Interviewer: The intervention of the two lovers, ... is almost sort of fairytale like, do you think that's what it takes to break the routine?

Walter Salles: You know, in the book, in Kadare's book, these two characters that intervene and give us the idea that a foreign element could help us to, you know, to somehow decode ---

Int: ...like you said about living in a fairytale, I thought that was really good, how you talked yesterday (during a Q&A with Anthony Minghella) about him being air, and she was spinning around in the air and she was also a fire-eater and a sort of fire display and there was the water, which was obviously a huge image and then the earth with the oxen going round and round and round.

Walter Salles: You know, when I read the book and when we started to do the location scouting and we did travel for at least twenty thousand miles to find the place where we wanted to shoot it, we realised that the few persons that we found in those regions, of course they were really grounded to the, you know, to the land and had a very scarce understanding of the world that was beyond those the limits of their small properties and this is one of the reasons why the film is played on the opposition between what is earthy and what is not, you know, and what is actually in a circle you cannot escape from and what doesn't have gravity and may allow you to escape from, you know, so for the scene in the robe or the existence of the book, the existence of the sea, whatever can trigger your imagination is, works in opposition to whatever grounds those characters in the same, place and do not allow them to overcome those very limits and there was a fable-like quality to this project that, that was very keen to us since the beginning and it's as if we were in what the French call huis clos, how do you translate that? It was a claustrophobic cloister, but in the open.

Int: Do you see imagination as an opposite to violence?

Walter Salles: Yes, certainly and knowledge as well, you know, this is where the book enters into the story, the possibility together, information and to be able to project, images and concepts that go beyond the limits of the ones you're normally accustomed to, you know, whatever helps you to have a more diverse and polyphonic vision of reality, I think helps to fight from off on the violence and if you, if you also accept the fact that whomever comes, whatever is foreign to you is not a menace, and if you remember in the film, the mother reacts at the fact that there's somebody crossing their lands and when they don't get mixed up with those vagrants and it's, er, um, that's the reflection of something we wanted to say in the film, is that for that family, whomever doesn't belong to that nucleus is a menace, you know, who won't agree to go beyond that.

Int: And has the author seen the film?

Walter Salles: Yes.

Int: Ismail? He has?

Walter Salles: Yes, yes, Ismail Kadare, yes, he has and actually the book was adapted twice before, once in Albania and another time fifteen, twenty years ago in France, I opted not to see the other versions and um, the interesting thing is that when he, when he saw the film, Kadare, he came to me and, and said you know, this is the most faithful adaptation of this book and yet, so many elements are different and at the end of the day, I think that when you adapt a story, when you transform literature into film, what you have to really respect is the essence of the book, more than anything else and you should be able to create a dialogue between those two forms of communication as opposed to just adapting, ipsis literis, you know, a book, you should be able to, to use it as a formidable source of inspiration and, that, that could grant you the possibility to investigate, you know, worlds that you would never be able to plunge in without that source material. I read once an interview by Kubrick where he said that he preferred to adapt books where the characters were very well defined and he didn't care too much about story, and, and then the architecture and the plot was really concerned that he didn't have on the option a book, and I can understand that, but on the other hand, if you are not moved by the story, if there's, if the story doesn't, doesn't create a resonance I think it's very difficult to move on, because the characters per se are not sufficient to justify an adaptation but I, again I can understand, I can understand his perception

Int: Did you find that the, the actors gave anything to their characters that you didn't already have in the script? And I'm mainly thinking, to be honest, of the boy who was a street actor that you found, wasn't there, and then the point where you could really see that in the film was where, it was amazing when he was behind the conical of wood and he was reading out the tales himself and creating the tale and then he had all the actions and then you know, he was amazing at that, so I didn't know whether the other actors kind of brought things that you could develop?

Walter Salles: Yeah, no, absolutely, um, you know, we, we, rehearsed for almost eight weeks, seven, seven to eight weeks, in, because there were many elements to be mastered. Well, first of all, that machine that crushes the sugar cane is a dangerous machine to operate in that in the vicinity of the place we shot there was a, a little city and um, we saw a few people without hands and, or who had lost part of their arms and we soon realised that they had in fact lost them in that very machine, and therefore as it had to be operated by the four, you know, by the whole family we spent a number of weeks making sure that they had a complete understanding and complete control of that. The second thing is that the oxen at the beginning, wouldn't respond to the father's mantra because they were used to another voice so for weeks also you had to create a situation where the animals responded to the voice of the head of the family, that took a lot of work. Little by little, whatever, for instance, the mantra the father invented to make the oxen go round was incorporated and whatever he says is actually completely non-existent in the first versions of the screenplay because that had to be invented as we went along. And then the same thing for the boy, because he had such a capacity to project himself into a completely fairytale world, you know, and we soon started to incorporate that into the screenplay. I had done a similar thing in, in Central Station where as we were on the road and when we saw the religious processions in that part of Brazil, we soon incorporated them into the film and it didn't exist in the original screenplay either and here the boy started to imitate, you know, as we went back and forth to the location and the animals were there, he started to imitate all of them and then suddenly we started to incorporate that as well, er, same thing with the fire-eater, when she started to show us what she could do, we, we immediately started to, you know, to organically incorporate those elements into the screenplay and that is really a fascinating part of our film, it's the collaborative aspect of it, you know, it's when you realise that without every single person's input, the film wouldn't be the same and this is what really makes cinema depart from most medium, is that you have to accept it's democratic quality, you know, essence in order for a film to really be alive and interesting to watch, I guess.

