A title card in the opening seconds of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent welcomes the audience into a setting steeped somewhere between fact-and-falsehoods: 1977 Brazil, during the country’s military’s dictatorship. “A time of mischief,” as described by the title card, when we see the film’s protagonist, Marcelo (Wagner Moura), driving into an isolated gas station on the outskirts of Recife. On the floor, half-covered with a piece of cardboard, is an abandoned cadaver roasting en plein air in the summer heat. The scene resembles something out of a neo-Western, or even a low-budget cult classic from the Australian New Wave—not necessarily a direct association with the political thriller that unfolds over the next two hours and forty minutes.
What else would we expect from Kleber Mendonça Filho, a director whose work—always set in his hometown of Recife—consistently plays with the imagery and story beats of popular genre cinema. His 2020 feature, Bacurau, stood out as socially-conscious revenge-thriller owing as much to John Carpenter as to Nelson Pereira dos Santos. His following movie, the 2024 essay-film Pictures of Ghosts, an autobiographical love letter to the forgotten movie palaces of Recife, waxes poetic about 70s B-movies and blockbusters through the documentary style of Chris Marker. He is a cinephile’s filmmaker, and with The Secret Agent, he may have made his best movie yet.
Boxoffice Pro caught up with the Brazilian writer-director following The Secret Agent’s debut at the New York Film Festival in a wide-ranging conversation covering his influences, his latest movie, and the role that movie theaters play in his life.
I was pleasantly surprised to see the influence of your prior film, the documentary Pictures of Ghosts, all over The Secret Agent. As a publication focusing on the movie theater business, it was wonderful to see a film where the physical space of a cinema plays such a crucial role in the narrative. How did Pictures of Ghosts influence the direction you took with this new film?
I had been working on Pictures of Ghosts for nearly seven years, and it was taking so long, since it’s a documentary without a script that relies heavily on in-depth archival research. All that research led me to discover a wealth of historical materials and footage. Pictures of Ghosts reconnected me to memories of my childhood, because a lot of my life is marked by the presence of cinema—not only as an art form, but as a physical space in the cultural life of a city. That’s how it led me to develop a thriller set in the past. I felt like I had the emotional connection to write the film, and then I just had to find the story. So yes, Pictures of Ghosts is what brought me to The Secret Agent, and even now, while doing the festival circuit for Secret Agent, I am already developing ideas for my next film.
You mentioned the concept of cinema as a physical space becoming the hub of a city’s cultural life, and Pictures of Ghosts is very much a love letter to all the movie theaters from your experience growing up in Recife. Do you think that’s still the case in this day and age?
I’m fascinated by how cinemas shape city life. That’s gone now in most cities, especially in Latin America, where cinemas have left downtown and moved to shopping malls. Perhaps there are exceptions, such as in countries like France, where large cinemas on the street still have a significant impact on daily life. But in Brazil, it’s very hard to find today. The shopping malls drain life out of the street.
In Recife, nobody noticed that life in the city was being brought out of people’s lives under their noses. I was a journalist at the time, and the developer of the local shopping mall was also the owner of a big newspaper and television station. We started seeing stories focusing on how dangerous the downtown area was, how dirty it was, how unpleasant it was, how difficult it was—channeling people into the shopping mall.
It’s not surprising, then, that your films seem purpose-built to watch in a big auditorium with an audience.
The theatrical experience is central to any film I make. It’s at the top of my mind whenever I shoot, compose, or mix a film. Never say never, but I don’t think I would ever sign up for a streaming project. Streaming is a great option for movies after they complete their theatrical run, but it should never be a substitute for going to the theater. I have ensured that each of the films I’ve made has a real theatrical run, not a token one. Even going back to my first film, Neighboring Sounds, which played for seven months in some cities in Brazil.
Your films are all set in Brazil, particularly in your hometown of Recife, but despite that specificity, they feel like they can take place anywhere in Latin America. That opening scene in The Secret Agent, where the protagonist drives to a secluded, rural gas station on the outskirts of a city and finds an abandoned cadaver exposed in the open, has an unfortunate regional quality to it. Coming from Mexico myself, I often see some of my own experiences in Mexico reflected in all your films.
