Fernanda Torres On Her Golden Globes-Winning Performance In ‘I’m Still Here’

In Walter Salles’ Oscar-shortlisted film I’m Still Here, set in 1970 at the height of Brazil’s military dictatorship, Fernanda Torres plays an extraordinary mother: Eunice Paiva, who was left to raise five children alone after the disappearance of her activist husband Rubens (played by Selton Mello). In the movie, as in life, however, Eunice refuses to be worn down by the scare tactics of the regime, mounting a campaign of defiance that would take up 25 years of the widow’s life before the authorities finally took responsibility for this historic crime and issued Ruben’s death certificate in 1996. The real Eunice never broke down, at least never in public. “Photographers wanted to take pictures of us looking sad, so we started a battle against the media,” explained her son Marcelo, who wrote the memoir that Salles’ film is based on. “The family of Rubens Paiva does not cry in front of the cameras.”

Torres’ own mother, Fernanda Montenegro, is an equally formidable figure; a legend on the Brazilian arts scene, Montenegro was herself a Golden Globes nominee, for another film directed by Walter Salles (1999’s Central Station). Unlike her daughter, Montenegro lost out (to Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love), but last August, at the age of 95, the actress hit a milestone of a different kind, making the Guinness Book of World Records for The Largest Audience of a Book Reading (Portuguese Language) after a reading excerpts from French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s writings to a crowd of 15,000 people.

Inevitably, Montenegro was uppermost in Torres’s thoughts when she took to the stage on Sunday to receive the award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama. “Of course I want to dedicate this to my mother,” she said. “She was here 25 years ago, and this is, like, proof that art can endure through life.” But Torres also has her mother’s indomitable spirit, as she proved in this Zoom interview conducted at the end of 2024. In fact, she had only one request before the conversation started. “Let me just find my glasses,” she said, “so I can see you properly.”

DEADLINE: Obviously, you’ve worked with Walter Salles before, but was it a surprise when he came to you with this film? What were the initial discussions that you had with him about I’m Still Here?

FERNANDA TORRES: Before he invited me to take part, I already knew that he was going to do this film. One day, because we’re good friends, he gave me the script to read, and he said, “I’d like you to tell me what you think.” I cried when I read it, and I said, “It’s wonderful, Walter.” But I thought he would do it with someone else, because I was too old to play Eunice. At the beginning, she’s 41. I’m 59 now, and I was 57 at that time. So, the day he invited me to take part in the movie, I thought he wanted me to work on the script with him. I had no idea. And then I started to work, and get really deep into the process.

DEADLINE: What did you do?

TORRES: The first thing is that Walter waited a long time to cast the actress for this part. So, when he asked me, I thought I couldn’t just treat the first reading like any other first reading, I thought I should prepare myself, to give him something [substantial]. So, by myself, for a month, I went to an acting coach, and I worked on Eunice so that, on my first reading, I had a glimpse of Eunice already. There was something there.

Later on, we started to work with another coach, one who stayed on the movie for the whole process. She worked with us [to create] a sense of family. Of course, we also had the house. The house is a character in the movie, and that house became our home. Walter shot everything chronologically, so everything that happens to Eunice, or to anybody else, was happening to us, too. The day I said goodbye to Selton was the day Selton—my friend, who I love—was leaving the movie, and [after that] I would have to stay alone with the children and the strange men that had come to the house. In the house, there was no light any more.

For example, when we did the party scene [early on in the movie], those people you see are all friends, and we were all really happy that Walter was coming back to Brazil to shoot a movie. We all had such pride that we wanted him to have a good experience. So, in that party, we were all happy and partying. Suddenly, that feeling is over, and [my character] is taken to prison. I come back to that house to meet my adorable family, and I’m different.

The whole process was very [organic]. From the beginning, Walter told me, “Less, less.” I remember him saying that, telling me, “Trust me, please. Less.” And I said, “I trust you completely, Walter.” In fact, I spent almost a whole year with this film, because I did a whole part of I’m Still Here that is not in the final movie, that perhaps will be [reinstated] in the streaming version. The film didn’t need it. We all tried—in my case, and I think Walter’s case as well—to be loyal to Eunice Paiva. You see, she was the main guide for us.

DEADLINE: Did you do much research into her story? How much did you decide you wanted to know about Eunice?

