Kleber Mendonça Filho’s “The Secret Agent” may take place largely in the late 1970s, but it is grounded in a richness and a reality that has nothing to do with nostalgia for the past. Much of that comes down to the incredibly rich, diverse cast for the film, assembled by casting director Gabriel Domingues.
“Until recently, Brazil did not see itself in the mirror in TV programs and films. It wasn’t as diverse as the Brazilian population. When we open this possibility of diversity, it’s amazing because to find richness in different people — that’s what happens when you take a metro in Brazil. You see every kind of person that exists,” Domingues said in the video above.
Domingues did not only seek out a diversity of faces or body types, but also of professional acting experience levels. “There are different stages of [the performers’] career in the casting of the movie,” Domingues said. “That’s a thing that Kleber likes. We don’t mind if you are a big star or if you are in your first job. If it works, if you’re the right person, the movie will say.”
Domingues’s process relies heavily on self-tapes at first to find those right people, but then on conversations between the actors and Mendonça Filho, and, eventually, robust rehearsals to integrate all the performers, whatever stage of professional career they’re in. Wagner Moura, who plays a charming academic forced into hiding and into going by the name Marcelo, did about a month of rehearsals in Recife before “The Secret Agent” started shooting.
“ I love to do rehearsals because that’s the first time that I see a scene that used to be just theory. And it has dimension. And now you can tell that it’s a good scene. Just by the way they say the lines, they react. They bring something new,” Mendonça Filho told IndieWire on an episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast. “ It’s very much like an orchestra, and everybody was in sync and in tune.”
While there are logistically and emotionally complex scenes that it would be natural to want to make sure are in tune before you get to set, Mendonça Filho and Domingues also know that the process really helps integrate the cast into one unit.
“I really enjoy doing this, and the actors actually enjoy it, too. Sometimes they find it a little jarring, but then they really appreciate the system in the middle of a scene. It just occurs to me that he or she could say something else, or maybe we could expand on a situation, and then I say, ‘Let’s try this. You can say this. You can say that. Let’s go back.’ I think it’s very naturalistic and it’s like building on something that had already been written, and maybe it was underwritten, and now I can actually give a little more detail to the scene,” Mendonça Filho said.
In the video above, you can watch some of the self-tapes and early rehearsal takes that led to incredible performances by the cast of “The Secret Agent.”
