Going to Ends of the Earth to Break a Vicious Circle

There is a harrowing moment in “Behind the Sun,” the new film from “Central Station” director Walter Salles, that draws gasps from American audiences. It occurs halfway through the Brazilian drama when a sugar cane farmer relentlessly beats his two aging oxen to get them to move faster. The oxen begin to breathe heavily, their eyes start oozing, and they collapse under the strain of the whipping and the hot sun.

“An interesting thing about the animals, for them to respond to the mantra of the actor we had to train them with the actor for two months,” the Brazilian Salles said in a recent interview in Beverly Hills. “It also took the actors eight weeks for them to know how to operate the mill in that region of Brazil. You find a number of people who have partially lost their arms.”

The depiction of the brutality to the oxen is so real, in fact, that Salles was asked about the treatment of animals in the making of the film. “I love animals,” he said quietly. “I would never do [anything to harm] an animal.”

Much of “Behind the Sun,” which opens today in Los Angeles, is harrowingly realistic, something Salles and his cast worked hard to achieve. The film explores the destructive nature of violence and the ways to break that cycle--a theme that seems particularly well suited to our times--as well as the love between two brothers.

Set in 1910, in a desolate, arid area of the Brazilian badlands, “Behind the Sun” focuses on two neighboring families embroiled in an age-old feud over ownership of the land. The poor Breves family has just lost its eldest son to the feud, and its handsome middle son, Tonho (Rodrigo Santoro), is next in line to avenge his family’s honor.

It is Tonho’s 10-year-old brother, simply called “The Kid” (Ravi Ramos Lacerda), who prays that Tonho won’t die in the feud. And when the little boy and Tonho meet two performers in a traveling circus, Tonho begins to dream of a life filled with love, passion and excitement--a life with a future.

Salles, a youthful 45, chose an isolated area of northeastern Brazil to shoot “Behind the Sun.” “In cinema, in a way I always tend to go to regions where no one has ever put the camera before because pretty much like [Michelangelo] Antonionni, I feel that the physical geography has an impact on the human geography and that somehow men are affected by what surrounds them. We, therefore, went to the edge of the world to do this film.”

The nearest hotel was 100 miles away from the location. “At the end of the day, we drove almost 20,000 miles to do this film,” he said. Temperatures rose to 110 degrees during production, and for several weeks some of the actors slept in a house used in the film that didn’t have electricity. Despite the physical discomfort, Salles said he looked at the shoot as a “filmic adventure,” noting: “It was a very passionate crew, basically the same crew who had done ‘Central Station’ and with a number of actors and nonactors who were discovering cinema as they were doing the film.”

“Central Station,” the haunting Oscar-nominated 1998 drama about the relationship that develops between an elderly woman and an orphan boy, won dozens of awards around the world, including the Golden Globe, “We went to maybe 60 film festivals,” Salles said. “So I traveled for maybe seven or eight months and I read 25 or 30 books during that period.”

The one book he couldn’t shake from his mind was “Broken April” by Albanian writer Ismail Kadare that inspired “Behind the Sun.”

“In the book was a description of a blood feud and the decision of this young man, who for the first time in the family, doesn’t want to commit a crime,” Salles said of “Broken April.” “Living in the world we live in, how interesting that at one point, someone decides to break the cycle of violence.”

Salles began doing research on blood feuds in Brazil and discovered there were a number of frontier territories defined by blood feuds lasting more than 100 years. “It was only through research that we found the film could have happened in Brazil in 1910.”

He also met with Kadare “who is a man of rare intelligence and sensibility. He told me to go behind the Brazilian research and to read the Greek plays of Aeschylus.”

“I soon realized that the same blood feuds Kadare was talking about in the Balkans in the 20th century were already the very essence of Greek tragedy, so it may be that men react in very similar manners in different latitudes. That is what allowed this universal story to be told in my country, as it would have been told in the West during the colonization of America.”

He prefers to have children as his main protagonists because “I was always moved to see films where the main narrator had an innocent eye. In a way, all the films I have done so far do have one character that can see the world with an unspoiled innocence. These characters normally are the ones who unveil the chaotic status of society. And they have the courage to confront what seems unfair and unjust to them.”

Lacerda, who plays “The Kid,” comes from street theater, and Flavia Marco Antonio, who plays the beautiful circus performer with whom Tonho falls in love, comes from the circus world. Santoro, who plays Tonho, has appeared in Brazilian TV and movies.

Santoro said Salles’ directing technique has a “very special quality, the way he talks to an actor. He just whispers into the actors’ ears.... He is direct, to the point. The whole crew and the set is very concentrated.”

“Behind the Sun” reunites Salles with his “Central Station” producer, Arthur Cohn, who has won four Oscars for producing documentaries. He also produced the last six films of Vittorio De Sica, including his Oscar-winning foreign-language film, “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis” (1970).

Cohn finds numerous similarities between the legendary Italian director and Salles. “De Sica had a habit of using films with actors who are known and unknown,” he said. “He used to work with people from the street he discovered. . He has succeeded in getting the best performances out of inexperienced actors.”

And just as De Sica, said Cohn, Salles is a perfectionist.

“It took us a long time to do this film,” he said. “We developed the novel--I am sure it took a year. Then we were shooting 13 weeks and under the worst circumstances. I am wonderfully happy to have a director who has this adorable sense of perfection and wants to get the best out of it.”