Manel Esteban, assistant director

The filming was characterised by a complete lack of orthodoxy: there was no script or shooting schedule, so the days depended on the inspiration with which the Brazilian director woke up each morning. Although this would be unacceptable to a producer’s mindset, Esteban regards the experience as something wonderful, emphasising that he had never experienced such a wild, fun and enormously creative shoot. In this sense, the technical crew enjoyed extremely pleasant days, from ten in the morning until six in the evening, spent setting up a spectacular, fifty-metre curved travelling shot to film, often, a single scene per day.

For the cast, which included Paco Rabal, Emma Cohen, Pierre Clémenti and Marta May, Rocha’s approach was disconcerting, as he gave hardly any direction and was not a conventional ‘director of actors’. He recalls some very funny anecdotes about Rabal, such as his unexpected three-day disappearance and his reluctance to take off his toupee, which he called ‘the cat’. On a personal level, Esteban has fond memories and describes Rocha as “a very nice man, but he was quite mad”.

Although Esteban admits to being critical of the film’s final result, he argues that Rocha was in fact the victim of a “great betrayal”: accustomed to creativity born of the precariousness of Cinema Novo, the director found himself overwhelmed and intimidated by a production scale he did not know how to manage. That chaos, fuelled by the enthusiasm of the era, left Esteban with a fascinating and unique professional memory.