TORRES: Well, I knew it already, because I’d read the book. We talked about the script, but the first thing I did when the book was out was to read it, because Marcelo Rubens Paiva, the author, is a great friend. And also, he was a hero of my youth, of my adolescence, because he wrote this book— Feliz Ano Velho (Happy Old Year, 1982)—about his accident. He was this beautiful boy that couldn’t move anymore [after jumping in a shallow lake at the age of 20], but wrote this very straightforward book about his accident, asking himself if he was ever going to have sex again, which must have been really hard coming from a guy who’d lost his movement.

So, he was a hero, and he became a very good friend. I always knew that his father had been kidnapped and tortured and killed by the military dictatorship, but nobody knew how. And not only me—journalists, and people who were usually very well-informed didn’t know either. So, when Marcelo released the book, I ran to read it, because I always wanted to know what had happened to Rubens Paiva.

DEADLINE: Did making this film bring back any memories?

TORRES: The house [in the film] was like the house of my youth in Rio. I could feel it, smell it. I knew those kinds of people, Eunice reminded me of my mother in the ’70s. I knew what Walter was talking about, that kind of Rio de Janeiro. And then the story is not only about the father, but about this amazing mother. The vision I have of Eunice is the amazing woman that was in Marcelo’s first book, which also became a theater play. And her character in the play was very moving, this strong woman who helped her boy to recover. But this new book was much more than that. This book talks about the coup. The book could make four seasons of a series, because you have the coup, you have Rubens escaping to the Yugoslavian embassy, gunshots, airplanes, and then he comes back. It’s unbelievable.

I didn’t know any of that. The book was my main resource, and also the interviews that she gave. It’s amazing, because, in the interviews, you have this very elegant, polite woman, who’s very persuasive, but in a gentle way. She’s always smiling, even when she’s telling you that her husband never returned home. Even when she was talking about Marcelo’s accident, she had that smile. I’d never encountered that before. It’s not cold, but it’s not warm either. It’s something in-between. This is someone who faced big tragedies in life but was still operating and knew how to make life go on. I’ve never encountered this.

DEADLINE: Deadline’s review of the film suggests that part of the film’s message is that being happy can be an act of rebellion in itself…

TORRES: Perfect. And what’s amazing is how she passed this on to Marcelo, because that was the surprising thing about him—he was paralyzed, but he refused to become a victim of that. And then when you discover Eunice, you discover that it started with her. It’s about how to face tragedy and not collapse. I don’t know if you have this expression in English, but she did it with a straight spine. It means you were not broken. That’s the thing: If I’m not broken, it doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m tough. That’s the thing about Eunice. She was always very feminine. It’s a feminist tale, but she doesn’t look like a feminist heroine.

And she has a lot of contradictions. Like the fact that she never told the children what happened with their father. On one hand, you understand it. It was very difficult to explain to children from seven to 18. It’s something you cannot explain. I think she didn’t want to pass over to them the bitterness that she felt when she discovered that sadness, the feeling that humanity doesn’t exist, all of that. I think she could not tell this to the children because of all the bitterness, all the anger that it would create. But, on the other hand, she never said anything at all, which is cruel, in way. So, it’s not that she’s a heroine, a woman without contradictions. No, she’s full of them. It’s a hell of a character to play.

DEADLINE: Walter’s filmmaking is very romantic and very nostalgic here, and yet we see the army, we see the planes. Were you aware of all that as a child? Were you aware of what was going on in the background?

TORRES: Of course, because I lived in that idyllic Rio before the violence, before the high buildings that destroyed Ipanema. I remember as a child, the fear that my parents had of the dictatorship. Plays could be censored. I mean, my father [actor-director Fernando Torres] almost went bankrupt because they censored a play that he produced with Chico Buarque and Ruy Guerra [called Calabar, 1973, about 17^th-century Portuguese soldier Domingos Fernandes Calabar]. It was a huge musical, a huge production. And it was cancelled, the day before the opening. I was raised with all the costumes from the production in my grandmother’s house. There was a warehouse there with all the costumes from Calabar that were never used.

All this I found out later. We moved a lot. I was born in Rio, we moved to São Paulo, and we came to Rio in the ’70s, really in a hurry. But my father stayed in São Paulo. And he stayed there because his producing partner was arrested, just like Rubens Paiva. But his partner was sponsoring the guerrillas, and my father didn’t know! So, he stayed in São Paulo, and my mother, in a way, escaped to Rio. I remember, I spent a year without my father, without understanding what was going on. I was younger than Marcelo. I was five or six years old.

