, and more complicated, than Trás-os-Montes. People think it is a cold film – I think it is our most perfect. This is a learning process. You can only learn by doing. You can only write by writing, you can only paint by painting, you can only play by playing. It is by living that you learn to live. Although there are people who have made thirty films and don’t learn anything from one to the other (Laughs). 

What is your memory of them? 

Trás-os-Montes was a celebration. For me it’s intoxicating to make a film – it’s a passion. Trás-os Montes was a celebration, as we were busy working. It was an immense pleasure and we were like children – it was the first time that had happened to us. In Ana we were already more mature, we already had some experience, and therefore we got things right more quickly. And then with Rosa de Areia it was much easier. It’s like having three children – by the third, the mother has already had time to learn.

Was there any objective in those three films of yours? 

We had no objective. Our cinema was an accumulation of experiences we had and experiences are strongly emotional. We tried to take a lot of things from our lives and give it shape. Everything in the movies took place. Nothing was invented, except for the filming surprises. It all happened personally or to people close to us. And these things that we experience in our body are passed on to the characters as our alter egos. All that happened. But it just happened in a different space and time. Things from my experience, from António’s, from my family’s. Then it all came together, so that it was organic. Such things call each other by affinities, contrasts, by contiguity. A character in a certain film is experiencing something that happened to someone – and because it was experienced by that someone, it has an intensity and a truth, because things have to be well thought out, well experienced, and even well dreamed. And above all, we talked to each other, trying to observe better. We were two people thinking and feeling, and we had a very open critical attitude. I think we functioned as one person. It’s difficult to do this, but there are other people – the Straub couple and perhaps the Taviani brothers. There is great trust, no rivalry, a lot of esteem and critical sense – and this ended up working out, wonderfully. 

There were big gaps of time between some of our films.

Because we didn’t have any money. We would have done more and in other directions. For example, I like the sea and we could have done one about the sea – a huis clos. 

And do you think António would have followed you on a project like that?

I think so. António’s ideas were extreme and very linked to real life, politics, and social life. At first glance this is quite practical, but on the other hand there was an unbridled enchantment with life and poetry.

It was no coincidence that your work always generated a stir around it. First of all, with Jaime, which was subject to censorship by the fascist regime.

I don’t know about the censorship, but I do remember the problems that Jaime’s family, his widow and children, raised with the issue of his copyright in relation to the drawings. But the drawings were not in our possession, they were just borrowed. As for the controversy around Trás-os-Montes, it had to do with our naivety. As I already told you, the making of the film was epic for us – many kilometers scouting, very little money to support it, editing only with the memory of color... And when we finished it, we thought that the people up there, those who had participated, who did not have access to cinema, should see it first. We were idealists. We took a lot of people – people we knew from the hospital, people António knew – and we went to Bragança. The premiere went well. But then we went to Miranda, where there was no theater at all and, therefore, we projected the film on a white wall in the square there. Most people were standing, we were sitting in a kind of council hall, and it went well... People said some things, but we didn’t quite understand what they meant... After a few days, they flooded the powers that be with letters, saying that it was a film that didn’t show anything that was good, that it only showed the region’s backwardness, it didn’t show roads, it didn’t show tractors, it didn’t show what they considered progress. And that was distressing for us, because we wanted to show the film, candidly, to the people who performed in it and the others in those villages – they were all invited, of course. It was a way of thanking them, especially because they worked for nothing, almost nothing, symbolic payments and some didn’t even want any payment. So, this reaction made us realize that not everyone was able to understand the effort we had made. But we ended up discovering that the people who did this, who wrote these protests, were the bigwigs of the region, the ones who should say to us: “If you really see Trás-os-Montes like this, it’s because Trás-os-Montes needs to be helped, centrally or otherwise.”

Was it then more a reaction from the established local authorities than from the inhabitants?

Exactly, not the inhabitants. We tried to find out who were those individuals who challenged the film, and they were people who voted extremely right-wing, who didn’t like the peasants being shown, the plowing of the field, the degraded roads – which we didn’t film just because they were degraded, but for being bucolic too. It didn’t even cross our minds to make any appeal to the Lisbon authorities. We did what we wanted to do. We didn’t have an overtly political principle. But they came to associate us with the Communist Party. 

