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Escape Routes: Miguel Gomes on Grand Tour
Crista Alfaiate in Grand Tour At its core the story of a man taking extreme measures to avoid his fiancée, Grand Tour originated when Portuguese director Miguel Gomes read W. Somerset Maugham’s The Gentleman in the Parlour (1930) just before his marriage to co-screenwriter Maureen Fazendeiro. The cast of their previous collaboration, 2021’s The Tsugua Diaries, included the couple, who played variants of themselves in a meta-comedy about trying to direct a movie under COVID lockdown restrictions; Grand Tour is their second, exponentially more ambitious pandemic production.
Grand Tour specifically grew from a story told early in Maugham’s Asia travelogue, as the author recounts meeting George, a British man in present-day Myanmar, whose engagement to his wife Mabel began “when he was home on leave, and when he returned to Burma it was arranged that she should join him in six months. But one difficulty cropped up after another.” After seven years passed, “his nerve failed him […] He had forgotten what she was like. She was a total stranger […] he really couldn’t marry her. But how could a man tell a girl a thing like that when she had been engaged to him for seven years and had come six thousand miles to marry him?” Thus, “seized with the courage of despair,” George took a boat for Singapore—but the indefatigable Mabel followed him there, continuing to trail behind as he proceeded to Bangkok, Saigon, Hong Kong, Manila, Shanghai, Yokohama and so on, to no avail. Mabel finally caught up with him, and the two were married.
Gomes explains in the press kit that he noticed “the flight of the groom followed the route of the grand tour” taken through Asia in the first decades of the 20th century by British travelers. So, in 2020, he sent two cinematographers out to capture footage from seven countries: Guo Liang in China, Sayombhu Mukdeepromfor the rest. After sorting through the results of this commissioned documentary travelogue, Gomes created a story in response with a team of three other screenwriters, then shot that narrative with DP Rui Poças on soundstages in Lisbon and Rome. Enacted by two veteran Gomes performers, the characters of Maugham’s story are slightly rechristened Edward (Gonçalo Waddington) and Molly (Crista Alfaiate). His story takes up the film’s first half, hers in pursuit the second, both narrated in the language of each country they pass through. Throughout, the “British” characters (and everyone they interact with) speak in Portuguese, regardless of what language they’re ostensibly conversing in.
Often densely crowded with extras, soundstage reconstructions of the past are wedded to the present-day real world. One early showstopping example comes when Edward arrives in Thailand. Having sung the “Eton Boating Song” to himself in the jungle, he finds himself at a gathering where that Edwardian staple signaling an expensive education is playing for the guests. As Edward speaks to a young Thai monarch, that song seamlessly leads into the “Blue Danube,” which continues as he hurriedly finds his way out of the gathering and makes his way to Vietnam and a series of spectacular, slow-motion black-and-white shots of roundabout traffic. Decades, countries, fact and fiction are bridged in one smooth gesture, leaps characteristic of Gomes’s work. His second feature, 2008’s Our Beloved Month of August, similarly interwove a constructed fiction with on-the-ground ethnography, while 2012’s Tabu staged its first half in present-day Lisbon, rendering its second half as a faux-silent film set in the colonial past.
After the film’s premiere at Cannes last year, where Gomes won Best Director, the filmmaker went on his own grand tour of worldwide festivals; I spoke with him during the New York Film Festival leg of his promotional journey. Grand Tour enters theatrical release via MUBI on March 28.
Filmmaker: This film began when you were reading The Gentleman in the Parlour. I want to know more about why you were reading that book and what your reading habits are like in general. Do you ever read with the idea that it might be generative, or do you just read for yourself?
Gomes: I like to read. I think it’s a good habit. Normally, I read novels, but it also happens that I read travelogues, so it was completely random. Reading was very important to me when I was 13, 14; I was a compulsive reader. I have phases—the last three months I’m not reading, but I could read 20 books this month. It comes and goes.
Filmmaker: Did you read it in English?
Gomes: I started reading in a Portuguese translation. When it started to get serious, I read it in English.
Filmmaker: Is there is a sonic appeal to hearing your actors say English names with a heavy Portuguese accent? Do you hear that in your head when you’re reading that way?
Gomes: I’ve never thought about it. I was [experiencing] some pressure from producers about normal things. I was thinking about using English or even American accents, [then] there was a moment when I got fed up with this pressure and thought, “Now they will use many languages in the film except English.” There’s also a film that I think is a little bit underestimated nowadays, Alain Resnais’s Smoking/No Smoking. They keep saying [British] character names out loud with the French accent—marvelous.
Filmmaker: Are the actors you cast from Vietnam, Thailand or other countries learning to speak Portuguese doing so phonetically?
