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Interview: João Pedro Rodrigues on The Last Time I Saw Macao

The filmmaker’s latest creates an aura of intrigue, mostly from documentary footage aided by an ominous voiceover.

Interview: João Pedro Rodrigues on The Last Time I Saw Macao
Photo: Blackmaria

It’s been a busy year for João Pedro Rodrigues: His latest film, The Last Time I Saw Macao, which premiered in Locarno in August, is currently screening at festivals worldwide, from New York to Rio de Janeiro, where Rodrigues is being honored with a retrospective at the International Film Festival.

Red Dawn, a short film that Rodrigues shot in Macao last year, is a companion piece to The Last Time I Saw Macao. But if Red Dawn is a straightforward account of a Chinese fish and meat market, where in the wee hours the offloading of live produce and the quick, mechanical slaughter allow customers to pick food while it’s still alive and oozing blood, The Last Time takes a less gory, more labyrinthine approach. Shot on digital camera, with a crew of four, including Rodrigues and co-director João Rui Guerra da Mata, the film creates an aura of intrigue, mostly from documentary footage aided by an ominous voiceover. Macao looks grainy and desolate, as the unidentified narrator, whose face we never see, checks into a dinky hotel, hoping to meet and possibly rescue his old friend, Candy. But Candy is as elusive as the crimes she’s embroiled in; in an increasingly apocalyptic plot, the gang that pursues her transports mysterious white-cloth-covered birdcages. Part noir, part art-house Blair Witch Project, with a distinctly Pynchonesque wry humor, The Last Time is a movie to both get lost and to delight in.

I sat down to talk with Rodrigues on a hotel terrace overlooking Copacabana Beach, the day he was leaving Rio for New York.

How did you pick Macao as your subject?

João Rui Guerra da Mata, my co-director, lived there as a child. He left in 1975, after the revolution in Portugal. His stories about Macao sounded like fictions, or adventures, since they were childhood memories. I knew Macao from films, pictures, and literature, as a Portuguese colony. I had a fictional idea, and the film was born from the confrontation of these two fictions: João’s and mine. When I finished To Die Like a Man, we applied for money for a documentary. The Last Time started as a very low-budget film. We went to the places that João remembered. Since we had very few constraints, we’d always end up taking a different route. The city started to tell us stories. Macao is very labyrinthine; we enjoyed being lost and basically shot everything we liked. We spent six months over a period of three years and had 150 hours of material, so it was a very long process of editing; we were lost for a long time.

In the film, Candy, a performer and singer, summons her friend to Macao, to rescue her from danger. As soon as he arrives, she disappears into the city’s maze of mystery and crime. How did this fictional murder story emerge?

Josef von Sternberg’s film, Macao, from 1952, was our starting point, though it’s not a very good or a characteristic Sternberg film; it was finished by Nicholas Ray. It starts with the documentary shots of the city, but then is totally shot in Hollywood. We had the idea to do the opposite: to shoot on location but to reinvent it. Also, while we were shooting our film, Jane Russell, the star of Sternberg’s film, died. Her death resonated with us. Cindy Scrash, who plays Candy, has this glamorous aura of the ’40s and ’50s, but also of Andy Warhol. I’ve known her for a long time and the letters read in the film could be from her, even though they’re not true.

So Cindy is a mix of a glamorous, a bit kooky star, and someone you know.

Yes. I also personally liked the idea of getting out of Portugal, especially now, with the economic crisis, which is quite oppressive. In Portugal, we’re just waiting for things to get better.

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How did you settle on the film noir genre?

I’ve always liked mixing genres. My last film, To Die Like a Man, is a mix of melodrama with war movie with musical, and some comedy. I liked the idea of playing with conventions. The images that you see in The Last Time and the sound could almost be independent. We wanted to make a more experimental film, reinventing the conventions of film noir so, for example, you have the voiceover, but you don’t see the persons narrating. We couldn’t contradict the original desire to make a documentary film, but we turned it on its head: It’s not a documentary, but it is one, because in any documentary there’s a point of view—it’s not impartial. This film is our point of view, but playful. It becomes apocalyptic. Around 2012 there were so many blockbuster movies about the end of the world. So we tried to make our film in contrast to these blockbusters that had so much money for special effects—a homemade apocalyptical film, editing images in a playful and ironic way.

Why did it end up being a fiction?

I guess from the start I wasn’t interested in making a documentary about Macao. But even in Red Dawn, a documentary about the way people work in an Asian market, which is quite brutal and bloody, there are hints of fiction. Some shots appear in both films. I like the idea of films echoing each other: To understand something you need to see the next film, not because it’s cryptic, but to understand it better.

