Miguel Gomes first began to build attention in the United States with his film Our Beloved Month of August in 2008. Since then, the Portuguese auteur has developed a maverick reputation as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary international cinema. His films often allude to the the medium’s early days — the title of Tabu (2012), for example, referencing F.W. Murnau’s epic of the same name — but he’s just as known for playfully flipping the rules of conventional narrative cinema with modern storytelling techniques.
At the beginning of Grand Tour, a British civil servant named Edward (Gonçalo Waddington) treks across Asia on a mission to avoid his fiancée, Molly (Crista Alfaiate). His story constitutes the film’s first half, while the second is led by Molly. The film primarily takes place in 1918, but Gomes infuses his road movie with documentary footage from his own travels in Asia. Grand Tour won the Best Director Award in Cannes for Gomes last May, and on the occasion of the film’s U.S. theatrical release, I was able to sit down with Gomes to discuss the project further.
Clara Cuccaro: First of all, congratulations on your film and your award at Cannes. I especially love this film because you gave us two or three films in one, depending on how you want to look at it. I want to start with the documentary footage. I know before you wrote the script for Grand Tour, you went on your own personal grand tour of Asia. I was wondering if you always planned on including your own travel logs into the film, or was that a more organic decision?
Miguel Gomes: I was reading the Somerset Maugham book The Gentleman in the Parlor, and I thought this could be a crazy adaptation. In the book, there’s a short chapter, three pages about this couple called “The Situation” that was told by Maugham as if it was a real encounter with someone. The male character in the book became Edward in the film. At the same time, the rest of the book is mostly travel logs, so it’s a description of things. And I said to myself, is it possible to do both? To be faithful in a strange way? Or to do a strange adaptation in a faithful way? So I decided I will do the travel log and I will do the story, but I’ll do the travel log not the same as Somerset, but my itinerary should be the same as the characters. I’ll tell their story, and then I’ll move to a studio and will make up this fake Asia from 1918, and we’ll pass from one to the other we’ll see what this will give. Will 1918 give something to this centric and divisive person? The studio will give something to reality or the reality will give something to the studio. Let’s see how it works. I did not have the answer before, so I had to make the film to understand what would happen with this mix.
CC: So you were discovering the film as you made it?
MG: I don’t have any other possibilities. It’s like in Tabu, I know you’ve seen the film. There were certain days where I was shooting with people who were just moving their lips. Pretending to be talking. There were moments where the characters were supposed to be talking but you don’t get to hear the dialogue because there’s a voiceover telling you other things. On some days, I would finish shooting, and I would get the impression that we are doing a very silly thing. You never know if it will work. Sometimes it just looks silly, and maybe it is. I don’t know. The only possible answer, to see if it’s silly or not, is to finish the film, and then see what you have.
CC: For sure. I wanted to talk about transportation and movement in the film. We saw trains, planes, automobiles, motorbikes, everything. I especially loved the karaoke scenes on the bus. The vespas in traffic were like a symphony. There’s also a fair amount of emotional progression with Edward and Molly, even though they’re individuals isolated from one another. I was wondering if you could talk about how movement manifests in Grand Tour?
MG: Yeah, it’s funny you’re talking about this, transportation, because there was a crisis during the making of the film. Is it possible? One of the producers, he saw the material and the images and said, “we’re having doubts about what we could do now.” There was a moment when everything seemed quite difficult. And then this guy said to me, “don’t worry, in the end you’ll have a nice film about transportation in Asia.” Because I have tons of footage of trains and boats and cars and things like this. They’re moving in space, which is quite amazing to me because you have to understand, have you ever been to Portugal?
CC: Not yet, but I want to go.
MG: I live here. It’s a tiny country, you know? And so the idea, for instance, of all these American road movies in Portugal, is impossible to do. I mean, you start the motor of a car and then it’s finished. It’s a small country. And so I was really thrilled with the movement in space because this story is set up around this couple, traveling thousands of miles in space. This was very attractive to me because I’m Portuguese and I cannot do movies like that in Portugal because it’s kind of ridiculous.
But, it’s not only literal movement. When Edward begins his own road movie, he’s not the same Edward. In the beginning, he is really panicking, and at the end he is maybe even more lost, but in a different way. He’s more melancholic or more sad rather than just panicking. Molly, of course, is even more visible. Her movement is very vivid and, you know, full of life, joyful until the end when she’s only thinking one thing, and it’s getting darker and darker and more desperate.
So this movement is in space, and also inside, and also in time. Films for me are movement. If it doesn’t move for me, then I have no interest. Movement, you know, is not just cutting from shot to shot. I think the real movement is what happens in our film. How our characters change before the eyes of the audience. We start in a lighter way, we make the film look like a comedy, but then it’s a tragedy. That’s the movement. That’s the important thing.
