Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty ImagesKleber Mendonça Filho likes stuff. The Golden Globe-winning director of The Secret Agent (2025) is doing Zoom interviews from the office of his home in Recife, the northeastern Brazilian city where he grew up and the setting of his latest film. The wall behind the filmmaker is lined with books, reels of film, and boxes of papers and cassette tapes. Overflowing with ideas and voices and stories and vivid details, it’s like a visual representation of Filho’s movies. There’s a lot going on in The Secret Agent: It was Udo Kier’s (R.I.P.) last film role, for one, as well as a vehicle for unlikely 79-year-old awards-season darling Tânia Maria, who plays the lead’s anarcho-communist landlady. Armando, aka Marcelo (Wagner Moura), is the Secret Agent of the title, a former technology expert who’s living under an assumed name after pissing off an energy-company executive during Brazil’s military dictatorship. Powerful men are sending dangerous ones to kill Marcelo, but in the meantime, Filho fills his world with fantastical detours — at one point, the film stops to act out an urban legend about a disembodied hairy leg terrorizing men cruising in a city park — and charmingly eccentric side characters.“I think far too many films have the logic of movies.”Then Filho zooms out to show two young women in 2025 listening to tapes of Armando/Marcelo telling his story in 1977, revealing yet another facet of this sprawling, brilliant film. Inverse’s conversation with Filho as The Secret Agent prepares for its Criterion Collection debut was similarly expansive and detailed, covering everything from the cinematic nature of dreams to Filho’s very specific memories of Brazilian light switches in the 1970s.Scene-stealer Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria) and the gang. | The Criterion Collection This film is so rich. There are all these little side stories happening: the woman who’s having a seizure at The Exorcist, for example, or the man who’s preaching about procrastination outside the barbershop. As a writer, how well do you know these characters? How much have you filled out their lives and what happens to them in your mind?When I write, I think a lot about not only great scripts that I have read, or great films that I have seen, but also great books. The logic of writing doesn’t have to follow the industry standard for a script. Now that my films have become more well-known, my collaborators know what we are doing [going in]. But with my first film, Neighboring Sounds, I had questions like “Why do we need to see them making their way to the meeting? Why don’t we just cut to the meeting?”But in my mind, arriving at the building, and then having somebody say, “You have to take the service elevator,” and then going over to the service elevator, and then the waiting time inside the elevator … it means something to me. All of these things become interesting for me when making a film. I love the guy screaming his lungs out about procrastination, because Recife has this history of street poets. They can be incredibly annoying, but sometimes you’re walking and you go, ‘Oh, that’s interesting.” I like the flavor of the city, and I like the sounds of the city.At the end of the day, you have kind of a long script that has lots of ideas going on. But that’s what I call the logic of life. I think far too many films have the logic of movies. [What] I really like [is] the logic of life coming into the logic of movies, which is what I think I have in my films. It is a movie, but then there is also life happening inside the movie.I only went to a couple of years of film school, but they teach you exactly that. “Don’t show them parking the car and going into the building. Cut straight to the building.”What if you fall in love with somebody while you’re parking the car? What if you find a puppy in the freezing cold, and you decide to take it home? What if you get an important call inside the car? So many things can happen in unusual places, and that’s part of the story.Even something as popular and as Hollywood as Die Hard has some really unexpected moments of life in it. So, guy arrives at the airport, and there is this chauffeur waiting for him with a limousine. And then they have this really long conversation in the limousine. Why didn’t they go straight to the Nakatomi Plaza, you know? That’s the kind of thing I like. And that’s a big Hollywood 20th Century Fox movie.So in terms of story, there are no dos or don’ts. The only rules [you need] to watch out for are mostly technical — the sound shouldn’t clip, for example. But narrative-wise, you can do anything you feel like, and anything that would be good for the film. With The Secret Agent, I really had this desire to do this panorama of time, and looking at humans living life 50 years ago. And it is a fascinating thought, because the way we live our lives today is very different from the way we would have lived our lives in 1977.Wagner Moura in The Secret Agent.When you were building this version of 1977 in Recife, how much were you drawing from your memories of being a child during that time, as opposed to other sources?I happen to have a photographic memory. I was 9 in 1977, so I have a lot of very particular bits of memory that ended up going into the film. Some of these memories would be considered so unusual today that I actually had to look them up and check old newspapers and [things like that] to see if I hadn’t imagined things, and I happened to be right.I had so many of the memories already in me: the light switch in [our] house, because in ’77, many of the light switches would still be from the ’50s, or even the ’40s. [In Brazil] it was only in the ’80s that the light switches began to change to something more modern and more plasticky. The color of the cars, the smoking of cigarettes, the way they would lower their voices when something politically sensitive was said — this is something that I very specifically remember from my childhood, my mother lowering her voice because people could be listening, you know? That’s one thing about living in a dictatorship.Now I’m working on a film that is set in the 1930s. It’s a completely different way of answering your question, because I do not have memories from the ’30s, so I have to research. I have to look at the details. That is a far more complicated way of writing the past.