We could tie ourselves in knots, draw party lines, and make blood oaths declaring cinema’s greatest-evers: directors, actors, screenwriters, even studios or entire national output. I have rarely heard a conversation for greatest-ever producer, so allow me to propose that this title belongs––so clearly it’s unprecedented among such conversation––to Paulo Branco. He deserves consideration for decades spent shepherding the visions of Raúl Ruiz and Manoel De Oliveira alone; remove them from the equation and there’s still major films by David Cronenberg, Chantal Akerman, Pedro Costa, Wim Wenders, or João César Monteiro, to say nothing of Christophe Honoré, Rita Azevedo Gomes, or Mathieu Amalric, or films whose exposure is still so limited they’ve not yet pierced any cinephile canon, however deserving they may be.
When I saw Branco would be at this year’s Tokyo International Film Festival on behalf of The Englishman’s Papers, a new feature he’s produced, I opted for a solo, career-spanning interview. What follows is an entryway into one of cinema’s most consequential minds that, at 30 minutes, feels like spotting the top of an iceberg, and which began with an appreciation of cinephile ephemera courtesy our contributor Z.W. Lewis.
The Film Stage: My friend made this shirt.
Paulo Branco: Oh, my God. [Laughs] It was 31 years ago––something like that.
And Abraham’s Valley was just restored.
Yes, there is a restored version now.
I’ve only ever watched a DVD that looks not-so-great. Which has long been the only way you could see it in America.
Now it will be different. If you Americans want to see it, there is a digital restored version. The problem, after Manoel died––there was a lot of time nobody took care of the restorations and of the work of Oliveira. The family, they were fighting between them. My relation with the family was not the best one. And all these films, for years, the new generation could not really see how Manoel de Oliveira is such a great director. Now, finally, it’s possible. For example: the Monteiro movies, all his work, is going to be shown in the States because Cinema Guild has all the rights now. The same can happen with Oliveira’s work now.
I helped release the restoration of Francisca in 2020.
Yes. It was the first one. The first I produced for Oliveira, and we start working from that moment until… I cannot speak about Francisca because I could spend hours talking about each film. Francisca, Vale Abraham––all of that. I learned to produce producing Francisca, in a way. I didn’t have any tools, any rules, anything. That’s why the film exists. It was a kind of unconscious, maybe, that produced it. The way the work went was absolutely fascinating.
So not knowing the rules was essential for Francisca?
Completely. It’s always essential––even now. I prefer not knowing the rules. The day I will know the rules, I may not be a producer anymore. Or if I know them I don’t want to accept them. That’s how.
Do you not set rules for yourself?
I try to be free––that’s all. I try to be free. I try to give this freedom to those I work with. I think that makes such a longer relation, you know? I worked with Raúl Ruiz for, I don’t know, until he died––from ‘80 until he died. With Oliveira until he was 100 years old. With Monteiro, even if I don’t produce all his films, I work all my life as a producer with him, from the first one I produced, Silvestre, at the same time that Francisca, until he died. All these because I tried to be, at the same time, the principle of reality of them: to make true their dreams, but at the same time trying as well to that they can do it in a way they wanted––completely free. Of rules, of everything.
I didn’t give––sorry about the word––a shit about the scripts when I was working with this genius. That’s something that I still try to do the same, but producing now is such a… for the new producers, they get well with that, but I can’t accept the rules that are imposed all the time. I think cinema is still an artistic… gesture. And an artistic gesture, you cannot teach that. You cannot formulate that. Most of the films that you see now, you can already know exactly what they are even before you see them. You don’t have any surprises. You know that something will happen there, something will happen there, and for me it’s not cinema; it’s other things.
Raúl Ruiz and Paulo Bronco
I just showed God’s Comedy to a group of friends. I talked it up as one of the great films by one of the great filmmakers, but one for which you need to be prepared.
Perfect.
Which maybe they still weren’t. But it was an amazing experience. I also helped release Casa de Lava, which for me is another major achievement. I guess what I’m getting at is: when I saw you were at the festival I knew I wanted to do this interview. People always talk about the best directors, the best actors ever, even greatest screenwriters or composers. But not producers. And, just for my taste, you might be the greatest producer ever.
Yeah, we are only what Serge Daney said: to make reality something that is in the mind of these great directors. The cinema is more difficult than a painting, or a writer––because they are alone, they can do it. The cinema, they need people to do it. They need money. They need other people. I met, in the old times, when I started––I was very young––old producers like Jean-Pierre Rassam, and I saw how, in a way, they were authors as well. It’s something that… I don’t think I’m an author. I don’t want to be an author. But I know, in each of the films I produce, there is something of me. In any of them. That is something that makes me proud. And the trust of people like Oliveira, Ruiz, Chantal Akerman, Monteiro through my life––this trust that I have from them is the best thing ever in my life.
