Miguel Gomes' Arabian Nights is one of the boldest films at the New York Film Festival, from its sheer size, its wide scope of subjects and tones, and its re-imagining of what it means to make a political film. We sat down with Miguel to talk about the different impulses that went into this mammoth undertaking and his experiences making the film.
What came first, a desire to adapt Arabian Nights or the desire to respond through film to the financial crisis?
I don’t have a good memory, so it’s difficult for me to answer that. I think, to make Arabian Nights, because I’ve read the book. I started to read the book but never finished it, to be honest, when I was twelve years old. It was a book that fascinated me from then on, so I keep returning to it. This book has these never ending possibilities of fiction, it’s a book that gives vertigo almost, because it’s so complex, its narrators are changing all the time, there are stories within the stories within the stories, it’s a labyrinth of fiction, which attracts me a lot. On the other hand, the situation in Portugal, when it got worse, I said to myself at one moment, I don’t know when, I cannot, if I have the possibility of making a film, I cannot ignore this, because we are living in incredible times. Not incredible as in very good ones, unfortunately, but very exceptional times and so the lives of almost everyone here in Portugal is changing. So I have to film this and I’ve seen a connection between this kind of wild, extreme forms and fictional characters and events that are in the book, which are pretty much rock and roll, and a sense of delirious reality that was also happening in Portugal, creating lots of stories that were appearing in the press that seemed very unreal, like in Arabian Nights, with very extreme things, very dramatic, very absurd, sometimes very comical, and so I thought, let’s bring Scheherazade to tell how is it like living in Portugal today because it’s a job for her.
Would you agree that modern filmmakers, even though the Arabian Nights are almost ancient, are just now catching up with the complexity of storytelling in it?
I’m not sure, because I think that maybe what changed is the range of how to do it. Maybe this change comes naturally now because it’s more than 100 years of cinema, but the complexity of some silent films or the complexity of certain films made in the States in the 30s or 40s, they’re pretty amazing. Like you can say it’s quite complex what the Greeks made when they were writing theater thousands of years ago. So what I think is that nowadays the possibilities of how to tell, how to show things in cinema are bigger, and things that were not imaginable some decades ago, now we can do it. But I think that even when the range of cinema was smaller, it had very complex structures and ways of showing and telling things.
I know that you had journalists that went out and collected stories, could you describe what that process was like?
It was chaos. Chaos all the time. We tried to organize this in a rational way, in our agenda we had like, every week we start a meeting with a journalist and me and other screenwriters, trying to gather their information about what was happening and give them advice and say to them, we are not interested in these stories and this and this and this, but on the other hand, you should research more and maybe go there to tell me more about these stories. And sometimes they did the opposite. They didn’t follow our orders and sometimes this was good, but it was chaos.
Was it hard to balance the journalistic aspects with the fantasy aspects, or did that come naturally to you?
It was different every time, because these connections are always different it depends on the segment of the film. But it was guided by the idea that the fantasy should not interfere with the darker aspects of reality, because this would be a betrayal, this would be an escapist kind of fantasy and this was not our purpose. Our purpose was to, in every segment, let’s have what really happened, but let’s also add to this what are the fears and the desires that we have and maybe we share with other Portuguese. And this means, for instance, that in some episodes are so unreal and so close to fiction that don’t depend so much on journalism, like “The Men with the Hard-ons,” – that’s not reality, the journalist did not come to us saying that the Troika guys, the bankers and the members of the government really found a wizard and had an aphrodisiac potion or something, but this aphrodisiac potion, which is quite silly, comes from the desire, which is real and I think we shared in Portugal, that all these measures of cutting everyone’s pensions and salaries and what happened, could stop, could go away. And so in this case, the fantasy is real. If it comes from a real desire, it is as real as what happened. Because something you really want to happen, like these Troika guys leave the country and all these things that they are imposing should stop, we say let’s shoot this fantasy, we tried to show how silly this fantasy is, it’s a little bit absurd.
You mentioned discovering Arabian Nights as a twelve-year old, was the experience of hearing stories as a child, did you try to channel that in this film? Some of the stories had a child-like logic to them, in a good way.
In fact, my daughter, she is now nine years old but then she was five, she asked me to buy her something, and I said “Hell no, I don’t have the money” and she said “Oh, it’s the crisis” and she was five years old. When I was her age, I didn’t know that word. And I think, she didn’t really know, she was five years old. But there was this idea of this thing called crisis, and that meant that people had less money. So, this idea of telling the crisis by telling stories, and I think it came from her, and so yeah, there is a connection with childhood and like we tell stories to the kids. I was not able to tell her what the crisis was and explain, so I’ve made a film that uses these tools we use when talking with children, stories, with very fantastic elements, so in a way it came from my daughter.
You had a mix of professional actors and non-professional actors in this film, why do you think that’s important in a film like this?
Because, this idea of having a portrait of Portugal, we thought it would be important to have real people that are living real stories and so the film should provide a space for them, but also for something completely different, for a representation of reality, to have professional actors playing the roles of the characters. This range of the film should have a place for real people that are living real stories and for characters that only exist in fiction.