But have you ever had any partisan involvement? 

No, although our vote has always been to the left. And now I’m even more so. Marx said very important things and explained that economic reality is fundamental, it’s a bedrock. That’s true, in that sense I’m a bit of a Marxist.

So, those who participated in the film didn’t react badly?

No. Most of them were amazed. Entering a film, the various takes, all that movement... People don’t know what ends up in the film. For example, when we did the first rushes – which were the only ones we saw – they showed Mariana harvesting (Ana). The images were beautiful, but they were repeated – they were takes. There were a lot of people in the room, I remember that they were completely silent, and I realized at that time – it was even stronger than in the theater – that those images were so beautiful. Without sound, the light nearing sunset, so golden, we were left looking at them just thinking, “What a beautiful thing!” In the film it is no longer so beautiful, because it loses strength due to what comes behind and what comes in front. And that’s how it should be. But in the rushes the images were naked, in blocks – like a quarry. It was a shock for me and other people. 

But returning directly to your question, what people found strange was all that hustle and bustle – cars from one side to the other, no time for lunch, orders and counterorders, “now let’s film – shh!,” and then watch what remained of everything. They had no idea. So there were comments like “So when we watch a film, it takes all this effort?!” They were very candid questions from adults, who for the first time realized that seeing something on TV or in the cinema is the result of extremely difficult work. And when we told them that a second in cinema can take a day to make, they were absolutely amazed: they couldn’t fathom it. 

I imagine that most of the performers were illiterate. How did they memorize what they had to say?

With our help. They had been chosen for their voice, their diction, and their posture. We told them: “Be yourself and say this.” And, as you can see, it’s not a documentary, but it is absolutely natural. I mean, it’s not exactly everyday life, but it’s not theater either. It’s a middle tone that we knew the chosen characters would have. The importance of each bit they should say was broadly explained to them in reference to the larger scene, so that they could be comfortable in that environment. 

When rewatching Trás-os-Montes, it became even more evident to me that, with one or two exceptions, in all framing of people – whatever the type of shot, angle, whether or not there is camera movement – they are always centered. Were people the center of that film? 

Undoubtedly. I don’t know what our choice was, but when people are lost in landscape, they are no more than an element. But when they are close to us, we give them special importance – because we are the ones who see the world. We are, whether we like it or not, anthropocentric, and the aim would be to give a little bit of dignity to the person within that immense landscape. If there was any truly conscious purpose in our choice, I don’t remember. 

I’d like to discuss that scene in Trás-os-Montes where the girl says goodbye to her father.

That’s a true story. This is an example of what I already told you: the stories in our films are all true stories. They are fragments of stories (this fragmentation is more noticeable in Rosa de Areia, which is why I prefer it), small stories that curiously concern our lives, whether António’s or mine. As to this particular story, the girl actually happened to be my mother. My mother was an illegitimate daughter and her father went to Argentina, where he lived for many years. When he came back he wanted to meet her – my mother is that girl. One fine day he left again, and my mother told me many times, “I spent half an hour saying goodbye to my father, on a very long straight road.” As we were filming, we suddenly saw a beautiful road – which wasn’t the original road, of course – and we transmuted that story. They said the shot was too long... 

On the contrary, it seems to me that it has just the right amount of time to disturb us! And it’s an entire sequence without sound...

Because what dialogue could we put there? What do a father and daughter say when they say goodbye, especially under those circumstances? They come from under that chestnut tree, raising all that dust – which I think is beautiful visually, and sometimes that visual element just has to stay, because it ends up giving a new dimension to a story that would have been different – and then they say goodbye forever.

There are two departures in this film: one is what you just talked about; the other occurs in the penultimate scene, when the train tears up the screen. Perhaps to accentuate the cut between the people who live there and those leaving, there is a sort of diagonal, oblique perspective that crosses the screen.

