Top 6 Quotes & Sayings by Kleber Mendonca Filho

Sometimes you are working and you feel like walking out into the terrace, stretching, looking out and feeling the night air on your face.

I think it modern society as a whole, but definitively in Brazil, spaces are so well divided and there are so many barriers, and so many divisions, so many lines and so many borderlines, basically telling you that you should be here but not here. This is my space and this is your space, and this is expressed very dramatically in architecture, we have a very kind of aggressive, almost medieval concept for architecture, which is basically keeping people out. So you get high walls, fences, and electric fences, and divisions like that.

Basically you can do anything in a film. I could have place a spaceship in the middle of a street. You can do anything, and I love to talk about this because is so organic to the process.

When you write a scene where somebody is afraid of something you instantly go to decades of genre cinema: horror, suspense, and thrillers. Those are very cinematic genres, when you shoot a close-up of someone and you can see fear in the person's face, or anticipation, or some kind of anxiety, it's a very cinematic image.

One good thing about a good book or a good film, or maybe even a song, I'm not a musician but I love to listen to music, is the range that each piece is able to give you. Like 'Bohemian Rhapsody' by Queen, 1975, that song is so epic. It goes in so many different places, it's and opera and it is heavy metal, and it's so crazy as it goes every which way. I kind of like films like that.

I've seen a lot of Brazilian films and most times I kind of react negatively, because of the way I think they portray places they don't really know or care about. This is something that I specifically tried to avoid in my film.