"I'm much more interested in living specific experiences in films"
About this Quote
A director admitting he wants to "live specific experiences in films" is really confessing a bias: cinema, for Walter Salles, isn’t primarily about building worlds or showing off craft. It’s a vehicle for inhabiting moments he can’t quite access otherwise, or can only access partially in ordinary life. The key word is "specific". He’s not chasing grand themes or generic inspiration; he’s chasing the texture of a bus ride, the moral weight of a choice, the way a landscape changes the body. It’s an artistic ethic built on particulars.
The subtext is quietly anti-spectacle. Salles is pushing back against cinema-as-product, where stories are engineered to be legible everywhere, to everyone. "Specific experiences" implies stubborn locality: a certain class position, a certain geography, a certain political weather. It also hints at humility. He’s not claiming to represent whole communities from above; he’s trying to enter a situation, to learn its constraints from the inside, and then translate that apprenticeship into form.
Context matters because Salles’s filmography repeatedly treats travel as an education and movement as a moral test. Whether he’s filming adolescence, displacement, or restlessness, the camera often behaves like a participant rather than a judge: attentive to faces, pauses, and the social systems humming beneath the plot. The intent, then, is less escapism than rehearsal: using fiction to practice empathy with precision, not sentimentality. In Salles’s hands, specificity isn’t narrow; it’s the only route to something that feels true.
The subtext is quietly anti-spectacle. Salles is pushing back against cinema-as-product, where stories are engineered to be legible everywhere, to everyone. "Specific experiences" implies stubborn locality: a certain class position, a certain geography, a certain political weather. It also hints at humility. He’s not claiming to represent whole communities from above; he’s trying to enter a situation, to learn its constraints from the inside, and then translate that apprenticeship into form.
Context matters because Salles’s filmography repeatedly treats travel as an education and movement as a moral test. Whether he’s filming adolescence, displacement, or restlessness, the camera often behaves like a participant rather than a judge: attentive to faces, pauses, and the social systems humming beneath the plot. The intent, then, is less escapism than rehearsal: using fiction to practice empathy with precision, not sentimentality. In Salles’s hands, specificity isn’t narrow; it’s the only route to something that feels true.
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