Oscar nominee Fernanda Torres sat down with THR at her cover shoot and shared what life was like growing up in Brazil and how it mirrored her film I'm Still Here. She also discussed her reaction to the news of her nomination and how her acting family has been strongly embraced in Brazil.
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PeopleTranscript
00:00People went to the movie theatres again, and people were crying in the movie theatres.
00:06This film awakens the pride in culture, in cinema.
00:12And also, I'm the daughter of my mother, so we are this entity.
00:17Brazil likes me.
00:18My childhood was pretty much like the house you see in I'm Still Here.
00:32I lived in a house very similar to that one, and my mother, she looked pretty much like Eunice Paiva.
00:40That was my childhood, playing in the streets.
00:43I love Rio de Janeiro, I mean, I'm a product of the culture.
00:48Rio, there is a lot of artists, musicians, so we were kind of raised in this environment.
00:54Life was like that.
00:56I mean, you have a dictatorship in a country.
00:59Susan Sontag, I think she went to Sarajevo when there was the war,
01:04and she said that every week there was a party in the main square.
01:09So even when the situation is unbearable, I think people find a way just to live.
01:16So happiness, life, theatre, music, it was all around, together with a very dark, dark time.
01:24The 70s were my childhood, really.
01:29And then the 80s was when my generation came with great poets, great music.
01:36I started to live, I think, really in the 80s.
01:40I miss the 80s.
01:44I had my parents who were actors.
01:47I used to go a lot to the theatres, and our house, for instance, the dining table was the place where they rehearsed.
01:55We would come from the school, and they would be there, sitting and preparing for the new play.
02:01So that's how I grew up.
02:05And also later, when I was an adolescent, then I had the influence of my parents,
02:11but also everybody wanted to be actors, because theatre was very strong in Rio de Janeiro, together with music.
02:20My mother, we talk a lot about theatre and acting.
02:25We talk generally about life, theatre, she talks a lot about theatre.
02:32Eunice teached me a lot.
02:35I never did a Greek tragedy, and I consider Eunice a Greek tragedy,
02:42someone who passes through something beyond human capability.
02:48And when it happens, what she does is she has to control herself, because she has five children.
02:57So the anger, the desperation, it's a mother fighting for a family alone.
03:04It's so big, and at the same time, so controlled.
03:08That's something that I've never done before, I think.
03:11And it teached me a lot, and I think I'll take Eunice with me for a lot of things from now on,
03:18because I understood something about acting with Eunice.
03:23I was in Lisbon, and I didn't watch the television, because I hate expectations.
03:29And my son and my husband, one of my sons, the oldest one, were in the house with my husband,
03:37and they came up to the room where I was and said...
03:45And I had this strange feeling, because the Oscars for us in Brazil, for an actor,
03:52is something so far away.
03:55To imagine that a movie spoken in Portuguese, the nomination of my mother already,
04:01was a kind of miracle.
04:03I never thought it would be possible.
04:05And then suddenly, we were working this film, making people watch it.
04:09It was a heavy, heavy work.
04:11We could feel that there was a good feeling around the film.
04:15And it was really a surprise.
04:18It's like living in a parallel life, that it's not really yours.
04:23And now it is mine, but it's funny.
04:27It was like, oh my God, how did it happen?
04:33I look for a good project.
04:35I don't make this difference between comedy and drama.
04:40You do whatever the project asks you to do.
04:45But of course I love comedy.
04:47My dream was to have done Young Frankenstein.
04:52That's the film I would die to do.
04:55The first film that I saw, that my father took me to see,
04:59was Podaz and Pelidiaz and Donkey Skin with Catherine Deneuve.
05:05It's a fairy tale with Catherine Deneuve.
05:08I never forgot it.
05:10And later, 2001, another film that my father took me when I was a child.
05:16And later, when I had my children, that was the film that I first showed them.
05:22Because you have the monkeys, you have the spaceship.
05:26Even if you don't get the whole thing, you get a lot of things.
05:31I have a long career in the Internet or outside the Internet.
05:36Some people don't like me, but I'm popular in Brazil.
05:40And also, I'm the daughter of my mother.
05:43So we are this entity, the Fernandes, in a way.
05:47We work together, we work separately.
05:50So Brazil likes me.
05:52Before I had like 500,000 followers.
05:57After the movie, it was like almost 5 million people.
06:02So it is the movie that is doing this kind of commotion in Brazil.
06:09This film became, with the nomination, the possibility of a nomination,
06:14with Walter again directing a film in Brazil about such a beautiful story
06:19that nobody knew that caused the commotion in Brazil.
06:23Because not me, the film.
06:26People went to the movie theaters again.
06:30And people were crying in the movie theaters and proud.
06:34This film awakes the pride in culture, in cinema.