Biography

February 20, 1972 · Lisbon, Portugal

Considered Manoel de Oliveira and João César Monteiro the best Portuguese directors ever.

[as a Portuguese film-maker] We film with lower budgets than almost any other European country. So, for instance, now [2012] because of the crisis in Portugal, everything is cut.. The only advantage of being poor is you can afford yourself a bit more freedom because you're not obliged to do a big box-office hit. But if you have the chance of doing a good, interesting film and you can afford the freedom not to deal with the pressure, you can take advantage of this.

[on 'Tabu' his film which concerns a senile white woman and her African housekeeper] These characters - older women between sixty and eighty, that are lonely but no one gives a damn about - you don't get to see very much in cinema. So I wanted to have them on the film.

Every day it's time to make a deal between what was your first desire, your first ideas, and then what's happening that day - what's happening in this location, what you see. This is the most enjoyable moment. Sometimes it also brings a kind of anguish, because you ask what the hell I'm doing here. You're not sure, it's not very solid, it's improvised in the moment.

[press conference for Grand Tour (2024) at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival] Some years ago I got married; this is always a stressful decision and a radical one nowadays. And so by chance I was reading a book, not a novel - by W. Somerset Maugham - it's a traveller's book, it describes temples and markets and places and cities and landscapes and jungles. It's a book called A Gentleman in the Parlour. There are these two pages of the book, when Maugham tells the story of knowing an English guy in Burma - it tells the story about his marriage. He lives happily with his wife now, but he panicked when she arrived to marry him and he ran away. And the Grand Tour is something that really existed - it's like a journey that some people did in the beginning of the 20th century - the Asian Grand Tour. It started in a territory in the British Empire - India or Burma - and then normally it ended in China. This was one of the interests for Grand Tour. There was a moment when I said, I want to make this film but I want to make a film with this starting point and I have to create because it's only an anecdote about men being cowards and women being very......decided. So, it's about the stubbornness of women and men being cowards. But there was no story - it was this anecdote. So we decided to create an original script from this departing point.