In that shot of the train there is actually an opening of the lens and a movement that makes the train pass beneath us and sweep across the screen... At first it was very beautiful because you could clearly see the distinction between a dovecote and the sky, in the early morning (5:00-6:00 a.m.) – now the prints are too dark, you don’t “read” the trees so well, you don’t see through the smoke so well... It was a single take. 

And the fact that children always carried a chromatic stain on their clothing or accessories – usually red – did it simply have a visual purpose or did it also have some symbolic meaning?

Everything is symbolic. The people there used to dress darkly without fail: gray, brown... Women who got married automatically dressed in dark brown. The children didn’t. They had a lot of freedom in terms of bows, bibs, and caps; mothers would make clothes in bright colors for the children. It’s a cultural phenomenon there, because getting married meant becoming settled, becoming cataloged. It was really useful to us, because color punctuation is like a note in a symphony. So we didn’t force the facts – we just concentrated them. For example, the beautiful colors you saw in a village were the colors (parsley green or the red of the heart of Jesus) of the procession banners through the dark granite streets...

You never used professional actors, except for small appearances. Either casting, let’s say, common people, villagers, or, later, your friends, this is a hallmark of your practice. How was your choice made? Was it merely for emotional reasons?

Starting with Trás-os-Montes, Miló’s name is Luís Ferreira, he must be in his thirties now, he works at the Árvore cooperative. His father is an architect, Manuel Ferreira, and he lent us the house for Ana and Rosa de Areia, a fantastic manor house, in Palácios – we filmed there twice. It has an interior courtyard and columns. The architect’s mother appears in the film, sitting in a corner. 

Miló became very attached to me, he was ten years old, his mother had died recently. The other little boy, Armando, was found by us at the Bragança Seminary. We went in to choose a boy, there were about five hundred, we both started looking and we both stopped, naturally without agreeing beforehand, on Armando: “This is the one!” His mother was mentally ill, he had to go to the seminary, where he learned the goldsmithing trade and is currently a partner in a goldsmith shop in Bragança. I meet him every year. He married a teacher and has a little girl. 

Albino, that shepherd at the beginning, was sixteen years old (not ten), but as he was very poor he was small and we even forgot that he was sixteen. In any case, they were like my children. I didn’t have children yet and I was always with them, each by my side – Luís and Armando. 

Ana was only born in August 1977, and in Ana she’s on the rocking horse because she wasn’t able to sit still, she was four years old... The other girl was also Luís’s cousin. In fact, we used the people there a lot. We chose nonprofessional actors who were photogenic. A cousin of mine is in Ana, he looked a lot like my brother and he plays a doctor. I didn’t even know that cousin, but he had my brother’s demeanor. They all received very little pay.

As for the Rosa de Areia sequence that your producer José Mazeda gave us, and which led to the poster... There you are, Margarida, composing the petals to prove the concept according to which cinema, as art, must construct and complexify reality, that all art is manipulation.

It was Carlos Teresinho, who is a driver by profession (he was involved in the scouting and later in the making of the film), who arranged them. We needed red petals and Trás-os-Montes doesn’t have many roses, and he got up at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning and walked, in the dark (he saw the poppy field and, as a good country man, he knew he couldn’t harvest during the day, as the petals would fall), he picked up as many as he could and carried them by the dozens in bags. 

In Rosa de Areia we still had to wait for the sun, sometimes for a whole day, and Zé (Mazeda) always said to me, “Do you know how much this minute is costing?” (Laughs). And Zé walked past me all day, with the damn stopwatch, saying, “Margarida, do you know how much just this little bit cost me? Do you know how much you are losing? Look, this costs that much, that thing that much...” (Laughs). All day. António had a different attitude toward him. But it was worth being stubborn! 

Rosa de Areia is the first film in which your name comes first and then António’s. Why? 

The story is very simple. In Jaime I was an assistant director, António wanted me to put my name on it, but, and I explained why I didn’t do it. I was an apprentice. In the second and third films, logically, I put my name after his. This went very well abroad, but in Portugal our leading lights would sometimes put my name at the end of an article and other times they didn’t even mention me. Sometimes it was difficult for me, because I worked, and what’s mine is mine. And António was very annoyed, always calling their attention to it, and they would joke about it. And so, we decided it like this: “In this film you put your name first (Margarida) and me second. And then in Pedro Páramo it would have been reversed.” This is the sad story of this reversal. Just for this. Just that. The collaboration was always the same, from one to the other.