CC: I’m glad you mentioned both Edward and Molly. I felt like Molly was a character that I understood. Her stubbornness and that progression forward that she just needs to achieve. But I was wondering if you could expand on Edward’s melancholia? He’s drinking a lot. He’s traveling. He’s escaping his past, present, and future. How do you see him as a character?
MG: So there are two main characters, and they each have their own characteristics that were given in the book. Edward is a coward, Molly is stubborn. So there’s the coward puppet, and there’s the stubborn puppet; but, of course, it gets more and more complicated as we work on the film, with the characters and with the actors. But you asked me about Edward, and I don’t know him that much. I’m glad you know Molly; I’m not sure if it’s good for you to know Molly so well. I know them a little bit, but I don’t think I know them so well. But I don’t think that’s so bad. I think there’s something that should be void. They should be marginally generalistic, so there’s a space in them for you to project into the characters. This is how it works for me. But I will say that Edward is like the documentary footage, because he’s someone who hides in the world. He disappears. He has much less screen time than Molly. Edward uses the world to hide. I think that the difference of mood in the film is carved in a more metaphorical and melancholic way. So I don’t completely get Edward. I was surprised when I was showing the film at Cannes, and there was a moment during the press conference where someone was asking me a question about Edward, or the journalist was posing a question to the actor that was playing Edward, and the actor said, but “I didn’t play Edward as a coward.” And I said, WOW! Well, I never thought about this. So I guess I don’t know that much about Edward, and that’s good.
CC: Yeah, that’s good. Sometimes we don’t see ourselves as cowards or we don’t see our faults. Sometimes we’re delusional. It’s other people who remind us of those qualities. I often thought of Molly as a conqueror. She just puts one foot forward constantly, but I was a little shocked by her behavior in the end, especially when she makes everyone go up the river. I’m not sure that this was something that was at the forefront of your mind, but I was wondering if you could talk about her relationship to colonialism?
MG: The film is also dealing with obsession. Regardless of colonialism. There’s an obsessive dimension in the behavior of Molly, and how she acts that can be sometimes amazing, like what a strong woman, and it can also be like the Captain in Moby Dick. This obsession can start to be a real problem, to the point that she doesn’t care about anything else. She’s feeding her obsession. So there are two sides to the same characteristic, no? Which is this objective that she doesn’t want to abandon, or give up.
But, of course, you cannot escape from this colonialism. On one hand, I wanted to work with this kind of imagery of fake Asia that Westerners and cinema invented. There were lots of masterpieces like Sternberg films in the 1930s that captured this, but it’s different times, I cannot do it like Sternberg. I cannot just go to the studio and, you know, do it with Marlene Dietrich and make this fake Asia, but I wanted to deal with this and get to something different, but start from this kind of universe that is, you know, watched by the Western gaze. Nevertheless, I have to say that I’m kind of disappointed with the British. Because I think they also should complain about what I’ve done to them. I’m Portuguese. I’ve never been to England, and these British characters are played by Portuguese actors, which some people could consider almost like black face, you know? What do I know about England? So, I’m a little bit disappointed because no one mentioned this.
CC: Yeah, I mean, when you put it so bluntly, I’m like, oh, that’s such an obvious comparison.
MG: Well, you know, I have an answer, Clara. It’s because it’s cinema. It’s a Portuguese film, and in cinema you don’t have to do these sorts of sociological studies. I mean, there should be things that help you to see the world, to see your life, to give you an understanding of society, but it doesn’t have the same rules. It’s a representation of things; it’s not the thing itself. So the characters are British, yes, but it can be a Portuguese actor playing a Brit. I don’t have any problems with that.
CC: Speaking of cinema, Edward functioned like an overly reluctant Cary Grant. He was charming, but just couldn’t get his shit together. When did you decide to bring screwball comedy into the mix?
MG: Edward, in a colonial approach, should be the hero, but because he’s panicking, he’s like an anti-hero. In the end, he’s much closer to Bringing Up Baby than a big conqueror. It’s the woman who has the strength. She has more of the spirit of a real colonizer than Edward. He looks too weak and miscast; he shouldn’t be playing him in a screwball comedy. So he’s misplaced, and that was interesting to me.
