Kleber Mendonça Filho and Wagner Moura have known each other for over twenty years. But until now they haven’t made a film together.
“The Secret Agent,” Mendonça’s fourth narrative feature, stars Moura as Amando, a researcher who’s traveled to Recife, Brazil, in a bid to escape the wrath of the crooked industrialist Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli). Set in 1977, at the height of the military dictatorship, the film chronicles Amarndo’s desire to obtain fake passports for himself and his son before murderers hired by Ghirotti learn of his location.
Along the way we are immersed in Amando’s network: the refugees living under assumed names who he calls neighbors, the resplendent movie theater his father-in-law Sr. Alexandre (Carlos Francisco) works at the records office where he hopes to find proof of his mother’s existence, and a group of investigators who’d like to take his testimony as evidence of Ghirotti’s crimes.
With help from cinematographer Evgenia Alexandrova (whose energetic camera creates a kind of espionage-like tension), Mendonça both recreates 1977 Brazil and provides a window into a time when disappearances and kidnappings in broad daylight were either refashioned into myths or flatly ignored. At the center of this harrowing, at times, winking story is Moura, who won Best Actor at Cannes for his performance.
Here, Moura is smart and suave, unassuming and sexy, in a performance that combines the restlessness of Gene Hackman in “Night Moves” with the movie-star wattage of Robert Redford in “Three Days of the Condor,” for a film that says much about our fraught contemporary relationship with truth and fascism. It’s also the kind of performance that feels like a sincere partnership between actor and director.
During the New York Film Festival, Moura and Mendonça met in person at the Thompson Central Park Hotel with RogerEbert.com to talk about the importance of journalism, censorship, and the long road that led to this collaboration.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
You two have known each other for quite a while. Why did you decide at this specific moment to collaborate?
Kleber Mendonça Filho: I really think that things happen at the right time. There was a possibility of working with Wagner on “Bacurau,” but he had his mind too much on his own film, “Marighella,” so it wasn’t the right time. Instead, I sat down and actually wrote a script for him. It’s really tailor-made for him, tailor-made in terms of what I knew about him as a person and all the work he’s done in theater, television, and cinema, and weighing it all together. I came up with this role, which I really hoped you’d appreciate, and now here we are talking to you.
But we had met many times before. I was a film critic then, and I’ve interviewed him maybe three times. But then I made my films, and life went on, and by 2013, we developed the desire to work together after he saw my first film, “Neighboring Sounds.” So these things take time.
In what ways do you think you grew to this moment?
Wagner Moura: There was one thing that strongly contributed to our decision to make this film. From 2018 to 2022, Brazil was in a difficult political period, and Kleber and I were both vocally opposed to what was happening. We both suffered lots of consequences for doing that. I had my film censored, and Kleber had his own issues. If we had wanted to make a film together before, that environment was what brought us together.
Before then, we were talking informally because Kleber really takes care of his scripts. So he didn’t really show me the script until he felt like it was time to do it. But I knew exactly what the film was about because we were talking about it all the time, because we had conversations about how to survive and how to stick with your values when everything around you is saying the opposite of what you think.
KMF: I kept telling Wagner before he read the script: No good deed will go unpunished. It means that you’re absolutely right in what you do. You’re honest, and you’re a model citizen, and that is precisely why they can get you. I find that really painful, shocking, and terrible, and it keeps happening in so many places and countries.
The Bolsonaro years brought us together first as citizens outraged by the inequality happening. But then we also had to deal with persecution because, like now, we are in this interview with you, and we often find ourselves with microphones in our hands, and then people ask: So what do you think about denying vaccines? I think it’s terrible. It’s wrong. When that goes on the record, a lot of people who believe that vaccines are ways of installing Chinese drones into your blood veins will go against us for being pro-vaccines. That statement will put us in a position to be attacked.
WM: It’s extremely polarized everywhere, man.
Wagner: When a role is written for you, do you find yourself using another process to get into the character?
WM: I’ve been trying to work with Kleber since I saw “Neighboring Sounds.” I met him when he was a critic at Cannes 20 years ago, became friends with him, and then started seeing his short films. I was like: Holy shit. That critic can direct. And “Neighboring Sounds” is one of the greatest Brazilian films ever made. So, when I saw it, I knew this was what I wanted to do as an artist. I’m also a very political person, and I wanted to be part of that universe. Kleber is a master; he shoots films beautifully. You can see his references, and he manages to turn them all into a very Brazilian thing.