Gomes: This actress [Lang Khê Tran] playing Ngoc, the Vietnamese maid [who works for Molly in the film’s second Vietnamese section], she’s French. In fact, I only found out later she’s the daughter of a pretty famous director from Vietnam, [Tran Anh Hung], and [her] mother is the actress [from his first feature] The Scent of Green Papaya. I was looking for a Portuguese-speaking Vietnamese [actress], then found this French-Vietnamese actress. We changed the script and said, “OK, she’s speaking French.” I mean, there are so many unreal things happening in this film; it will be just one of them. So, she will speak French, and the actress playing Molly should answer in “English,” [even though that’s represented as her speaking] in Portuguese. And there will be a moment where [Ngoc] says some sentences in Portuguese because there’s an ellipsis. Having [spent] time with Molly, [she learned] how to speak this “English Portuguese.”
Filmmaker: Let’s talk about the black and white.
Gomes: Black and white is the most expensive film stock because it’s more rare. You pay for it, and I spend lots and lots of time in the grading because in black and white film stock, there is no color. There is black, there is white and there are different tones of gray. But when you digitize the film, you sense the digital. I spend lots and lots of time trying to kill the digital [so that] we all get the impression of seeing a 35mm print. I go up to the Lisbon Cinematheque, which is one of the best in the world, and see prints there every week.
Filmmaker: Do you do a lot of takes?
Gomes: No, because I’m always pressured. It’s first take, second take lots of [the time]. Going more than 10, it’s strange for me.
Filmmaker: Do you know how much you shot for the travelogues? Were you affected by film restrictions?
Gomes: Let me think. I don’t shoot much. [He does some arithmetic in a notebook] 120 cans, 12 to 16 minutes a can—maybe 11 hours.
Filmmaker: To find your shooting areas, did you look at a lot of YouTube or Google Maps?
Gomes: All these things. We knew which countries we would shoot in. One of the four [screenwriters], me or the other three, would be responsible for one country and so on. By the end of the day, I would ask one of the writers, “Mariana [Ricardo], impress us with China.” There are four screenwriters [for] seven countries. I only got one.
Filmmaker: They just posted the design blueprints of the train compartment on the Viennale website this morning, along with part of a lookbook with some images from Shanghai Express.
Gomes: This was really the work of one of the [production designers], Thales Junqueira. This guy also works with Kleber Mendonça Filho, and it’s his way of working. He just talks with the director, the researchers, and puts all his references [together], then he draws or asks someone to draw. I don’t have anything to do with this. I mean, during the phase when I was discussing sets, they were a little bit worried because we didn’t have much money, and filming in this old-fashioned way of working in-studio is quite expensive. Everything looked pathetically small, and I was loving this. I was trying to convince them: “They are miniatures, so I’m working with this limitation. If it seems too small, it’s beautiful because we already have a big, big thing in the film, which is the world. The world is unbeatable. So, I’m happy we’re working small-scale in contrast with this scope of world travel.”
In the first part of the film, [Edward’s] completely scared, running away in panic. There’s a moment I cut in the Philippines where he was tap dancing with American sailors, with prostitutes, until he says “Molly” lots of times—“Molly, Molly, Molly, Molly”—like an invocation, then Molly appears. You can even wonder if the second part [in which Edward disappears while the film shifts its focus to Molly in pursuit] is real or if it’s just him wandering [in an] opium [trance] in the forest.
Filmmaker: The forest seems like it would be very hot once you started lighting it.
Gomes: Rui Poças, the cinematographer that worked in the studio, was not using these kinds of lights everyone is using today. He was using more old-fashioned kinds of lights, so sometimes it got a little bit hot, yes. The forests were shot in two studios—one in Lisbon, the other one in Rome. There are two kinds of forests: the Thailand jungle in the beginning, and the bamboo forest in China. These forests were built in Lisbon because it was too expensive [to build] in Rome. We were discussing all these spaces for months, and I tried to have the ability to move things.
Filmmaker: Like the trees?
Gomes: Yeah, where I could just remove and replace them in 10 minutes, but we didn’t. We didn’t have any [storyboards]. I don’t work with this. I just improvise how many shots I’ll do and [of] what every day. Normally, I get to set 15, 20 minutes before the rest of the group with the assistant director [and] the continuity guy, [who] is also my editor and my screenwriter. We just look at things and I get some ideas, then change these ideas when the actors appear. I say, “OK, remember what I’ve told you? Forget about me.”
Filmmaker: “The Blue Danube” is a musical cue that is inextricable from 2001. Obviously, it’s something you had to think about; it invokes Kubrick even if you don’t want that.
Gomes: When we were researching countries, we were not only [using] Google and things like this, we were also reading books. Thailand was never colonized; they were playing with westerners in a very intelligent way, doing all kinds of alliances. There was, I think, a French book about a traveling woman that was in Thailand, [which had] a description of the parties in the palace. They would do this in the palace in Bangkok for the amusement of the European diplomats and sometimes have big orchestras playing western music. There is nothing more European than this 19th-century music. Of course, I was aware that Kubrick used [“The Blue Danube”] in 2001, so we are a little bit in a danger zone by doing this, but I love it. This is my playground, so let’s try to see what we can do with this. There was this great day in the editing room when we understood there is one note in [the “Eton Boating Song”] that is exactly the same note as the beginning of the Strauss. We said, “Amazing.” We understood that there is no transition; it’s the same note.
