I'm a big admirer of Payal Kapadia: 'Grand Tour' filmmaker Miguel Gomes

New Delhi: When Payal Kapadia won the Grand Prix award at Cannes for All We Imagine As Light last year, she gave a shout out to Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes, whose film Grand Tour was also in competition. And it seems the admiration for each other's work is mutual.

The director, known for his inventive style, considers Kapadia a friend and a filmmaker whose work he really admires. Gomes' Grand Tour, which won the Best Director award at Cannes, is currently streaming on MUBI India.

Gomes has seen Kapadia's 2021 Cannes winning documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing.

"Payal is a friend of mine. I met Payal when she made her previous film (A Night of Knowing Nothing). It was a major discovery for me. It resonated in a very personal way how she was building -- filming reality in India and at the same time, creating, like a novelist -- with letters.

"You don't see the characters but you hear them, the love story, so it was the film that really connected with me. I met Payal in France and she said that she liked my films and it was really amazing to know her and know her work which I am a big admirer of," Gomes told PTI in a roundtable interview.

In her Cannes acceptance speech for her history-making win for All We Imagine As Light, Kapadia said, "I'm a huge fan of Miguel Gomes. I follow what he does." Gomes, who is known for his experimental approach to filmmaking that blends different cinematic formats to create visually stunning stories, begins his new film Grand Tour in 1917 Rangoon where a British civil servant, Edward, abandons his fiancee, Molly, who arrives from London to get married after their long engagement.

As Edward travels to Singapore, then to Bangkok, Manila, Saigon, Osaka, Shanghai and Tibet, a determined Molly follows him.

The whimsical film, where Gomes has shot the period details in black and white and used documentary footage in colour, was one of the best reviewed movies at the Cannes Film Festival. Gomes shot the film during the pandemic and said they had no idea what was going to happen when they started preparing for the journey across Asia.

"We started in Myanmar. It was made chronologically from west to east and then in the first week of February we were in Japan and we tried to get to China and the  Chinese producer told us, 'I think it's a bad idea'," the filmmaker said.

According to Gomes, they were initially more concerned about the shoot being postponed in Manila due to a volcano eruption there in January 2020, but soon realised that the situation was getting out of hand for other countries as well.

"Maybe because we were supposed to shoot in the Philippines and then in China, we didn't take the messages seriously that were coming from China. We thought it would be okay and then it was Covid." Gomes said he wanted to shoot what was happening in China and even spoke to his crew about possible risks.

"I remember, I have a very nice sound man that, in fact, is a little bit crazy... (I told them) I would like to go, I would like to take a risk, so what do you think about that? And nobody answered me except for the sound man, who thought for five minutes and said, 'Miguel, I think I can go because I'm getting old and I didn't pay well enough to the social security. So I will be retired and I will be in misery. So if I die, it will be okay'." In the end, Gomes had to shoot the China scenes for Grand Tour remotely as they couldn't travel to the country due to Covid restrictions.

Known internationally for movies such as Tabu, Redemption and three-part Arabian Nights, Gomes said he has never been the one to meticulously plan everything in his movies.

"I try to create the conditions for not being able to control, to just enter the process that will give me something and I can surf it, like it was a wave and I was a surfer. Sometimes it doesn't go well, there are days that are not so good and there are days that are great. And in the end you have the film," he added.

And true to his style, Gomes would not define the characters or the story of Grand Tour, leaving it to critics and cinephiles to figure out whether it is about colonialism, a dying empire, or a gumptious woman.

"I made the film because I think it's open to many interpretations and what I like in the reactions to the movie is that I sometimes hear very different ideas that people got from the film about Edward, Molly and colonialism. Sometimes people see it in almost opposite ways. I cannot steal that from the viewers, saying, 'No, Molly is this'. To be honest, I don't have any idea." Gomes is next working on "Savagery", which he described as a strange war film. He has been developing the story for years. The film is inspired by "Os Sertões" (Rebellion in the Backlands).

Written by Euclides da Cunha in 1902, the Brazilian literary classic narrates the true story of a war that happened at the end of the 19th century in Canudos, a settlement of Bahia's Sertao.

"It's a film about a place, the people that live in that place and the war that existed in this part of Brazil...I had this film planned long ago. I started working on this film in 2016 and it was supposed to be my film after Arabian Nights which I made in 2015 and then it was so difficult to get it financed. It's not an adaptation of a novel, so it doesn't have main characters."