You have been talking a lot about the development of your aesthetic and your technique?
The way that I’ve been doing films is that I don’t work with actors, rather, I always try to find the people that I want to work with and usually the scenario or places of filming are already there, within the environment where the people are living. After I find the people that I would like to work with, I start to build a relationship with them. Usually, I build a friendship and then we start our work. I start to film them. I want to document their story.
For example, the last film that I did, was near a place where I live in Portugal. It took me about five or six months of filming. And I was going to this place almost every day. And some days I would not film anything, I would just be there with the people I wanted to film. Other days I would film the whole time. And what I would do, I would film their daily lives and their routines. If I missed something one day, I know that I would just film it in the next two or three days because they would repeat again the same things. I wanted to interfere as little as I could in their lives, yet document their lives and much as I could, if that makes sense.
Usually in cinema there’s a script or treatment and then actors or non-actors go to specific locations that were chosen by the director, artistic team and production team. Then they film as many takes as it’s needed until the director is happy with it. That is not the approach I use. For me, each day that I would film, I would take a shot of what the people would do. I would not ask them to repeat again and again the same actions of that day.
When I would come back in the following days, I would just position the camera and the sound and film again the same actions that they would do from previous days. Then in the editing I would choose which one I like the most. Of course, there would be a lot of moments, dialogues and gestures that would be a onetime moment and could not be repeated and those were some of the most precious things.
You don’t work with scripts?
No I don’t but I would like to explore this idea of actually writing a script and still working with non-actors. Rather than just following them I could perhaps direct the people a little bit. I don’t know, maybe that would work and it would be quite different from what I do now.
If you would like to see more of Dioga Pereira’s work go to the links below