There was a moment in Lisbon, where we had all the co-producers come and watch the first version of the film while it wasn’t finished. I think I had a good reaction from the producers at that moment, but there was one who was a little bit disturbed by this sequence. With all the music, I guess it was 10 minutes or maybe more. And this person said, “You should stop the music because it’s too much time. It’s unbearable: you are in the Palace of the Prince, then in this fisherman’s boat in Thailand, then in the streets of Ho Chi Minh City—it never stops!” I like this because it’s very democratic: it’s good for the tuk tuk, it’s good for bikers in Ho Chi Minh City and for fishermen in Britain. I know it’s too much, and this makes it more delirious and excessive, but this is why I like this.
Filmmaker: You have final cut, right? I assume.
Gomes: No. We worked a little bit more. That scene I did nothing, but I heard them, and they were right in certain points, and I changed things because of what they said.
Filmmaker: What did you need to change?
Gomes: The beginning of the film was always problematic because when you begin you have to instill the rules of the film; it is always quite difficult. It takes some time. You cannot do very bold things like you can do later on, because it’s too much; you destroy the film. So, decisions about precisely what the voiceover would say in the beginning—if it’s too much, if it’s something right—we had many discussions. Our process is that during the editing, we write the voiceover, so it’s simultaneous: we edit, we make up sentences, we ask someone in the office to record and put it directly on the [assembly], then we re-edit or rewrite.
Filmmaker: When you’re recording all the foreign voiceovers, are you doing it at a time and geographical distance as well, so that you can’t really direct them in the booth?
Gomes: Every week, we would write something new and ask someone around to record it—in Portuguese, of course, [because] we were in Lisbon. By the end, we had this collective voiceover with many voices. I liked this, but it was by accident. Maureen, my wife, was working on this film; she’s French, speaks good Portuguese but has a French accent. There was a moment when Telmo Churro, my editor, said, “I kind of like this accent.” Then, the idea appeared: forget about the accent [and use] the languages of the countries we are in at every moment, so it would also be like traveling through language. This was one idea that happened also two weeks before the cut that the producers saw.
Filmmaker: But the actual recording of the foreign languages, they are recording it in Thailand or whatever, then sending it back to you?
Gomes: No, we just used who was available in Lisbon. We did a second casting for voiceover by the end of editing. The options were very limited sometimes: we had lots of Chinese options in Lisbon, but some were more difficult to get, like Burmese. There’s not really much direction to be done. There are four buttons to push for the actors: faster, slower, higher or lower. This also works for the voiceover. I was starting to know the sentences because they were repeating them, and I had the Portuguese translation aligned, so I was having an idea of what they were saying.
Filmmaker: I often feel like when I see crowdwork, sometimes you can tell that people have not really been given a lot of precise direction, and they’re kind of winging it. Here, the crowds are very dense, and everyone either seems to be a real person doing their job or otherwise very specifically directed.
Gomes: I have a genius casting director that happens to be my wife. She’s very obsessive, and she wants to pick every extra, so we discuss this; we don’t buy them by catalog. I’m much less patient than her, but I’m glad to have her because I know she will get interesting people, and when I have interesting people, I get interested while shooting. The way they move, that’s one of the things I normally don’t like in cinema. I can almost tell, “OK, there will be three more [people] coming from the right, one with an umbrella on the left.” It’s very mechanical because [the choreography is] something that normally you give to guys from the casting agency or the assistant directors, and they do it on every film, so it tends to be the same thing in every film. So, sometimes I even try to create obstacles for something to go wrong, to create some chaos with them. I let them do their job, then I ruin their work. But then it can feel more alive.
Filmmaker: [SPOILER ALERT] At the end of the film, when the lights are actually shown, that’s a big gesture. [After Molly dies in a forest, her character is resurrected under bright studio lights and led off the soundstage.]
Gomes: Maybe two or three weeks before shooting, I had this idea. In the script, we had something more abstract: she’s dead in the forest, and then you work with the travel footage and something will happen—the density of the sound will change, there will be things with light and sound, a fusion of studio images and real footage from the bamboo forest—but it was very abstract. Three weeks before, I knew the studio space. I looked at the ceiling. They were adjusting lights, and I had this idea: maybe she could wake up because of cinema, because of light.
I don’t think I’m making films about making films, but definitely I’m working with an idea of, how can we still tell stories after so many years of cinema? How is it possible? The process to get there—in a way, it’s part of the film—even if it’s not about making this precise film, it’s more abstract. In the end, it should work emotionally. There’s a moment you don’t see the strings anymore, even if they are there at the same time, because they are working. This is in opposition to most films, which try to hide the strings.