Int: There's one thing that I didn't quite understand the significance of, but it just really stood out in my mind - where the oxen got tired and they collapsed, but then afterwards ---

Walter Salles: They walked by themselves.

Int: Yeah, the boy said, oh, ----

Walter Salles: Yeah, the idea is that the family is just like the oxen, in a situation where they go round and round and round and they don't go anywhere, any more and that thing is just a visualisation of it, but it's heralded by another scene that comes a little bit before that, when the boy says what I mentioned to you, we're just like the oxen, we go round and round and we don't get to see anything from the outside world and in that scene, where the oxen just move by themselves, you realise that you have reached the complete illogical situation where now they're just going round and round and round and for no reason whatsoever, they're not attached any more to the machine, so it's just about the how do you say that, er, the perpetual motion without anything to justify it and this is the breaking point really for Tonio, he just realises that he has to go.

Int: One of the scenes I really liked was the swing where Tonio falls off and then they think that he is dead and also it struck me that I kind of hoped he was dead, because then it would get them out of this entire battle if he were. Then it was lovely when he wasn't, because they rolled around on the ground and that also struck me as quite earthy because the straw was covering all their backs as they rolled and rolled and rolled around and they had no problem with getting that mucky.

Walter Salles: That's also, it's a moment of relief where for the first time the family bonds in laughter and it's somehow breaks for a few moments the gravity of you know, of the piece and so therefore it was of a necessary scene, it was also fun to shoot because interestingly enough, when you shoot people laughing, it starts to be immediately contagious, and you start to laugh in front and behind the camera as well and it went on forever and ever and ever, so at one point we said OK, enough laughs, let's move on.

Int: What influence do the Greek plays have on this film?

Walter Salles: When we went to Ismail Kadare, you know, he said the best way to research, to plunge even more into this universe, is to go to Greek tragedy and if you read Aeschylus, you see that blood feuds were at the very basis of Greek tragedy and this is what I did, what I've done, I started to read them again and as I studied philosophy and I did the Baccalaureate in philosophy, I had navigated in those waters many years ago and, and it was interesting to see them and to read them and in this completely different light and it in Aeschylus, you could already find that blood feuds between families were extremely common in ancient Greece and until the seventh century, after Christ, if there was a murder, the murder was settled between families, the state didn't interfere, as it does today in all modern societies, so if a crime did occur in Greece, let's say in the second century after Christ, the matter was settled between families and either through revenging the blood or through paying a certain sum that was stipulated in talents, the talent was the Greek measure for monetary values.

Int: So did you set this film in any particular time, because I know it's meant to be universal, but was it set in any particular time?

Walter Salles: Well yes, 1910, Brazil, because this is when part of that territory that was, as I told you, the basis for many doctoral studies in Brazil and even in doctoral theses made by American historians they all concentrated on that 1910, 1950, ---

Int: Yeah of course, I remember, there was a time slide at the beginning

Walter Salles: Yeah, but it wasn't until 1950, 1960, you still found, you could still find that and again perpetrated from generation to generation and generation to generation, to a point where you didn't even know any more how it, how it started and it seemed to me interesting to incorporate a character which is the young kid's character, at one point says no, and refuses to perpetrate the cycle and that is the element that is absent, that is, that doesn't exist in the Kadare book

Int: Tonio just did it to do it

Walter Salles: Yes, yes, he had to do it, but also what struck me in the book was the idea of life broken into two, you know, the idea of a young kid who is twenty, twenty one, who's obliged to commit a crime that he doesn't really want to commit and then his life is divided into two - the twenty years that he has already lived and the few days he's got to live. And he doesn't know what the world looks like and there was a tragic poetry to that, that I felt really compelled to, and I couldn't forget it and this is one of the reasons why I opted to adapt this. Just that it was so resonant and it struck me to a point where I could not move forward and do it.

Int: What are you doing next, have you got projects planned?

Walter Salles: Yes, at this point several possibilities and I don't like to venture too much into those because it doesn't make extremely good luck to talk about them ---- but there is a project that I've been developing for two and a half years now, which was offered to me by Robert Redford and it's called The Motorcycle Diaries ...

Int: Oh, Che Guevara ---

Walter Salles: Yeah, it's Che Guevara's journey throughout Latin America when he was 22, with his friend Alberto Granado. It's a little bit like Easy Rider meets Das Kapital and it's a quite a wonderful project. It was written by Antonine Gallard and produced by Caroline Choi, his wife, and it's the story of the relationship between a painter called Ferafidi Polipi, and a nun in 1450, just at, at the fade-out of the middle age and the fade-in of Renaissance. It's a relationship that occurred during the Inquisition so you can imagine what kind of reaction it did generate.

Behind The Sun will be released limited in the US on December 12, and in the UK on February 22, 2002.