Later on, I remember the fear I had. You remember the tunnel scene at the beginning of the movie, when the oldest girl is in the car? That was my adolescence—we were all afraid of the police. And we are all still afraid of the police in Brazil. The police can be really tough. This, I think, is part of our history, but it became worse during the dictatorship, and they were after students. I was raised with a fear of police. And even at the end of dictatorship, when the military wanted to open the country and end the dictatorship, there was a part of the army who didn’t want them to.

One night, my mother and my father heard a gunshot in their room in São Paulo. They were in a play, and someone had called the theater to say that if my mother went onstage, she would be killed. There were bomb threats. And I remember, of course, when [fashion designer and activist] Zuzu Angel was killed [in 1976]. They said it was an accident…

It was a strange time. I grew up in a country that was totally closed to the world. We had the feeling that we were condemned to Brazil. Condemned. So, I remember it really vividly. But it was also a time when theater, music, art—everything was really strong and interesting. [Laughs.] We didn’t have so many parties [as the Paivas], but our house was just like that. That was my childhood.

DEADLINE: Your mother also appears in the film. Have you worked with her much before?

TORRES: Many times. We did one soap opera. We did an avant-garde theater play where I would eat her heart. She would…. What do you call it when you take the head off? She would behead me! [Laughs.] I did The Seagull, Chekhov’s play with her. [In 2005] we did The House of Sand [directed by Torres’ partner Andrucha Waddington], which is a beautiful film. We spent two months in the northeast of Brazil in this amazing place. We play mother and daughter, then I get pregnant, and the film jumps—I don’t know how many years—and I become the baby and she becomes who I was. It’s a story that spans a hundred years, I think. And recently we worked with [British director] Isaac Julien. We did an installation called A Marvelous Entanglement about [Brazilian architect] Lina Bo Bardi. We have worked together many, many times, and it always works out well.

DEADLINE: What is your memory of her being nominated for Central Station in 1999?

TORRES: I remember she was 70. I remember her telling me, “’Nanda, I’m 70 years old. I’ve done everything I wanted to do in my life, I’ve played all the characters I wanted to play, and I think now it’s a time to close my door. It’s over, I think.” But then: Oscar! And she hasn’t stopped since. [Laughs.] Every year she says, “Next year, I have to stop. I can’t work the way I have been working.” She’s a workaholic. Severe workaholic. She just adapted a monologue about Simone de Beauvoir. It’s a very good adaptation. She did it in a theater for 1,000 people and they projected it at the same time to a park with 15,000 people.

DEADLINE: Obviously, the film is out in the world now. You took it to Venice, and you’ve shown it to audiences around the world. What has been the reaction internationally and how does that compare to the reaction at home in Brazil?

TORRES: It’s pretty much alike, in the way it provokes a commotion in people. And it’s not a sad kind of commotion. There is nothing [shocking] in the movie. You don’t have pornographic scenes of torture. You don’t have a feeling of, “Oh, how sad.” There is something… I cannot explain it. Do you feel it? You don’t get sad, you get touched. There is hope in the movie, because those people endured. The boy you see on the screen went on to write the book that’s being filmed, and it’s being filmed by someone who was actually in that house. Walter is opening the windows of that house again. Selton told me, “You know, strangely enough, this film is the body of Rubens Paiva. It’s the proof that he’s alive.”

DEADLINE: Has it had a big impact in Brazil? Did people know the story?

TORRES: People want to know the story. In Brazil, like America, we are pretty much divided between right-wing extremists and progressives, and a lot of people who I think are not right-wing extremists probably voted the way they did because they didn’t want [what the left was offering]. But, right or left, people were touched by the movie. Why? Because that family is adorable, and because they didn’t deserve what happened to them. People with all kinds of beliefs can agree that it’s a beautiful movie. It created a cultural pride, because in Brazil sometimes we hate our own culture. Not the music, but theater, cinema. It’s hated and it’s loved. But this film created a love wave for cinema, I think.

DEADLINE: You mentioned music. Do you think I’m Still Here will do anything for Brazilian rock band Os Mutantes?

TORRES: Os Mutantes doesn’t need the movie! [Laughs.] I have four boys. Two are my stepsons and I have two sons, so, that’s four boys. All of them listen to Os Mutantes. All of them. They’ve never been more popular. They listen to it over and over…