Kleber Mendonça Filho on Why ‘The Secret Agent’ Sometimes Tells Stories Out of Order

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy . We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Director Kleber Mendonça Filho has noticed something about modern action films. For the last 10 years or so, and especially now that folks on his productions have started asking him where and when he wants to use drone cameras, there’s always this one drone shot as part of a chase sequence that whizzes by a motorcade of cars. But that’s not how Mendonça Filho would want to shoot an action sequence. Indeed, the Brazilian director proves in his latest film , “The Secret Agent,” that cinema can be so much more and contains so many more tools than the filmmaking tropes and conventions we’ve come to expect. “You can do anything you want. You can use all the available tools for making a film, but for some reason, contemporary films only use contemporary tools,” Mendonça Filho told IndieWire on an episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast . “I’m not against it, but you can use all 130 years of cinema to tell a story.” “The Secret Agent” reaches for everything it can. Brazil’s Oscar entry for Best International Feature employs playful wipes and split-screens, stop-motion animation, and different film formats whenever it moves from the main action of 1977, as besieged academic Armando (Wagner Moura) tries to stay one step ahead of the cronies of Brazil’s military dictatorship, to a frame story set in contemporary Brazil, where university worker Flavia (Laura Lufési) digitizes cassette tapes that tell his story. The visual playfulness Mendonça Filho and his team injects into the film - starting with archive photography and including cheeky clips from “Jaws” and “The Omen” - isn’t just about being inventive with the form. Mendonça Filho told IndieWire that they’re about helping the audience understand time in a very particular way. “We’re living our lives in 2026 now. We’re talking here at IndieWire in January. At some point, if this interview survives, let’s say 30 years, right? 65 years? Somebody will be listening in the future. And I find that a really fascinating idea,” Mendonça Filho said. In the original script, the contemporary world wasn’t designed to puncture Armando’s story until the 90-minute mark. Mendonça Filho, though, moved it up and added a couple of key instances where the past and present, without knowing it, are in communion purely through the power of filmmaking. Fittingly, he does this inside a Recife cinema, where Armando describes how a Brazilian businessman dismantled his research department to the people trying to help hide him. “There is one moment where [the characters in 1977] stop talking because the audience is watching ‘The Omen,’ and they’re screaming,” Mendonça Filho said. “They just move their heads. Then, Flavia, in the future, she also stops, and she moves her head...

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