Filmmaker Pedro Costa Influenced by Gil Scott-Heron

Lisbon-born filmmaker Pedro Costa is interviewed at Film Comment, and he talks largely of Gil Scott-Heron, with whom Costa was set to work on his new film Horse Money. A retrospective of Costa's films is up now at Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City. A bit about him:

Costa turned to moviemaking at a period when Portugal was coming to grim terms with its colonial legacy. It was in part from his original, unorthodox ways of watching the work of some filmmaking masters—Yasujiro Ozu, Straub-Huillet, Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Bresson, and Jacques Tourneur, to name a few—that Costa found a vocabulary with which to confront his country’s past. Labels slide off his movies: they are “formalist,” yet they pulse with life and warmth; they are ascetic but also deeply expressive; they are patient and yet possessed of a powerful momentum and a strong sense of rhythm.

They are also possessed of a powerful poetry. From the conversation:

How long did it take to shoot Horse Money?

Well, it was a bit erratic. Because of a lot of things. The film was supposed to include another screenwriter, a composer and actor who I met, shot with a little bit, just a few minutes. He was supposed to write two or three musical scenes. And then he died.

Oh!

It was Gil Scott-­Heron. He was a black American poet, rapper, musician, very, very active in the Seventies, Eighties, Nineties, and then he did a comeback with an album. He was the father of a lot of rappers—well, politically conscious rappers. They owe everything to him. And physically, he looked very similar to Ventura. One day I was in New York and I asked a friend who knew him, and I said: “It would be great to have them talk!” Because Ventura doesn’t speak any English, and Gil couldn’t speak Portuguese. So I showed him my films, and he called me and said: “I like this. Let’s meet.” He was playing in Lisbon so I went to meet him, and I proposed [my idea], and he said yes.

He was supposed to write what you see today in the film—probably the montage with the people in the neighborhood, this voyage through the night. That first version was supposed to be written by him, with music by him, and shot perhaps in the same place... Or perhaps not. But it would have had him acting. That is what the first version was supposed to be like. But then he died. That was about two years ago. That was the first blow. So then I attacked the elevator sequence, which is quite big and difficult in itself. We shot that for three to four months.

Your last feature-length film was Ne Change Rien. Was making that any kind of influence on the greater musical element in this film, compared to your previous narrative works?

I think when I thought about Scott-­Heron, I was in New York with Ne Change Rien, around the festival or something. That was the moment when I started talking to people about the music from the New York scene. And then I remembered that, especially with the African­-American poets, the lost poets, there were a lot of very, very strong political rappers working in the Sixties and Seventies in New York and Chicago. I like that very much. Between poetry and rap and music. Rock, funk, books. Scott­-Heron was a writer too: he wrote a great novel called Vulture. I thought of something like that—that the film could be a long rap, and Scott­-Heron could do that. I thought we could get him, and Ventura would sing and Scott­-Heron would say poems. Because Ventura likes to sing, and in Colossal Youth there’s not really that chance.

Watch the trailer for Horse Money below. See you there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKpbSutb3gs