At the same time that I respect them, they respect me. That’s why I felt it was really important, the meeting between us. At the same moment I had to be very lucid in a way that, when I felt Pedro Costa, he wanted to go in another way––do the films he did with just one small camera––I was the first to tell him he didn’t need a producer; he could produce himself. That’s why he made all these films without a producer, because I felt he will be much more free doing like that with the time he wanted, compared to spending four years on something like that––having a producer there.
That’s why we are still on incredible relations: we, the producer, I have to understand if I bring something to a film or not. That’s why nobody understood why, in a moment, we split with Oliveira. He was almost 100 years old, but I felt that it was the moment that will give him a new energy in a way that he could say, “Do you see? I can as well make films without Paulo.” And he needed that, and I just put one step away and I let him. That’s why we never talk about why we separated––it was something very interior to us in a moment that I thought was important for him and for me. Things like that, we have to know when you are, in a way… you speak French?
Badly.
Badly. “Your place is not anymore there”––you don’t bring to someone something else. This lucidity is very important. Through my life, I always tried to put me in a question––my work in question.
I had wanted to ask if your preoccupations and interests in material changed over the decades, and if directors shaped what you want to make. It seems that’s the case.
I was shaped with working with them, in a way. But I’m very curious, always, in my life, and I still want to be curious and I still do not feel comfortable when I work. I need to be, in a way, confronted with new situations, new directors, new ways of producing. Not to imitate myself. Even without rules, sometimes, we imitate ourselves, and I don’t want that. I want to question myself every day. That’s something that I learned in them. Because when you work with Oliveira or Raúl Ruiz, for example, Oliveira questions himself all the time. He never made two films similar. He’s always risking, even with his age. I started producing him when he was 74––exact age I am now. Francisca, he was 74 already. [Laughs] At that moment everybody in Portugal thought he was finished––everyone––but each film we made, we knew that everybody was ready to finish our career. It was really risky. He was never afraid––never. Not because the film was working he wanted to do something similar. On the contrary: he wanted always to do something that was completely, totally the other way.
Raúl was the same. Raúl was this small, experimental movie he was shooting all the time. After, when he risked to do Time Regained was an incredible risk for him. Proust, even Losey and Visconti could not adapt. Of everything, a Chilean. And I was a Portuguese. You know [Laughs] we are going to be… they will kill us [Laughs] the French critics, the experts on Proust and everything. But he was so… when we started talking about this he said, “Paulo, for 20 years, the only things I want to adapt is this book of Marcel.” And I said––because it’s so close to me, and if you see the films of Raúl you understand that he’s very close to Proust in a way, with the time, everything––I say, “It’s in evidence. Let’s go! If we get killed or not.” Something like that is something that I still want to do, in a way. It’s much more difficult now to find a genius like that. Young people, it doesn’t come to me because now they are all together in the schools. They produce themselves; friends produce them. I’m a kind of dinosaur like that. I’m not the first… before, when I was 40 or 50, all of them came to see me because they knew, with me, we didn’t lose time.
But now it’s different, the way people produce. I’m out. I have another freedom, completely different: to try to, through the others, make my dreams possible. Books. Cosmopolis, for example. When I read the book and I talked with Don [DeLillo] and said, “I would love to adapt that.” When, in a moment I said, “Who is the best director to direct something like this?” I went and proposed to David [Cronenberg] and it happens. For me, it was one of my dreams that was reality. Cosmos with Żuławski, the same. And Mysteries of Lisbon with Raúl Ruiz, the same. It was all a proposition of mine. It’s another way. This one is the same, Englishman’s Papers. It’s something I owed to this friend of mine, this great writer––Ruy Duarte––for years. I wanted to do it. It was not easy and I’m proud of it; I think it’s a very good film. Things like that, for me, that’s why it moves me––more or less––now. Something like that.
You could not have been more correct to pair them. Because I love DeLillo.
Yes.
And Cronenberg got it completely. Then there was Noah Baumbach’s White Noise from a couple years ago that was a disaster.
Yeah. And David got, completely, DeLillo. David said to me––and it’s true––that for him it’s one of the most important, one of his best movies. Enough that he told me, after Cosmopolis, “I don’t have many things to say in the cinema after that.” The first time I saw him, I propose him in Toronto. He said, “Paulo, I never accept a proposition. I have things to do.” I had the book and I said, “But, you know, DeLillo,” and he said, “Yes, I will read but I have other things.” “But okay. I’ll give you the book and you’ll see. Just read.” And two days after he called me: “Paulo, it’s for me. I have to do it. It’s for me.” [Laughs]
I was very, you know, proud of that. My intuition was, you know, okay. A good one. And it was a miracle to work with him. We still are very close. Everything went… and it was very different for me because it was a very big budget for me. I was not used to this kind of budget and this kind of way of… but I kept the freedom, even in the middle of all this.