We’re coming to an end. I would say that there seems to be a kind of progressive fictionalization of your films. They have no story, yet they seem to tell stories. There appears to be a progressive abstraction in terms of theme and form, while maintaining an urgency to tell stories... Do you consider your cinema realistic or, on the contrary and as some would like, metaphysical?

For me it’s realistic. I’m fundamentally a realist, a Marxist in a certain sense; even if it is not politically correct to say so today. I refuse transcendence. I don’t believe in anything. 

There are also those who talk about pantheism in your films...

I don’t think so. Pantheism means that everything is God. As I like physics, I truly believe in science, I don’t need to invent other things. Reality is so fantastic! ... Since I oppose Catholicism (which did me a lot of harm, I only freed myself from it when I was twenty-three), I make sure to read extensively about religions, to get my bearings. The ideas of death, of punishment, are very raw, very concrete. I have no thoughts of things that surpass us. If there is such a thing, it is because we are incomplete animals. There are realities that we do not “digest.”

Our films were not mystical. And António was an atheist. There is a form of “secret,” but in the true sense of the word – all things have importance, even the petty life we lead. Everything is sacred. And I can tell you who my favorite philosopher is: Novalis. He died young and for him life was sacred.

And is death also a sacred thing, in your films?

Yes. That scene in Ana (of death from bleeding)... my grandmother, who was a mother to me, agonized for twelve days, without a complaint, with a stroke... and that is actually why I went into medicine. I come from humble origins – and I like that – and I thought I could save, not mother Umbelina but other mothers. She died knowing she was going to die – and I thought it was so atrocious, for a woman who was a saint, to die like that, that it made me conclude that no God could exist who would do such an ugly thing. And then at that point I even fell a little bit into nihilism, a horrible phase of my adolescence. I then disconnected from religion as a believer and started studying the history of religions. They all center around two things: sex and death. It is a masterful blow against women. Sex is scary; hence, let’s enslave women and they will control themselves (now they are freeing themselves, even in an exaggerated way, sometimes). And as for death, which is really a very strange point for everyone, people need to face this horror; religion is there to say: “There is another life. You obey your bosses, because ‘there’ you have paradise.” Religions are always on the side of those in charge. And the more I study, the more I become convinced of this. 

And why am I not afraid of death? Because I, as a doctor, know that my body is, broadly speaking, in a continuous process of life and death. I know that my six-year-old body has already died, and my fifteen-year-old body, and my twenty-five-year-old body, and so on. As Jaime says, “I’ve died here eight times already” (patients often tell the truth...). Therefore, the body we die with is the last dress we wear. 

Death seems to me, in fact, to be a constant theme, an obsession, or even a guiding thread in your work. Jaime had already died, in the literal sense of the term. In Trás-os-Montes, as we discussed, every farewell is a symbolic death. In Ana there is this process of death in life, or of life that is transferred from those who die to those who remain. In Rosa de Areia, there is that beautiful and harrowing moment when “humanity” crawls into a lake of blood.

It was a central theme. A recurrent theme, really, between me and António. Pedro Páramo takes place in a village, and the author himself says, “This one is alive, and that other one too.” Others say, “No one is alive.” And others yet say “Everyone is alive.” And I dare say, “Everyone is dead!” We were heading toward a place that would be the endpoint of these questions. 

As always, funding was the issue, right?

Yes. Jaime was made almost for free. For Trás-os Montes they gave us very little money, because we didn’t have to pay almost anyone. There is no one in the cinema industry who has spent as little money as we have making films. That’s what really irritates me. And that’s why I’m determined that, if I don’t do Pedro Páramo, which was supposed to be a gift for António, and since I’m painting a picture of every sequence us two imagined, when all this work is finished, I’ll do an exhibition. In honor of António. Simple as that.

Lisbon. August 27, September 6, and September 20, 1997.