On January 31, the Rotterdam Film Festival hosted a new edition of its Big Talk series, a conversation platform that on this occasion brought together filmmakers Kleber Mendonça Filho and Carla Simón to discuss cinema, memory, territory and childhood. In that context, the Brazilian director publicly praised Wagner Moura’s work during the presentation of his new film, The Secret Agent, describing the actor as “a generous star,” essential to holding together the film’s large ensemble cast.

“Since Neighboring Sounds, I’ve believed that a film is a great opportunity to show faces. Once you do, you say a lot about the country you come from. Brazil has great faces – we are a mix of many different things and anyone who tries to prove otherwise has a problem. Just this week we had a governor saying the whole state is white. Which is not true,” the filmmaker said, stressing that he does not really distinguish between professional and non-professional performers. “They are all great actors!” he added.

Mendonça Filho explained that the film features more than 60 speaking characters, in addition to an internationally known star. “Wagner was very important in making that whole ensemble work. Everything came together because of the main actor who believes in generosity,” he said.

The film has also earned strong critical recognition: The Secret Agent scored four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Moura, who became the first Brazilian ever nominated in that category. “My films are exactly the films I wanted to make. Some people ask: ‘Are you going to release a director’s cut?’ All my films are director’s cut. They are challenging, however, all of them. It’s like having someone say: ‘Here’s our supermarket, you can have everything for free but you have two minutes.’ We shot The Secret Agent like maniacs,” he said.

During the conversation, Simón recalled a childhood with little access to movies. “I grew up in the countryside, so we didn’t watch many films. Then I discovered that cartoons weren’t actually real, which was very disappointing. I remember how it affected me. It was like finding out Santa doesn’t exist,” she said. Mendonça Filho, by contrast, said he had “always been very curious about films.”

“My mother was a cinephile. I was lucky. She kept telling me about an Alfred Hitchcock film she had seen. She couldn’t remember the title, but she said it was about a woman going up the stairs and falling. It was only many years later that I realized it was Vertigo. It was one of my earliest memories,” he said. “That and a Tom and Jerry marathon – officially my first trip to the cinema.”

Both filmmakers agreed on their interest in portraying complex family dynamics and working with young protagonists. “I’m fascinated by children and by trying to capture them with a camera. It should feel life-like and natural, which is tricky. Some films have children play in situations that are unnatural, I think,” said the Brazilian director.

On Saturday, the filmmakers also discussed working with children on set and praised the naturalness and authenticity young performers can bring. “They also make adults better actors,” Simón said. “They are more participatory.”

Mendonça Filho, however, suggested that the era of social media may undermine that spontaneity. He recalled seeing, during a casting, a child who looked straight into the camera as if he were an influencer. “He wasn’t just a child,” he said. “He was a TV child, an internet child.” The boy he ultimately cast, by contrast, was “simply a wonderful and very expressive child.”

Simón shared another revealing anecdote: during a screen test, a seven- or eight-year-old girl referred to another child as “my enemy” because they often competed for the same roles. “So I try not to hire girls who come from agencies,” she concluded.

The conversation also turned to the influence of place on artistic identity. “It deeply marks who you are: our space, its history and context. Everything intimate is very political,” Simón noted. “I always get this question: ‘Why in Catalan?’ Because it’s my language.”

Mendonça Filho agreed, speaking from his own experience in Recife. “I come from a city with a very well-established cultural scene, but actors still leave [to find] work. They go through special training to lose their accent, which is so 40 years ago,” he said, while acknowledging that things are slowly changing. “I am very much in favor of authentic speech. In the old days, cinema was so theatrical. Marilyn Monroe could play a British character, which is a crazy example. At the end of the day, I like to mix extreme realism with extreme cinema.”