Your earlier films, O Fantasma, Odete, To Die Like a Man, all have powerful characters. In The Last Time, we face the absence of character.

Perhaps this feeling comes from João Rui, because Macao he remembered isn’t there anymore. But I don’t think that the film is nostalgic. We didn’t want to make a film that is about how the old times were the good times. Cities change, it’s the way things go. But João Rui is going back to the city that doesn’t exist anymore, so the film talks about invisibility. Portuguese is still one of the official languages; there are signs in Portuguese, but almost nobody speaks it. Yet Macao has that feeling of a small village, where everybody knows everybody. It’s still a bit of a colonial thing.

And the mysterious cage?

It’s something that you see a lot in China. The Chinese bring their birds in cages to parks, where they lift the white cloth for the sun to get in. We wanted something that’s part of the daily life in Macao, not at all mysterious to the people there. By playing with the daily object, we wanted to make it mysterious. So you’re seeing people exchange cages. You don’t know what’s inside, but in the end, when Candy opens the cage, the light comes in, and she turns into an animal. This ties to Asian beliefs about reincarnation, but there’s also irony: This world is so fucked up perhaps it would be nicer if we were animals. My next film is about a guy who watches birds. In all my films, there’s the question of what’s animalistic in human behavior. In The The Last Time, everything is destroyed, but the animal survives.

There are no actual actors in The Last Time. In fact, you’ve said before that you don’t really like working with professional actors?

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I love Robert Bresson and he never used actors; he called them models. Actors are complicated. I’m not that interested in developing psychology in my films, and there’s a lot of that with actors who work in theater. I think that’s bullshit. The main thing is to find the people who can personify your characters.

How do you then give non-professionals the confidence to act?

We rehearse a lot; it’s a question of trust. I start looking for my actors in very early stages, sometimes during script writing. In the end, I think that if I hadn’t found them, I wouldn’t have been able to make the film. There’s this kind of risk.

But in Odete a professional actress played the main part.

Ana Cristina de Oliveira. She was modeling in L.A.; she’d done some small parts. I’d met her through Portuguese artist Julião Sarmento, who had made a video with her. I started to think she could play the strange woman that I had in mind, so I wrote the script. But in my last film, To Die Like a Man, there are no actors; they’re drag performers. Before writing the script, I did a lot of interviews. I was not friends with transvestites or transsexuals, but I met people. I wanted to make a work of fiction, but inspired by stories that people tell you.

Critics sometimes refer to the Lisbon school of cinema. Is there a consistent aesthetic among filmmakers like you, Teresa Villaverde, or Miguel Gomes?

I’ve worked on some of Teresa’s films. Miguel, we came from the same film school; we all more or less know each other, but I don’t know that you can talk about Portuguese cinema as a whole. There is, of course, the shadow of Manoel de Oliveira.

His early film and shorts are also being shown this year in Rio. How has he influenced you?

My desire to make films came from watching films, and his were the ones I liked most. He has always made the films he wanted to make. That’s the characteristic of the more interesting people in Portuguese cinema: They’re truthful to themselves and they’re not commercially oriented. Everyone has to survive, but it’s not the American model where films need to have certain things to bring in more money. There’s still freedom in Portugal, and Oliveira is an example of consistent quality. It’s admirable, especially these days when people are so worried about market rules. In Portugal, the situation of filmmakers is very tough. All funding is frozen. Our right-wing government doesn’t support the arts. When it came to power, one of its first measures was to dissolve the Ministry of Culture. Now they’re approved a new cinema law, which will regulate cinema: The private TV channels will give a small portion of their revenues to support filmmakers. So I hope it’ll get better.

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The Last Time has been compared to the work of Chris Marker. Does this comparison resonate with you?

If you make a film that plays with time and space, and mixes them up, out of images and sounds that weren’t directly supposed to tell those stories—and which are more like essays, in Marker—it’s impossible not to think of him. He was one of the reasons why I wanted to make films, but not specifically this film. Sans Soleil is about memory, so there is a connection. There’s also the playfulness. We shot not just in Macao, but in a lot of places in China. In a way, we invented a place that’s made out of many places; we wanted to have this freedom, to invent a city that was our own.

Ela Bittencourt

Ela Bittencourt is a critic and cultural journalist, currently based in São Paulo. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, Film Comment, The Notebook, Reverse Shot, Sight & Sound, and other publications.

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