Oscar nominee Fernanda Torres on the emotion behind her role in 'I'm Still Here'

Transcript

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Geoff Bennett: The Brazilian film “I’m Still Here” will be vying this weekend for Oscars for best international film and best picture.

And its star, Fernanda Torres, already the winner in the best actress category at the Golden Globes, is also competing for an Oscar.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown talks with Torres for our arts and culture series.

Actor (through interpreter): Eunice. I’ll take it. You have to be in the photo

Jeffrey Brown: In the drama “I’m Still Here,” we meet the large and loving Paiva family living what appears to be a blissful domestic life near the beach in Rio de Janeiro. But this is 1970s Brazil, under a military dictatorship. And their world is about to be upended by the arrest and disappearance of husband and father Rubens, a former congressman.

Actor (through interpreter): Anyone else at home?

Fernanda Torres, Actress (through interpreter): No, just my children. They’re upstairs. There’s no need for weapons.

Jeffrey Brown: Fernanda Torres plays Eunice, his wife and mother of their five children.

Fernanda Torres: I think the essence of this film is endurance. They tried to erase this family, to say that they never existed. And this woman with five children, she endured in time. So I like to think that literature and cinema were not only to preserve memory, but to make this family forever remembered.

And this is quite a thing for art.

Jeffrey Brown: The film, directed by Brazilian Walter Salles, is based on the real-life Paiva family, whose story was told in a memoir by only son Marcelo in 2015, long after the end of military rule in 1985, and after the family learned officially what they already knew in reality, that Rubens had been tortured and murdered by the military authorities.

His body was never recovered.

Actor (through interpreter): Who is this here?

Fernanda Torres: Rubens.

Actor (through interpreter): See? It’s not hard.

Jeffrey Brown: In the film, we see Torres’ character, detained herself for days, fearing and fighting that reality, intent on finding her husband and keeping her family together.

Fernanda Torres: I think Eunice was a woman raised to be the perfect wife of the ’50s, and her utopian life, it’s over in a tragic and awful way. And it’s a woman that, after such a tragedy, in a very difficult time, she becomes herself.

Jeffrey Brown: What’s really striking in watching you is that so much of the emotion of this character has to be internal. How do you think about showing the emotion, but holding it back?

Fernanda Torres: I never thought it could be so powerful, you see, because, normally, as an Actor, you want to show how well you can feel, how well you cry, how well you scream, but, suddenly, you had this character that everything in her was about self-control, because she had five children, and she could not panic, she could not have like the Oscar scene where you cry and you scream.

And I never thought it could be so powerful. You see, it teach me a lot about acting.

Jeffrey Brown: Torres says she learned in part by studying the real Eunice Paiva, watching her in interviews throughout her life before she died in 2018. But Torres also had another example close by.

Her mother, Fernanda Montenegro, is a legendary figure in Brazilian theater and film, the first and, before her daughter, only Brazilian to receive an Oscar nomination for acting for her performance in the 1998 film “Central Station” also directed by Walter Salles.

And her mother, now 95, appears in “I’m Still Here,” playing her daughter’s character in the last years of her life.

So what is the most important lesson about acting you learned from your mother?

Fernanda Torres: Many years ago she told me that you cannot play a tragic character and start to cry in the first bad news, she told me. When you do a tragic character, you have to swallow and endure, swallow and endure.

And I remembered that vividly when I had to do Eunice Paiva. I said, that’s the key.

Jeffrey Brown: When it was released in Brazil in November, far right groups there called for a boycott of the film. But it’s become a major hit, raising questions about the country’s historic amnesia and the film’s continuing resonance.

Just this month, former President Jair Bolsonaro was charged with plotting a coup to overthrow his loss in the 2022 election.

What is your sense of how much or how little Brazilians have grappled with this painful past?

Fernanda Torres: You know, it lasted so long and it ended with an economical crisis and also with an arrangement that we all would forget what happened. And, in Brazil, it was called the amnesty. So Brazil never dealt with the crimes that happened during the dictatorship.

And we thought it was all over. But then, now, when the film was being released, we just discovered that there was a real attempt of a coup d’etat, military coup d’etat in Brazil.

Jeffrey Brown: The director, Walter Salles, said, that films like “I’m Still Here” can serve as — quote — “instruments against forgetting.”

Fernanda Torres: Because it has happened with this film and with this book. And, suddenly, this film in Brazil became a phenomenon of people from all kinds of beliefs. They all started to go to the movie theater and talk about the dictatorship and talk about, this is not right, I mean, to kill a family like this.

As it’s the story of a family, everybody can relate to that people, if you are young, to the young children, if you are a mother, to my character, if you are a father, to Rubens Paiva’s character. So something very special happened with this movie.

Jeffrey Brown: I mean, it’s got to be very fulfilling for you personally. It can’t happen very often in the life of an Actor.

Fernanda Torres: No, this is a very special moment. I don’t know in Brazil, and with the Oscars and the fact that my mother was nominated and now me. In a way, we are like — we are put in the place that Brazil normally dedicates to the soccer team.

(Laughter)

Jeffrey Brown: You’re bigger than soccer in Brazil right now? That’s big.

Fernanda Torres: That’s big. I cannot be bigger, but we are facing difficulties. So all the passion was put now in this movie and in this character and in this family. It’s very touching.

Go away! Where’s my husband? Go away!

Jeffrey Brown: Fernanda Torres and the film “I’m Still Here” compete for Oscars this Sunday night.

For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown.

Geoff Bennett: And for more coverage of all the Oscar nominated movies, as well as the Actors and directors who made them, check out our Web site at PBS.org/NewsHour.