It’s also very political. But politics doesn’t go in front of everything. You feel them because of the characters and the relationships the characters have. So it was like: This is what I need to do. And then I basically started to stalk him so he’d work with me [Laughs]. But to be honest, it didn’t really change the way I approach the character. I didn’t feel any pressure. I just felt happy and honored. Kleber used to say: I’m only going to give you the script, and if you read the script and you don’t like it, then you’re a fucking asshole. [Laughs]
I read it, and it was great. But even before then, we were already exchanging information, so I knew exactly what the film was. When we started shooting, I felt like I already knew what it was. It wasn’t difficult. It was very fluid.
How did you imagine Armando as a character?
KMF: I think it’s more challenging as a piece of writing to have a great, classic hero who’s not a wimp or an idiot. He’s actually strong, full of life, and passionate, but he doesn’t have a gun. Other people might have guns, other people might kill people. Not him. That was challenging because how do you make a strong character who doesn’t push people against the wall and say, “I’m gonna kill you”? [Laughs] Which is a kind of tradition, especially in Hollywood cinema.
It feels especially defiant to have a hero without a gun at a moment when political strongmen are carrying metaphorical guns.
KMF: That defiance comes through in the details. The way Armando talks to Ghirotti during the dinner sequence, Armando never lowers his head. He just looks Ghirotti in the face, and you can see he’s thinking: What a fucking idiot. When Armando tries to handle the situation diplomatically, it only explodes. The explosions were really interesting. There’s the moment where he punches that idiotic guy in the face. There’s another explosion when he wakes up from a nightmare. So, those modulations were necessary for the film. But I really wanted a classic James Stewart-type empathetic hero.
You were both journalists, and this film is partly about journalism, particularly the exploitation story about the hairy leg. What do you think about the vulnerability journalism is feeling today?
WM: I have so many concerns. The truth as we know it is over. A lot of that has to do with the decline of journalism. They’re being discredited, especially by world leaders in some places.
Journalism as a business is declining, too. People are now getting information from social media and WhatsApp. With technology, you don’t know what to believe. With deepfake or AI, you have an image of a person and a voice to go with the image, but it’s not the person. What the fuck? How can you deal with that? Where is the truth? There are no facts anymore. That’s what scares me a lot.
KMF: I worked at a newspaper for a number of years. In the film, the information in the newspapers is always imprecise, wrong, or manipulated. I saw this from inside newspaper newsrooms. I worked in culture, and I watched other sections of the newspaper. I saw mistakes many times—natural, human mistakes, errors—and I saw manipulation openly plotted. I saw simple people being reckless and irresponsible with information. As a filmmaker, I really believe that when I shoot the machines at the newspaper, what I’m shooting is a factory of storytelling. It just depends on what stories are being told.
One of them is the hairy leg, which is almost like a poetic fairytale, which finds its meaning in politics and censorship. The newspapers couldn’t actually say what had happened. So they made the hairy leg the culprit. Not the police or the military. So, I’m fascinated by the media, but what’s happening now is incredibly dangerous. I agree with Wagner. The truth is over. I have two 11-year-olds, and sometimes they hear or see things that have been manipulated, and I’m the one who has to look them in the face and say: “This is wrong.” And I’ve even started to feel like they’re beginning to doubt what I’m saying. That’s really scary.
Wagner: We all criticize journalism and specific mainstream newspapers, but I think that at this moment we need to support journalists. This is one pillar of democracy. The shit that our kids are reading on social media—I don’t have social media—but I know they read all kinds of crazy shit. They believe all of those things. Remember when Bolsonaro won the first election?
KMF: Of course.
WM: When he won the first election, one of the reasons he won was because right-wingers spread a rumor that left-wingers were distributing baby bottles with plastic penises pinned to the top.
KMF: To teach babies how to be homosexuals.
WM: People bought that shit. That won him an election in the second biggest democracy in the Americas.
What impact do you think returning to the dictatorship brings to viewers today?
KMF: I don’t think films change the world, but I think films can open an interesting window to the past and inform people about the nature of their own country. The American cinema has done that multiple times. I remember growing up in the 1980s when Hollywood made the Vietnam War a major narrative in US films. That was an interesting moment for many people in the US, as they realized it was a complete thing. Now with Brazil, I think we are at a really interesting moment when it feels like, over the last month, the far-right project has collapsed and is sinking. And while I wish it would sink without a trace, I’m not sure it will.
We have gone back to a democratic mode. “The Secret Agent” was written about a Brazil that existed 10 years ago. This is the crisis that we went through, which was basically a bunch of older men trying to reedit the best years of their lives in the military dictatorship. That was the most shocking discovery for me. This period piece that I was writing so I could work with Wagner was, in fact, a thinly disguised observation of Brazil over the last 10 years.
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