DETOUR, 1997, 50 min
14 years later, 'Detour' is screened at Portuguese Cinemateque, Lisbon - 12th September 19:30 -
as part of the Homage to actor Pedro Hestnes who sadly passed away recently.
'Detour' is a film I like a lot. It is my second film, it was shot between 1996-97.
It was very experimental, not only in its finished form but also in the film making methods I used.
The collaboration with Pedro Hestnes, Susana, the fishermen and women (from Carrasqueira) and my small crew was a memorable experience. I did the camera, editing and sound design as all the work was a constant work in progress, the post production followed the same experimentation of the preparation and shooting. The film happened by constant detours which I could call discoveries! I was just opened, letting things happen!
I didn't know Pedro Hestnes when I was imagining this film, I saw him once on the street, we made eye contact and I recognized him, as he was in many Portuguese films, and he was the main character of 'Sangue' a film by Pedro Costa which I liked very much. Pedro was one of these actors with glamour, a rebel, and yet also very fragile and sensitive. I see him a bit like a James Dean of Portuguese Cinema. At the time I was fascinated with the sort of decay of the characters of underground cinema like Andy Warhol and by then I was reading everything by Samuel Becket, so that was quite a challenge for a method's actor like Pedro.
'Detour' had no real script, I had notes, photos, drawings, slides, I had ideas that were more to do with perception than with a plot. I was young (24 year-old I think) and wanted to do things I've never seen before, I was radical in my approach and rejected narrative, I was searching for new ways of telling stories. Pedro asked me many questions about his character, we would talk for hours and I would give him Becket's texts. Then we started to go to Tróia and Carrasqueira / Cais Palafitico.
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| Cais Palafitico, Carrasqueira, Portugal |
Tróia is a peninsula in Portugal, it looks like a desert, with long roads along the ocean in one side, the river on the other side, and lots of white sand. The Romans had a city there once. In Cais Palafitico I discovered that couples go out to fish together (very unusual in a country of fishermen, a job usually for men), so I wanted to incorporate that in the film. People were friendly, accepted us and let us film with them. We often went on the boats with them.
Me and Pedro did some of these trips preparation together; it was in one of those journeys that we discovered the 18 stores building which we filmed in, as urban explorers we went in; The building was very tall with a view to the ocean and the mountain, it was never finished so it was chilling, it was grey, made of concrete, like a vertigo; nowadays it doesn't exist anymore, it was imploded a few years ago. From that day we started to imagine new scenes, together, it was a good encounter between two creative minds.
In the same area there were similar buildings that were finished and turned into hotels in the 70's, so the furniture was nice and pretty. We did film there too and we mixed both buildings as the film is a subjective time mental distortion of Pedro's character. For the Super-8 part of the film, every shot was 'drawn', in fact I made slides of each shot, printed contact sheets and pre-edited it all on paper in a wall installation! I still use those slides in my projections :)
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| slide projections of Detour's building @ house party 2011 |
We actually were arrested in that building later on (the whole crew!!!) yeah, 2 or 3 policemen dressed in normal clothes showed up with guns, at first we didn't know they were cops though, I had my super-8 in my eye and Rui Poças touched my shoulder saying 'there's some men with guns there', anyway I still managed to convince them to let us finish the shot ;) then we had to go down to the police station, it was a down moment of our shooting. The credits of the film were made on real walls in Lisbon, graffitis of our names! At the time I never heard of 'guerrilla film making' but we were doing it! We
were also lucky for having Paulo Rocha, João Pedro Bénard and
Gulbenkian as our producers, supporting us and giving us the means, the
encouragement and the inspiration to do it and experiment!
For the shooting, we rented a modest local house from a fishermen family that we were filming with and we all lived together for a month or so, filming, watching the footage, working daily, experimenting, improvising, allowing ourselves to be influenced by the people, the space, the light, the tides... Nuno Carvalho did all the sound recording on location; also there we experimented a lot. What kind of mics, where to put them? we expanded technically always searching to capture sounds in new ways. For the super-8 Footage we recorded little sounds, like we got sand and stones from the street into the studio to re-create a minimalist soundtrack.
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| Me and my crew in a windy day. Pic by Pedro Hestnes. |
The editing and sound design I did it myself. The effect is hypnotic. I had 40 hours of Betacam footage, documentary style, about 2 hours of super-8. I spent very long time watching the footage and taking notes, choosing shots, noting timecodes, imagining the editing, even before stepping in the editing room. Those were different times! I edited most of it in an old Betacam/analog suite. It was a great space at
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, they let us use it for free when they
were not using it, it was indeed their reggie, where they filmed and
edited the shows at Grande Auditório, we were very high up and could
see/hear the rehearsals of all shows, sometimes I would get a call from
the Maestro asking me to put my volume down and I wish I could ask the
entire orchestra the same :)
To edit the Super-8 footage I started to use a computer (Premiere, which was quite new by then) to allow me a more quick way to experiment different ideas. I was doing it at Paulo Rocha's new suite, at night, when no one was using the computer, then I had to take the timecodes to Gulbenkian and do the final version in analogue. There,
in 'my' editing room, I re-filmed a lot of the shots and pre-edited sequences (this time in digital), re-telling the 'story' through a composition of images in 4 screens and including myself reflected on the monitors, putting the process of making the film inside the film, always detouring and adding and re-creating!
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| Pedro making a box for a portable viewfinder as the one of my camera broke |
A shame Pedro is not here anymore to watch all his films, I know he would had like that! Me too, I wish I could have watched my film last night on the big screen, but I am in another country. Thanks to the Cinemateque for showing it, thanks to Pedro and to everyone who helped me making it and to everyone who watched it!
