Daily Inspiration Quote by Walter Salles

There’s a studied casualness to “maybe eight or nine times” that tells you as much about Walter Salles’s method as any manifesto could. The line sounds offhand, almost throwaway, but it’s a quiet flex: repetition as research, return trips as a form of respect. For a director whose films often traffic in roads, borders, and the moral weather of place, Cuba isn’t a backdrop you “capture” in a single scouting weekend. It’s something you circle until it yields a texture that feels lived-in rather than consumed.

The hedging “maybe” matters. It resists the clean authority of the definitive number, signaling memory over bookkeeping. That uncertainty reads less like forgetfulness than like immersion; the trips blur together because the point wasn’t the stamp in the passport, it was the accumulation of minor encounters: light at different hours, shifting street economies, the cadence of speech, the unphotographed rules of daily life. In a cultural moment when filmmakers are routinely pressed to justify representation, Salles positions himself on the side of patient looking, not instant access.

Contextually, Cuba carries a heavy load: revolutionary iconography, Cold War mythology, tourism fantasies, political grievance. “Eight or nine times” implies an attempt to get past the postcard and the polemic. The subtext is craft, but also ethics: you don’t arrive once, declare you understand, and turn a country into set dressing. You go back until the place can push back.