Interview by Matteo Pini 
Portrait by Victor Juca

MP The foundation for The Secret Agent sprung from your previous film, the documentary Pictures of Ghosts (2023), which concerned the visual memory of Recife. Your mother was a historian, and archiving is a central plot point in The Secret Agent. What does the archival image afford that the cinematic image does not?

KMF Since my first feature, Neighbouring Sounds (2012), I’ve opened my films with still images from archives. I grew up seeing my mother come home at night with boxes of tapes and a tape recorder, and I think of that as part of who I am. I spent seven years working on Pictures of Ghosts; it was almost like archaeology. Every time I found something beautiful from the archives, I felt the film become more alive, and eventually, I found the film. I love the way that the deeper you go into the past, the more the present comes into focus. The Secret Agent couldn’t exist merely as a blood-driven mystery set in 1977: it had to articulate what Brazil is and how Brazilians deal with the past. Now that the film is screening globally, I see that Brazil is not the only country with an open wound. I received some strong reactions in Spain, where many struggle to discuss the Franco regime, even today. This film has no torture scenes, no military uniforms, no shootouts between guerrilla fighters. It’s more about how the tentacles of power reach people in their private lives. For many people, that is scarier.

MP You wrote the script with lead actor Wagner Moura in mind, who has an old Hollywood quality. How did he influence the characterisation of Armando?

KMF I really love him as an actor, but he hadn’t quite done what I thought he was capable of. In his breakout film Elite Squad (2007), he’s very violent, always screaming, a fascist type working in the police force. I feel that put an unfair label on him, because Wagner is a really gentle person. For this film, I wanted to take him to places he hadn’t been to yet, which was often him trying to make sense of what was happening to him. In North by Northwest (1959), Cary Grant never understands what’s going on, but I love the way he owns the film. I wanted a similar quality with a more sombre tone, though my biggest surprise with The Secret Agent has been how strongly people have reacted to its humour.

MP You are in no hurry to introduce the biographies of the characters; you allow the rhythm of the film to bring us to them. There are also moments where you let the audience just sit and soak up the atmosphere of Recife, like when Armando joins the carnival for a moment of reprieve.

KMF I think of these moments as the logic of life, and films often avoid the logic of life. They want to streamline everything and give you the whole map in less than three minutes, which is not a problem with a film like Singing in the Rain (1952), but it is when you are trying to tell a specific story at a particular time. I’m quite old-fashioned in that sense: if you come to see my film, I want you to be in my world for the duration.

MP But you didn’t shoot on film.

KMF There are no labs left in Brazil, so we would have had two couriers flying to Paris or LA twice a week. I would have felt like one of those guys who goes to a cafe with a typewriter. The ALEXA 35 camera we shot it on is really great, and if you mix it with these Panavision lenses from the late 1960s and early 1970s, the result is wonderful. They have some distortion, this wonderful wide-screen image, which is how I learned to look at films.

MP Violence remains a mostly ambient quality in the narrative, until it bursts through dramatically in the film’s climax. Similarly, the figure of Ernesto Geisel looms large as an ominous, ambient presence. 

KMF He’s part of the film’s texture: I never go into the actual politics of the day. One year after the events depicted in the film, when I was nine, I saw a newspaper spread on the kidnapping of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro. When the Red Brigades took him, they killed five of his security guards, their bodies lying in the street covered with sheets. I wanted to bring that stark, brutal quality to the revelation of violence in the film, almost like a David Cronenberg or Paul Verhoeven film. Those kinds of images are never published today in print. I thought that if I built a realistic enough feeling of time and history, I could build fiction on top. Contemporary films often don’t look naturalistic from the word go, and then bring in fantasy, which doesn’t really work for me. 

MP But in the film, I would argue you establish the colourful fantasy of the remembered 1970s, and then interrupt this with the drab naturalism of the contemporary moment.

KMF Yes, but when Armando is driving his Volkswagen, he’s driving his Volkswagen: it’s naturalistic. But then we get to the hairy leg and carnival, and it’s as if the realism seismograph begins to pulsate and the film has the space to go crazy. 

MP You take some immense stylistic risks within the film. One plot point follows a dismembered leg, which circulates as an urban legend but at one point starts literally attacking people, monster-movie style.

KMF The hairy leg is printed in the newspaper from the minds of two journalists, who are fed up with being censored in their reportage of police and military violence against people on the street. So they come up with something absurd: a zombified hairy leg that kicks people in the teeth. Visually I wanted it to have this B-movie quality, very grungy and funky, like a cheap tabloid. I like the different layers of storytelling you can see in the film: the character Thereza is reading from a newspaper, and our reaction is her reaction. I also love that I got to work with stop motion for the first time in my life. 

MP As with all your films, the storytelling is happening through sound as much as it is through image.

KMF I always think that if a film were to be played on the radio, it should make its own sense. I worked with a genius called Cyril Holtz: we wanted the mix to be strong and aggressive, but a little old-fashioned. During pre-production, I had an incredible trip to a record store in Recife, where I found four mysterious albums. Each gave me a track for the film. One gave me the music for the chase sequence, which fit perfectly: the length of the track is the length of the sequence. In every film, some serendipitous, wonderful accident like that happens. .