We talked a little bit about Grant and Hepburn with the actress before doing the film. For instance, with Crista, the actress who plays Molly, we closed ourselves into a theater for rehearsal, and decided that Molly will be born from a laugh. So we have to make up a laugh that is silly and a little bit annoying, and she will be born from this because she, as a character, is sometimes annoying and sometimes wild and also a little bit naive. So we have to have all of this in one. And when you get this, you can move through the rest. We talked about Hepburn a lot on this day. Because she had the nerve to do these kinds of things in screwball comedies. She [Hepburn] wouldn’t act in a naturalistic way, but she really had fun doing something that is really constructed; you know, the work of an actress, that’s meaningful for the character to reveal to people. So I said to Crista, you are my second choice. The first choice is Hepburn, and the second is you. You’re lucky because she’s not here.
CC: Yeah, Crista lucked out. I love older cinema, especially screwball comedies, and I found myself really diving in to the point where I forgot that I was watching a movie at certain points, especially whenever Edward and Molly were on screen. I was wondering if the quote-unquote documentary footage that’s infused into the film was meant to disrupt the seductiveness of cinema?
MG: Well, I think a lot of these documentary scenes are obsessed with spectacle. You know, there are puppet shows, there are lots of people singing. So let’s say I shot “reality” but a reality that has the desire of fiction. And I did not shoot in a very intellectual or rationalized way; it was done in a very intuitive way. It was only after shooting that I understood, I am so obsessed with action, and so I would say it’s not a way to cut the flow of the narrative. I thought it would be interesting — for me it’s interesting at least — to think that in the film you have, you know, the studio and the actress, the characters and the studio, and you see them doing something. And then you cut, and you stick the places or the things they, the characters, are maybe seeing, or the places they are at that moment, through today’s lens and then they disappear, but you still have the voiceover.
There is this saying that is very well known: “show, don’t tell.” And I say, show and then tell, which obliges the viewer to be in a different attitude at every moment. Because sometimes everyone is just watching and seeing exactly the same thing in the theater. Sometimes, it’s projecting the characters onto these images, knowing that it’s more difficult to understand, but it’s different from viewer to viewer. Because everyone has different operations, when they are projecting the characters into a different context of images. I recall this happened more than once, people asked me, “why was Edward speaking on a cell phone on the boat?” I never shot Edward in that way. That scene was shot in modern-day China, you know? And it’s a Chinese man that is speaking on the phone, but it’s true that the voiceover is telling us what Edward was doing on the deck of the ship. So these people glued the voiceover with the image, and Edward, in this moment, even though he wasn’t there. This is precisely why this film was made, and why I did it this way: to have this flow changing all the time.
CC: I have one more question before we run out of time. I was wondering if you could talk about sound in the film and how music is used. There’s a lot of non-diegetic moments like the sounds of nature, but then there were a lot of really important needle drops. I was wondering if you could talk about those?
MG: Yeah, you know, not so many people ask me this, but I’m glad you’re asking. Because personally, I’m very happy with the images we shot, but for me, what makes the film really work is the sound because it’s a film that should flow with wooing artificial things. And for me, what guarantees that it flows is precisely the sound. It’s the music, it’s the sound, and how we use the sound. It’s always important to me. In a way, It’s like a musical. There are too many things to talk about in general about sound because there isn’t a unifying concept like this, but it’s something that we worked on a lot.
Music in the film comes from many different moments. So you have folk songs from these countries, of course, but you can have many different things. For instance, the last song we hear is “Beyond the Sea.” I listened to it on the radio on the way to the editing room, and thought, “this is quite catchy.” Maybe this is only me, but let’s try it in the end scene and see if it works? So it comes from very different moments. For instance, the song you hear just before “Beyond the Sea,” which is quite impressive for me, is a Vietnamese song that’s sung a cappella. It was popular in 1918, and I never thought about this song. I was almost finished with shooting in the studio, and in the last week, there was this woman that appeared in the studio during lunch. She said, “I have a song,” and the casting people listened to her and said, “Miguel there is this song, which is amazing.” And I said, “you are crazy, I’m finishing the movie. I don’t have time for songs now!” But they were pushy, so I sacrificed my lunch hour to listen this woman singing. There was this Vietnamese woman who entered the set, I was surrounded by sound men with microphones ready to record, and she said, “I have this song, its a tragic love song written in 1918,” and then she started singing. And 10 seconds later I was crying because I recognized that this was the end of the film. Not the real end, that’s “Beyond the Sea,” but just before the death of Molly, this would be the song. And it was really impressive. So sometimes you get lucky and the music appears at different moments. I once again learned that you should be available. Even if it’s in the last week of shooting, you should be available to hear the song.
CC: That’s a great story, and there’s two different songs at the end of the film. Be ready for anything. I feel like that’s a good message for any filmmaker and a good place to end the interview. Thank you for your time. I can’t wait for your next few films.
MG: Thanks, Clara.
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