Interview by Matteo Pini
Portrait by Patrícia Neves Gomes

MP Grand Tour (2024) was shot over an extended period. The film’s narrative scenes were shot on a soundstage, while documentary-style portions were filmed on location across Southeast Asia, with additional footage shot remotely in China. How did that separation between time, space and production inform how the narrative unfolded?

MG In my films, I don’t start with the story or the characters. Film should be many, many different things. Film is moving, and the characters are too. We had always planned to have two different shoots. We decided to go on a trip to Asia and create an archive of images before writing the film, and after we had collected the footage, we wrote the script reacting to what we shot. We had footage of a cockfight in Manila, a sequence of monks with baskets on their heads in Japan, and we were thinking: what could these sequences give to the parts of the film shot on the soundstage? What kind of feeling, what kind of mood, what kind of situation? Due to the pandemic, we had to wait until we could shoot in China, and we waited for two years before we decided to shoot the China scenes remotely.

MP In the film, Edward, a Portuguese-speaking diplomat for the British Empire, flees across Asia from his fiancée Molly, but she is in close pursuit. They are always narrowly missing each other, and in the process, they seem to miss everything around them. What forms of absence were you thinking about here?

MG It resonates with colonialism. Molly and Edward are very basic figures. He is running, and she is chasing, and when people are obsessed with something from their personal lives, they have less space to integrate, to show concern.

MP You have spoken about the influence of W. Somerset Maugham’s 1930 novel The Gentleman in the Parlour, and his specific gaze as a European travelling through the colonial territories. How did that inform how power relations are depicted in the film?

MG I was trying to deal with colonialism, but for me, it’s also important not to be a judge or a policeman, trying to punish either the viewer or the characters. I don’t believe that cinema should be able to exert this kind of violence to make the world fairer. I always knew that by shooting in Asia and not pretending that I was an expert, I was playing with fire, but I don’t mind playing with fire. I was hoping that British people would come to me and complain about how I was representing them, but no one did. I’m Portuguese: while I don’t know Asia, I don’t know Britain either.

MP  There is no point at which the film proposes itself as an ethnographic study of Asia. The word “tour” in the title gives it away.

MG The only fair thing I could do is to have an exterior view because I cannot have another one. But I don’t think that is a crime. It connects with the subject of the film, which is people who are on the outside and who don’t belong there. All the Western characters in the film look completely out of place. They don’t seem to understand what’s happening and what they’re seeing. It’s the opposite of a film about people who become more culturally integrated.

MP In the film, you’re constantly testing the rules of cinematic realism. There is a scene in which a mobile phone rings in a forest, even though the film is set in 1917. Those scenes are juxtaposed with real-life footage of present-day Asia. These disjunctions all feel quite deliberate. Where does the idea of cinematic truth lie for you?

MG I think the idea that cinema has to be truthful is a big mistake. There were moments in the history of cinema when cinema was a parallel world with its own rules. Other constructed art forms, like paintings or songs, are designed to talk about life, but do not pretend to be life itself. I think it’s a pity that in so many films, we are trying to convince ourselves that we are watching something real. The studio images depict a very artificial Asia from 1917, how Asia was depicted in cinema in the past, but we also wanted to include the “real” Asia. We were mixing them and not trying to hide it. We wanted to see what the present would give to the past, and how the characters and story from the past would be affected by the things we see in the present. It’s like there’s contamination on both sides.

MP There are repeated visual references to puppet theatres, which itself is a kind of ancestor of cinema, a different kind of make-believe.

MG Cinema comes from puppetry. It’s very obvious in the shadow puppet scene we shot in the south of Thailand, where the puppet master manipulates the puppets from behind a screen. You don’t even see the puppets, you see their projection and their shadow. Puppet shows are a kind of popular fiction across Asia, and I wanted to connect them to the film’s own puppets – they are British, they’re called Edward and Molly, and they speak in Portuguese.

MP There’s a sequence in Saigon where multiple layers of footage of mopeds driving are layered over one another. You expect the dissolve to transition to another scene, but instead all the images pile up on top of each other. You gain the awareness of multiple timelines existing at once.

MG That’s the moment where Edward arrives in Saigon, and we wanted this part of the film to be a little feverish with the blending of images and the sensation of being lost in a place. The characters disappear and you see the footage from the present day, but the footage is contaminated by our knowledge of the character. The landscape exists by itself, but in the context of a film, it starts to become a kind of inner landscape.

MP You worked with three cinematographers across different continents. How did each of their contributions shape the visual language of the film?

MG  We didn’t want to have a unified style. I never work with storyboards and I don’t discuss the look of a film. It’s a very natural process, filming in a certain place with a certain light. Making films is like negotiating. If you’re a bad negotiator, like Trump, you don’t give space to others. But you’re also a bad negotiator if you accept everything. So you wake up, you go to set, and you start to negotiate, knowing that the film will be better for it. .