The first time I met Miguel Gomes, in the spring of 2013 for the Swiss release of Tabu he spent part of the interview explaining the film’s two-part structure with an alcohol-based metaphor: the first half was a hangover, the second was inebriated euphoria. Eleven year later, our paths cross again at the Viennale, where he is presenting Grand Tour, and I ask him if something similar can be said about the new film.
“No metaphors this time,” he responds, “but Grand Tour is also a two-part story: first we have the point of the view of the male character, who is running away from his bride; and then hers as she tries to find him. The first half is more like a comedy, the second is more tragic and melodramatic, also because of the gender switch. I like films that mutate, that don’t stay the same throughout.” He then adds on the subject of analogies and metaphors: “Grand Tour is very different from Tabu because there’s a constant alternating between the footage filmed in the studio and the one we shot on location on Asia. Tabu had two very distinct halves.”
The reason we’re meeting is Grand Tour was chosen to represent Portugal in the Best International Feature Film race at the Oscars, the third time this has happened to Gomes’ work after Our Beloved Month of August in 2008 and Arabian Nights: Volume 2 – The Desolate One in 2015. “I’m used to it, but not too much,” the filmmaker says about the selection. “I’m not sure it’s a film with the right profile for Academy voters, but I was already surprised to win an amazing prize in Cannes, so let’s play the game.”
He’s referring to the Best Director award, which started what can be considered his own grand tour around the world. Has there been a particularly memorable reaction from the audience? “There are questions where you can tell even the person asking it doesn’t know what they’re saying. In that case, I just say whatever I want. People are also curious about how we made the film, and that’s understandable, because you engage in a process, and doing it one way or the other will produce different results.”
He adds: “There’s also the critical reaction. Some directors get quite angry if they feel their film wasn’t properly understood, but I think that’s the price to pay for making your work available to the audience, and to the critics. I value critics a lot. Maybe I used to be one long ago, but I think it’s valuable to have people on the other side, who try to understand your work and describe the experience of watching a film. With knowledge, of course, because it’s a talent, and some viewers have more talent than others.”
It’s a constant learning process, Gomes says. “I always learn more about my films when I’m editing than I did while I was shooting them. And when I start talking about them at Q&As and in the press, I always know less than I will after six months, because during those six months I will have been reading about my film and discussed it with people.”
Going back to the process of filmmaking, Gomes addresses the question of cinematic influences. “Every film is born in a specific context,” he says. “People talk to me about Tabu or Grand Tour and say I made a silent film or a screwball comedy, but the context behind my films is different. I’m Portuguese, not American, and I’m not working in the 1920s, ‘30s or ‘40s. These ideas come from a memory of cinema, Grand Tour is a film made in 2024 and dealing with this fake Asia that Western cinema invented, from the perspective of a Portuguese director in a post-colonial world.”
In addition to filmmaking and criticism, Gomes has also worked as a film professor, mentoring new generations (Basil Da Cunha, now a festival regular in his own right, was one of his students at HEAD in Geneva). Is there an emerging director who has particularly impressed him lately? “I was on the jury for the Chinese competition in Pingyao, at Jia Zhangke’s festival, and we saw thirteen films that were first or second features. Karst, which we gave our main prize to, is very impressive.”
The problem with first films, he adds, is they’re usually less visible, with festivals being the main exception. And there’s been visible changes in the industry, he opines: “I think cinema now is less wild than when I started. I made my first short film 25 years ago, when there was a bit less money on the European circuit. It’s good to have more money, of course, but it has a cost, with the financiers trying to control aspects of the process. European cinema has this apparent moral superiority of not being as industrial as Hollywood, and many times I think that’s bullshit. It’s the same rules, maybe slightly different, and the director can be a prisoner to those rules. So the films are less wild, more controlled.”
