I’ve seen it twice on 35. It’s better on 35, of course. It’s a beautiful thing. It almost looks like a movie that’s been found and restored, which I like quite a bit.
I thought that [Fawcett] was the victim of a class system that was ruthlessly unforgiving, and that forced him into a position of inadequacy. That spurred both his greatness and his folly. And I thought that the film could bring life to the idea that’s in the book [by David Grann, the movie’s source material], that his sense of inadequacy was fueled in such large measure by class. That idea obsessed me. I thought, in a larger sense, what the book conveyed and what the movie could convey was the brutal sense of hierarchies. You know, [Fawcett’s superiors] look down on him, and he puts his wife in a box, and Western Europe looks down on South America. So in that sense, the film is political. And when I say “political,” I don’t mean Democrat or Republican or that kind of thing. I mean, in a larger sense, seeing how economics shapes history and how that shapes our lives.
I just tried to project myself into the story as much as I could and not worry about the cultural specifics. Maybe I got some of them wrong, but if I did, it doesn’t have all that much meaning. You don’t watch The Godfather and talk about the inaccuracies about the Italian Mafia in 1953 or whatever in New York. It’s probably quite inaccurate, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is the greater truth. Well, it matters to some, who pick it apart and say that’s not accurate.
We looked almost exclusively at paintings and not at movies. I mean, you talk about Visconti, but we never looked at him. He influenced me only because I love him, and you can’t hide an influence when you love a filmmaker. We looked at Claude Lorrain for the UK [scenes], and we looked at Henri Rousseau for the jungle [scenes]. We tried to stick to those guys. We looked at [Thomas] Gainsborough, some Watteau, some Corot, Turner. Because we didn’t want to replicate other movies—we wanted this to have its own rhythm. So, we simply pursued a painterly look and tried to communicate the beauty of the jungle in a way that was not copying other directors.
Could you describe your relationship with Darius Khondji, your cinematographer on this film and The Immigrant? How do you communicate your visual ideas to him? Our relationship is excellent. He’s a genius, one of the greatest cinematographers in movie history. I owe him so much. Because you know how hard it is [to shoot in] the jungle? Not just physically, but to balance the light in there? It’s one of the hardest things you can give a director of photography to do. I’m hugely in his debt, he was unbelievably helpful. This was a very tough movie to make. I asked a lot of him, and he exceeded my expectations.