Paulo Bronco and David Cronenberg
You say you’re a dinosaur, but you’re the same age Oliveira was when he made Francisca. So really your best work is just beginning.
[Laughs] I’m not Oliveira. Oliveira is [Holds up finger] one in a century. [Laughs] Okay? Because Oliveira spent 50 years without doing what he wanted to do. When he finally, okay, we could do it, but he had 50 years without, and I had 50 years doing what I wanted to do. That’s the big difference. [Laughs]
I have so much fear of not doing what I want, so it’s inspiring. Truly.
You will always do what you want. You will find, always, a way to do what you want to do. Maybe not the way you thought in the beginning. But there is other ways. I don’t know––I’m very optimistic on that. Very. And if, sometimes, there’s a kind of obstacle: okay, you have to turn around or we jump, or maybe they are saying “if there is not this way, we have to go another way.” There is always ways.
In my time, in the past, we start the movies and you look for the money afterwards. [Laughs] By doing other movies. [Laughs] Now it’s completely different. For me, but it was not for many. It’s tough. I can’t tell… I don’t say to anyone to do what I meant. [Laughs] I’m still alive. It’s a good point; I’m still here. All my colleagues at that moment that have done that, they all disappear in a very tragic way. Even Jean-Pierre Rassam. I’m still here.
I read an interview from 2017 where you said producing is not the way it used to be. I’m curious what you meant by that then, but also how it’s maybe changed in the time since.
You know, when I started producing, it was after this enormous, incredible movement, the Nouvelle Vague. All over. And that changed completely the way to produce movies––in Poland, in France––because Nouvelle Vague is not only in France. All over the world. Even in America. And I learned from them that you have to give space for… l’inconnu. The unknown. And the scripts, for us––State of Things, there was not a line. In the White City, there was six pages written. At the same time we were doing State of Things, Jim Jarmusch was doing, without any rules, Stranger Than Paradise.
I started in this moment. We are, what they say, “the pirates,” but everybody was admiring the pirates. Now we go to prison if we do the things we have done in the past. But everybody had trust in the directors, and that trust doesn’t exist anymore. Now they go through so many people that they say what they have to do or they have not to do and what, how to obtain. I’ll give you an example of what is, for me, incomprehensible: a young Portuguese director just now got prizes. If you speak with her, she had 19 executive producers––I don’t know how many sources of financing––and when she wanted to change a line of dialogue in the script, she had to be approved for all of them. And I don’t know how you can make a film like that. After you see the film you feel, from my side, the film is very good and everything, but you feel that, “Okay, but all this for a film that is a story that’s such a simple story?” The energy. The money. Everything is a kind of… throwing away your money, the time, everything.
That is something that I always try to avoid. That’s why I had all my problems and everything––bankruptcies, things like that––but I kept going. I had an example of something completely different from me: Dino De Laurentiis went bankrupt several times and I said, “Okay. It’s not the bankruptcy that’s going to stop me.” But it’s not anymore possible. You cannot start shooting before one year. It’s ridiculous; the energy and everything is lost. All these, each amount, of small money gives such a work, and I prefer to do the films with less money, more liberty. Not going to all these places where any producer goes… now the producers are not producers. They are head of production. I remember, when I made Francisca, I went to see Daniel Toscan du Plantier. You know Toscan du Plantier? Producer that produced Van Gogh, of Pialat.
Oh, yeah. Okay.
But in that moment he was working for Gaumont. And he was producing the filmed operas by Zeffirelli, Losey, Don Giovanni. And I told him, “You make the worst films of these directors.” I told him. I was 29 years old and he was the big chief of Gaumont. “That, for me, is not producing,” I told him. And he said to me, “But Paulo, you are a producer. I am not a producer; I am a head of production. It’s different.” And now the producers all are like that. What they dream is to work for Netflix, for HBO, for everything. I could never in my life work with them. Never. Because I don’t make a budget. Never. The budgets are here. [Points to self] Never. I never put in the papers a budget.
If I say for someone, “Make me a budget of 3 million. But invent what you want.” I don’t… I don’t know. If a film, I know exactly how much it is going to cost, the film is going to be a failure. Because, in ways, I’m producing a product; I’m not producing a film. But that is not possible anymore. Or there is small examples of people that still have, still, this freedom. The most extreme example is Megalopolis.
Yes. Which is however-much of his own money. Selling a winery.
And I liked the film. [Laughs]
I just want to note, last, that the best genre is “Paulo Branco has a mansion.”
[Laughs]
If I see “Paulo Branco Apresenta” and the first shot’s a mansion I know it’s about to be one of my favorite movies.
[Pause] Oh, my. Not… not all. [Laughs]
Paolo Bronco (Empedocle713, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
The post “Less Money, More Liberty”: Paulo Branco on a Cinematic Life with David Cronenberg, Manoel De Oliveira, and Raúl Ruiz first appeared on The Film Stage.
