GreenCine | article

It's rare that I am kissed goodbye by a director after an interview, especially one as handsome as Andrucha Waddington. It was only one of those traditional two-cheek kisses goodbye, but somehow it left me with a smile on my face. I like to believe it was just as much a sign of his natural personal charm as his enthusiasm for his latest film. Waddington has become an important film figure in Brazil. His company, Conspira��o Filmes, is now the largest production house there, having broken box office records with last year's Two Sons of Francisco.

Waddington's latest film as a director, House of Sand, is a remarkable, moving film about the slow acceptance of its heroine for a place and position she spends much of her life fighting against. When her husband suddenly dies, Aurea (Fernanda Torres), who has married to pay her family's debts, finds herself stranded in the remote, ever-encroaching sand dunes of Northern Brazil. Pregnant and with only her mother for company (played by real-life mother Fernanda Montenegro), the two, soon to be three, wanderers are taken in by a local village of escaped slaves. Set in four periods over a span of sixty years, what starts off as slow and frustrating becomes, like its heroine, a graceful host of emotion.

Could you start by telling me about the geographical area of the film?

This is a very not well-known area. The story of this film came from a picture that this producer, Luiz Carlos Barreto, saw in a wall of a bar in Cear�, which is another state [the film was shot in Maranhao]. He saw this picture of this house half-covered over by sand and he asked the owner of the bar: Who was living in this house? The guy said a woman had been fighting against the sand for almost her whole life and when she died the sand took over. So he came from this trip and we met at a party - I was coming in, he was coming out - and he grabbed my arm and said, "Andrucha, it's good to meet you here because I would call you tomorrow. I saw this picture and I was thinking about you for the last 24 hours!" And he told me the story of this picture and said, "You need to make a film about it." I said, "Okay, no big deal, let's talk," and I went in [to the party].

I had just seen Woman in the Dunes two weeks before, and I had a dream of the images in Woman in the Dunes and the images he described. So I woke up the next day with this thing in my head and I called him and I said, "Listen, Carlos, let's make this movie, can I come to your house now?" He said, "Okay, come on!" And I came to his house. He cancelled all the things he had scheduled, and then we started to talk about the film. We cleaned the table and we said, "Okay let's go."

We spent six or seven hours talking, then we called Elena Soarez, the screenwriter, and invited her to write the original story with us - she then wrote the script by herself. So we spent one year writing the original story and researching the century and, on the same day, we called Fernanda Torres and Fernanda Montenegro and told them about this idea that was not a script yet, and that, if they liked the idea, we would write the script for them. So from the beginning, we wrote the script for a real mother and daughter.

We decided from the beginning that it would be a story told by three generations with a main character, �uria, who arrives in this place and there will be this kind of Exterminating Angel feeling, where she tries to leave but she can't. Exterminating Angel is a film that gave me the power to believe in the script. The idea of not being able to leave somewhere.

After two years, when we had the first draft of the script, we went to travel for scouting research. I went with the screenwriter and the DP. I needed my right and left arm. So we arrived in this place. We knew about this house, but we had never been there before. When we arrived, we spent five days crossing the whole landscape, we slept in these little tents that we had with us. When we arrived in this place in Maranhao, we said, "Okay, this is the place, this is where we're going to make the film." This was at the end of 2003 and through this trip and the research that we did, we added some things to the script, for instance, the airplanes.

I asked, "What are the memories you have from World War II?" And this woman said that her most amazing memories were of when these planes started arriving, because there were no planes flying over there, and then suddenly there were hundreds of planes every day because they were escaping from the German U-boats that were patrolling the Northern Atlantic. They would go to the north of Brazil [Natal] and then across the south Atlantic to Dakar [in Senegal], then up to Europe, the American planes. This was something that came from the interview with this old woman.

Another woman we asked, "What do you do when the sand gets near to your house?" She said, "It's okay, we build another one." Because you cannot fight against the sand. So this is something that in the beginning we re-edited in the script. We said, "Okay, these dunes are walls of thirty or forty meters."

Another thing that came from this research was the runaway slave village. At first, it was just a village and in one of the readings with the actresses, Fernanda Montenegro said the village should be a runaway slave village. In our research we had noticed that the density of these villages, which we call quilombos, was really huge in Maranhao. So then when Fernanda said that, I thought, perfect, it makes sense because we have these Portuguese characters, we have these third or fourth generation immigrants which are the mother and daughter, we should have the immigrants from the slavery boats that came from Africa, which tells a little bit about the foundation of Brazil with its three elements. The only element we don't have is the Indians. But we have the elements that populated and created the contemporary society of Brazil.

So that's how these elements came into the script, in a smooth way. Talking about our original story, it can go anywhere, so this is something that drives you a little crazy when you are building up a story, because you don't have a story to follow, you can make anything.

Did you see elements of �uria in the women you met while you were researching?

The people who live there are born into that place. Instead, we tried to get someone from "civilized" society out of society and in to this island with these runaway slaves. Actually, the women of this time were treated almost as slaves. They had no rights, they had to follow what the men told them to do. There was almost a deal with �uria's family. Vasco de Sa paid the debts of �uria's family but she had to marry him and go to his new land. But he was cheated because it was only sand over there. And when he dies, there is this world of runaway slaves and they create this new statement of living and help each other.

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