Some anecdotes on the early films of João César Monteiro, recounted by Jorge Silva Melo

One night, João César called me, saying that he had already started shooting his first documentary, Sophia de Mello Breyner, and that he was having problems because he was going to shoot in Lisbon – he had shot in Lagos – he was going to shoot in Lisbon and he needed an assistant. He asked me to meet him that night. I didn’t want anything else, I became very excited. We agreed to meet at the Monte Carlo, which is now a Zara store in Saldanha. Luckily, I didn’t know who João César was, he also didn’t know who I was, but there was a mutual friend [...] who introduced us. It was therefore one night at the Monte Carlo that João invited me to help him in the filming of Sophia de Mello Breyner. We started to work right away on the documentary four days later, and it took quite a bit of time to be shot, with comings and goings, outbursts, non-outbursts, prefiguring the various crises that later existed in the production of many films by João César. It was work that I loved doing. And I loved doing it because there was a mixture – and now that João César’s body of work is unfortunately complete – I think that there is already a mixture of the things that will go on to mark all of the posterior films, which is the simple presence of the camera capturing the real, what is before it, and the enormous provocation and artifice that João César goes on creating in the very - I wouldn’t say staging, but a provocation of the events.

The shot that required the most work and that provoked great crises was a shot in which Sophia de Mello Breyner was sitting on the sofa in the living room of her house in Graça. And João wanted one of her daughters – the youngest – to play a song by the Beatles, who were very much in vogue at the time, in the middle of the shot without Sophia knowing. Sophia began to talk about Greece, beauty, humanity, then bam! There appeared the Beatles. And she didn’t realize that that was planned with João César. Second take, the same thing happened, and Sophia didn’t understand very well and got mad at her daughter, “Don’t you see that we’re filming?” The third take, she finally understood and became furious with João César because she realized that he was playing a naughty prank before that thing which all of us respected and which gives a sense of dignity: to be filmed. Well, João didn’t want dignity when he filmed. He wanted to provoke, to find the point of fracture, the point of irritation that would create an artifice. And I think that – or at least I see it now, I had never thought so before – it is very much a matrix-shot of the cinema that he was going to make. That is, this mixture of a pure attention to the duration of time which is real – and the duration of time is, for him, real – as a violent intrusion of his provocations: planned, unplanned, naughty; making it so that time doesn’t go back, but reaches another quality.

[...]

It was during the shooting of Sophia that João César showed me the script for Sapatos de Defunto. I was dazzled by the quality of the script’s writing, by the quality of the ideas there – I was very young, 18-19 years old, 20 years old at most. But I was dazzled by the writing. By that point João César already knew me and we knew a whole group of people: Margarida Soromenho, who already passed away; Luís Miguel Cintra, Nuno Júdice, Helena Domingos, Antónia Brandão, Carlos Ferreiro, this whole group that frequented the Monte Carlo and the School of Arts and Humanities [in Lisbon]. It existed as we spent nights together talking about the films that were possible. We all came from the Cahiers du Cinéma, and we wanted to make films that people our age were making in the other countries that had no dictatorship. And that script seemed to us to be our script, the script that would finally film our age, the 20-somethings that were suffering from impassivity and from nothing happening. And the falling of cockroaches from the ceiling with which the film begins was really what we felt, in the long hours of not doing anything and of dreaming a lot that we had. João César had already shot some scenes even before Sophia, scenes that appear in the film, with Teresa Bento, who was a young university student [...], at this moment I believe she’s been living in Italy. I had never seen these scenes before, and only saw them later in the final edit.

[...]

[...] so it was our youth. Its means of production would now be considered ridiculous, but I’d like to have these means of production again. The only production car was a Mini. We went to film in Sintra on the train. I took the camera by train and we filmed in Sintra. We filmed, it was done and it’s good. There was no sound. The clapper was only a writing slate bought at the drugstore, because there wasn’t even direct sound. We took note of the dialogues or the changes that the actors made in writing. Sometimes – on the first day there was still an empty cassette recorder for recording, but it was made with an enormous intensity by everyone, including João César, with his difficult working relationships with everyone. Or he was extremely attentive and sensitive to what was happening, or it seemed as if he was running away from us.

[...]

There was an idea of making a series of films about popular sayings with a production company called Média Filmes, which was also close to Saldanha. It was a production company for publicity, with Fernando Lopes, Fernando Matos Silva; Seixas [Santos] also did a few things for them. And the idea was to make six sketch films. One of them would be titled Quem Espera Por Sapatos de Defunto Morre Descalço; the other, Perdido Por Cem, Perdido Por Mil, ended up being directed in extremely long length by António-Pedro Vasconcelos. And there were 4 or 5 more, I myself was supposed to direct one called Com a Verdade Me Enganas. But this collective also dissolved, and João César was able to advance, because he was obstinate. Even though he was lazy, easily giving in at any moment and letting many things drag on, he was extremely obstinate. And his film was the first that was able to be completed, long before António-Pedro’s and without subsidies. António-Pedro only succeeded already within the Gulbenkian program. The one by João César was carried out to the end, despite everything, and when the first 50 contos [about 250 euros] appeared — and it was only 50 contos — only two shots remained […].