“Dreams are part of us as humans, but they’re also very cinematic.”When you say you had to go back and check some of the details in newspapers — what do you mean specifically? Like the scene with the man-eating shark? [One of The Secret Agent’s subplots involves a corrupt police chief and his sons investigating a man-eating shark.]The shark is some kind of adaptation, because the shark problem began in the very early ’90s. A new port was built about 30 kilometers south, and that f*cked up the ecosystem. It’s kind of a classic revenge-of-nature story, a mix of recent history with movie logic. The hairy leg was an urban legend from 1975. I grew up hearing stories about the hairy leg. I remember a school — not my school, one nearby — that decided to call off classes one day because the principal was worried about the whole thing around the hairy leg.I love when poetry comes crashing into reality, and Recife is a city where that happens a lot. The Carnival, I think, is incredibly poetic. I love [the scene] where Marcelo leaves the cinema through the side door and steps into [a celebration]. He leaves one dimension, cinema, and he goes into another dimension, which is Carnival. It’s incredibly strong in terms of the mystique, and the stories, and the fairy tales, and the urban legends. And I love when that mixes with the story that you’re telling. It’s almost like a dream sequence. Dreams are part of us as humans, but they’re also very cinematic.Filho and Wagner Moura (and the leg) as Carnival-style puppets, at a party in Recife celebrating The Secret Agent’s Oscar nominations. | BRENDA ALCANTARA/AFP/Getty ImagesAre you a vivid dreamer?Yeah, I am. I had quite a memorable dream on Saturday, which I told my wife about. But we lose most of them, don’t we? Unless you have the discipline to move over to the side table and write it down so you don’t forget.I’ve met people who say they don’t really dream, and I thought it was tragic because, like you said, it adds another dimension to life. You have cinema, you have Carnival, you have dreams, you have your day-to-day-life...That all should be a part of the story if you’re really going to be inside that character’s feelings and head. Depending on how well-written the character is, it can be a beautiful thing or a disturbing thing, depending on the character. I really wanted to go with Marcelo and share his feelings about life in that particular version of Brazil 50 years ago. I like that character very much.The moment you mentioned, where Wagner Moura walks out of the cinema and into Carnival — it’s not just shifting realms. It’s a huge emotional moment for the character, and a turning point for the story.I think it’s also a great sound moment in the film. It took a few days to get that right.Why?It had many layers, many different realities of sound. The cinema, the music, the street, the Carnival, the bands, the people, the screaming … it just grows and grows and grows. I love what we call the Frevo bands, because they are not powered in any way. You get, like, 20 guys and women with brass instruments and a bit of a percussion section, and you make a lot of noise. It’s really amazing.Wagner Moura at the records office in The Secret Agent. | The Criterion Collection Another thing this film is very much dealing with is memory. There’s a lot in here about records: the ID card that proves that Marcelo/Armando’s mother existed, and then the recordings that the researchers are listening to in the modern day. How does that tie into this idea of memory in the film?First of all, I love physical media. It’s just part of my generation. Not only that, but it is a piece of memory. I mean, you can see behind me, I have prints of my short films from 20 years ago, and then all these books and slides. I have a lot of physical media from [my] films.I think more and more, films and books and music have become ethereal entities, which is interesting when you’re driving for four hours in your car and you forgot to bring any of your favorite records. You can just go on your telephone and just [type], I don’t know, Caetano Veloso or R.E.M., and there you have it. But to have the objects in your house is something that I really love. I just keep buying records. I keep buying films. I keep buying books.“I just keep buying records. I keep buying films. I keep buying books.”There’s something great about the day you buy them, and you carry them around with you until you get home. And then you get home, and you sit down or lie down and you just look at them. Maybe you start reading. Maybe you play a record. Or maybe you just find a place for them on the shelf. It’s like archiving, in a way — archiving without discipline, but it is an archive of sorts.My film Pictures of Ghosts came from this section of my office. These are very old tapes, and I invested a lot of time and money into digitizing them, and then I found a film in there. And it’s wonderful, because 30 years ago, these would be just tapes of things that just happened weeks before. Now they actually mean something, because time did something to them. I think that’s one of the ideas behind the tapes in The Secret Agent. There is a lot of life in those tapes. It’s a beautiful thing — someday we will be voices from the past, if this conversation is kept in some cloud or on some hard drive. In many years, we will be voices from the past.The Secret Agent is now available on 4K UHD and Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection. The Secret Agent 4K Criterion Blu-rayAmazon -