Director Walter Salles talks about DARK WATER When I was a child, I lived for several years in a country that was foreign to me. Due to the weather, I suffered from rheumatic fever and couldn’t go out in the cold. Not far from our apartment, there was a movie theater that only played double features. That cinema became my second home, where the stories on the screen were far more interesting than the reality I lived in. There I had the privilege of discovering films by Rossellini and Antonioni, Godard and Truffaut, Ford and Hawks. But that theater also showed genre films, so I was also introduced early on to such films as Ulmer’s “Detour” and Tourneur’s “Cat People.”
It was in those formative years that I became interested in genre films, specifically those that transcended their normal niches. Film Noir, for instance, allowed one to see the dysfunctions of society through its cracks. Ghost stories were especially intriguing, because of the way they dealt with one’s fear of the unknown—and the fear of the other. Only later, when I read an interview that Stanley Kubrick gave to Michel Ciment (from the French magazine “Positif ”) on “The Shining,” did I rationally understand what attracted the public to this genre. “The unconscious appeal of a ghost story lies in the promise of immortality. It resonates not only because we are afraid of ghosts, but because, if we fear them, then we must accept the possibility that there is more than just oblivion waiting beyond the grave,” he said.
Later, when I started to direct documentaries, I did a five-hour series on the conflict between modernity and tradition in Japan. In order to understand a culture that was distant from mine, I studied Japanese literature, cinema and theater for several months. Watching Kabuki plays, Mizoguchi’s “Ugetsu Monogatari” and reading Kawabata, for instance, showed me how much the question of the afterlife is present in the Japanese culture (as it is, interestingly, in the African religions that are popular in my country.)
All of this to say that I when I read the screenplay for DARK WATER, its thematic core was closer to me than it initially may seem. At first, I read it because the screenplay had been crafted by a writer whom I know and admire, Rafael Yglesias. Beyond being a very talented novelist, Rafael had written two films I like: Roman Polanski’s “Death and the Maiden,” adapted from Ariel Dorfman’s play, and Peter Weir’s “Fearless,” an adaptation of Rafael’s own novel.
The screenplay was beautifully written and had multiple layers: its center revolved around the relationship between a mother and child, a theme that has interested me since “Central Station.” It was about the ghosts that we carry within, the ones that inhabit our past; it was also about abandonment and urban solitude; finally, there was something that you rarely have in a story like that—no blood and gore. What you didn’t see was more important than what you saw. And there was no glorification of the central character—a rarity these days in cinema.
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