I’m fascinated by storytelling, and strong storytelling can come from any culture. That’s why Bergman’s films resonate so deeply outside of Sweden, despite possessing a distinct Scandinavian quality. The opening sequence in The Secret Agent feels like it could take place anywhere in Latin America, but upon rewatching the movie recently, it reminded me a lot of Australian cinema from the 1970s. It’s a scene that resembles portions of Wake in Fright, for example. The idea that there is a dead person who has been abandoned by everyone, who’s stinking up the place, covered by flies, despised by the gas station attendant, but at the same time protected by that gas station attendant from the stray dogs. It’s a wild and savage scene that blends into the background of that place’s daily life.
This movie is often described, including by me, as a political thriller, but it draws inspiration from a variety of genres. The opening sequence we’re talking about is so evocative of a western. A protagonist riding into a new town and finding a grave warning, with an unknown threat hot on his heels. Did you have any references in mind when putting the movie together?
Discussing references is always tough, because some cinephiles have a Cartesian way of looking at them as if we’re replicating shots with tracing paper, when in reality it’s nothing like that. In the same shot, I can have De Palma and a Brazilian television ad from 1979. I can have a soap opera and a Robert Altman film. A movie I keep coming back to is Chinatown. A genre film, yes, but one that’s about so much more.
The production design in that late 1970s setting for The Secret Agent really transports the audience. You make a decision with this movie; however, by employing a framing device set in the present day, it gives the audience a detached connection to the plot. It pays off with the film’s ending, but I can see how it could have been seen as a narrative risk to step away from the rhythm of the story you’re trying to tell.
Whenever you change the point of view in a story, if you do it right, it can be a powerful moment. I find archives both fascinating and cruel, because you discover what happened to people, how things unfolded, and how that amazing project turned out to be a terrible failure, or how that horrible idea, in fact, thrived and became a success story. My mother was a historian, so I received that training from a very early age: hearing her discuss the things she discovered in archives and newspapers. It can make a story a lot more intense when you realize it’s one experience lost in time.
Like any good political thriller or noir film, you always feel like you’re at arm’s length from the truth as a viewer. The portrayal of newspapers in this movie is a great example of that. In some cases, the reports and information made available to the characters in the film are evidently false; in other cases, they hint at a truth that can’t be openly discussed. As an audience member, we’re trying to fill in the gaps in the story as we go along. The newspaper reports in the film of a severed leg that goes around beating people up at night in the park is so emblematic of finding truth in outright fiction.
Some people aspire to make films with 100 percent factual information, films aspiring to be the bearers of truth. I don’t see myself as that type of filmmaker. For me, poetry can have a much more resonant impact than this sort of journalistic rigor. You can be poetic while still being incredibly truthful, and you can be 100 percent journalistically truthful, yet still be far from poetic. This film isn’t supposed to deliver one fact after another for the sake of “fairness.” I’d rather be truthful, but in a more askew manner. There is an overwhelming cynicism in the world today; numerous lies are circulating, and we must contend with disinformation and manipulation as a business model employed by governments. All the pieces of news that you see in the newspapers of The Secret Agent are all mistaken, misleading, all-out falsehoods, or poetic truth. So of course, there isn’t a literal severed, hairy leg that goes around assaulting people—but people did get the shit kicked out of them last night in the park.
It’s a way of reporting on things you’re not allowed to report about.
And in the film, we see what happens to the guys who don’t use that poetic truth. Because the person who reported on something had finished his shift, gathered his belongings, and gone downstairs, he was led directly to an unmarked car by three plainclothes policemen. They drive around for an hour and a half, going nowhere in particular, without doing or saying anything to him. And after 90 minutes, they open the door and tell him to get out with a very clear point: Be very careful what you write about. Some other journalists might have been tortured, some might have been taken out back and shot, and others were taken for this joyride. That’s the setting of the film: “A time of mischief.”
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