Was it hard to convey your ideas to the non-actors, since this is a somewhat strange film?
No. I mean, for instance, you have also a dog, Dixie, that obeys three orders. To direct him is to say stay, go, or put it in your mouth, these are the three orders he can follow. So you can direct a dog like this, and I did. With professional actors it’s much more difficult, because they don’t respond to three orders, it’s many more orders and they don’t respond to them all. It’s about what kind of actors they are and what is good for them, because some actors are very intuitive and you don’t have to talk a lot, you just tell them very simple, practical things which you also do with non-actors, you don’t talk a lot about cinema, or discuss very theoretical things, you just ask them very practical things. And in the case of non-actors, I think people were pretty much engaged with the idea of the film because we share this new condition of being more poor in the last few years because of the crisis, turning those events into stories and very wild fiction like you see in the Arabian Nights to tell how we live in Portugal, people normally responded to that in a very positive way, were naturally engaged with it.
Do you think it’s more politically effective to engage the emotions in a film than it is to lecture with facts and figures?
For me, there are many codes that are very tight now days. So for instance when you show a harsh situation socio-economically, normally people expect you to do a documentary.
It can even feel like its own genre.
Yeah and I believe that fiction can do this, but sometimes there's even this feeling that you’re not allowed to do this, this feeling that these facts are so impressive on their own that you’re not allowed to bring in more stuff, and I don’t agree with that. For me, what you can’t do really is try to pretend that fiction is reality, pretending that you are seeing the real lives of people when it’s a complete construction. For me this is lying and I don’t like that. What I think is that to show reality, sometimes you need to show highly artificial elements and show precisely that they are not reality, they are very artificial, but they will have a certain truth attached so they can show in a way different from reality, they can illuminate reality. It’s something that we don’t have in television, or in documentary, normally we don’t have these kind of things. For me, a fantasy is a result of living in a certain moment. The fantasy of someone living at the North Pole is not the same as someone living in Portugal nowadays. The fantasy of someone living in the nineteenth century in Portugal would not be the same as nowadays. So I think the fantasy of a certain society at a certain moment is the result of the way people live. So in a way, I think we should provide a place for this kind of the imaginary, because the imaginary will give some light to the reality.
Would you say that the film is skeptical of all authority? I’m thinking of the judge, who seems well intentioned but simply bursts into tears when confronted with the enormity of the chain of events.
I think it’s nice to be at least suspicious of all authority. So judges or politicians, it’s not to say that they’re all bad people, to say fuck the power, it’s not that. Because I think we need politicians. And we need parties. I prefer to live in a democracy, I don’t know any better regime. So we need politicians and I think it’s quite populist to say “they’re all corrupt.” In the people’s minds there is this idea that the powerful figures are bad by themselves, and I don’t agree with that. But I think you always need a distance from power figures, including bankers and politicians and judges, so I think this is something which I relate to.
I’m very interested in the way you use voice-over narration, both in this film and Tabu, sometimes at odds with what’s on the screen. What do you think that technique allows you to do?
I really like the idea of telling stories and hearing stories and I want that in my films and I also think that the voice-over provides something that, if it’s not the same as what we see in the picture, it will enlarge the picture. In Tabu, for instance, there was this voice-over telling us some things that we don’t get to see in the image. In a way, it reinvents the image because you are hearing and seeing the images, but the images are transformed by what you imagine from what you hear. What I don’t like in the cinema is when the voice-over is saying the exact same thing that’s in the image, that’s kind of stupid. But it’s good to have this game of friction, sometimes they play along but sometimes there is friction between the text and the images, in what they suggest in your head, the viewer and what is getting on the screen.
What was it about “The Chorus of the Finches” that made you give it so much time and put it at the end of the film?
Because the film is dealing with lots of things and one of course is showing the real world that we share, life, and at the same moment trying to show these extraordinary things that we don’t associate with life, that we associate with fiction, these very unbelievable things that normally only happen in fiction. And for me, to balance between these two levels was perfect in this segment because you see all these very, working class, tough guys, so in a way you’re showing things about the working class in Portugal nowadays and at the same moment they are doing something that seems unbelievable because what they do is like living in a parallel world where they do birdsong contests and do events and invent birdsongs with the computer and try to pass it to the birds and they know how to tell the difference between one song and another. What they did, to me, was so unreal, so Arabian Nights, men teaching birds how to sing, and at the same time it was like a documentary because I just put up the camera and they were doing unbelievable stuff. For me it’s this question of balance between the imaginary and the fact that they have this almost parallel society, with it’s own community.
It seems to be successful community, compared to the examples in the first two volumes.
It’s complex, because on the one hand, they don’t have much money, they could live better and apparently they spend all their money and time doing something that will not help them have a better life. And so politically, what they are doing is a little bit useless. But on the other hand, it is a parallel society with their own world and so for me it’s like a parallel way of life that’s fascinating.
Arabian Nights will be distributed in North America by Kino Lorber.
