Portuguese cineaste Miguel Gomes’ latest film Grand Tour is an odyssey through Asia using a constructed narrative about a couple in 1918 who chase and elude each other through multiple countries. Gomes employs interstitial images that form his own contemporary travelogue visiting the same countries as his characters. Winning best director at Cannes for 2024, Gomes’ multiple visions of Asia challenge the idea of truth, fiction, and imaginary and embodied realities.
Nadine Whitney spoke to Gomes about his undertaking and what makes a vision worth sharing.
Grand Tour opens in select cinemas in Australia on 13 February 2025, with screenings to be held at Perth Festival on 3-9 March 2025.
This interview has been edited for clarity purposes.
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I enjoyed Grand Tour immensely. It's political, magical, constructed, and instructive. I'm very pleased to have seen it.
Miguel Gomes: Thank you so much.
How was it working with three different cinematographers?
MG: I didn't plan to do it. It happened that way. Many things happen in unexpected ways in my films, because nothing is decided from the start.
I decided to work with two cinematographers. Sayombhu Mukdeeprom from Thailand who I’ve worked with before on As Mil e Uma Noites (Arabian Nights). I invited him to do the journey with me. We had planned a seven-week trip before even writing the script and which was the journey of the characters. Sayombhu is a very important cinematographer. He has worked several times with Luca Guadagnino, as well as with Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
I had planned that we also would shoot in the studio in Europe, in Lisbon and in Rome. And for that, since I would I invited Rui Poças, another cinematographer that also worked with me on previous films, Tabu, for instance. Rui has worked with directors such as Lucretia Martel and Ira Sachs.
I was working with these two guys that I already worked with, and I had the plan to do the Asian part with the Asian cinematographer, and the parts in studios with the European cinematographer. But when we were shooting and undertaking the journey, COVID started in 2020, so I could not enter China. The third cinematographer Gui Liang came on board for that reason. I was shooting from Myanmar to Japan with Sayombhu but we could not enter China, so we had to postpone that part of the journey. In fact, the journey never continued because of COVID. So, we decided to that I would do it remotely, because after two years trying to get in, we decided that we would not get in.
I rented a house in Lisbon where we could follow a crew that did the trip in in China. I had a live feed all the time in order to decide things, where to put the camera, and so on. In fact, I never met Gui Liang personally during my time directed the film. I met him recently in China when we showed the film. It was great and strange to be with someone I worked with talking about the stories of our shooting for a first meeting. We already had a past without knowing each other in person.
Many people are comparing Grand Tour to Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil. Would you say that that is an apt comparison for the docufiction parts of the film?
MG: There are many people making the comparison between Grand Tour and Sans Soleil and, yeah, I understand. I think, yeah, of course, it has connections. But I never thought about Sans Soleil while I was making the film. It's not one of my references or something that it's close to me. I respect Chris Marker, but I’m not so attached to the film. Now Grand Tour is finished, of course, I can see the relation, but Marker isn’t a director I have that kind of artistic relationship with.
What is close to you? What were the things that you wanted to bring out that are specifically meaningful to you?
MG: Many things, many things. I don't start a project with a precise reference or a style. In this situation, the narrative departure point of the film for the fictional couple Edward and Molly came from a book. Somerset Maugham’s ‘A Gentleman in the Parlor’, or from more exactly two pages of the book.
The fictional narrative has a connection with screwball comedies. Hollywood films from the 1930s and from the 1940s. I knew that it would be a very strange screwball comedy, because normally you have the man and the woman playing together. But in Grand Tour it's a very different thing because they don’t meet. I would say it is dysfunctional screwball comedy.
What most inspires me is a very neglected thing, which is the world itself. The experience of being alive. It was very important to make the journey before writing the script, and to experience in a way, being in that part of the world.
I really don't have the talent to just be at home or in the office imagining from without reacting to something, without reacting to the world. The world is composed of concrete things: people, places, rituals that you must know so you can film them. The world is also composed, or at least my world, the world of everyone, of things that really exist, such as memories of things we experience in the world of fiction. Art, books, and films.
I have one film, Tabu that comes from another film, FW Murnau’s 1931 film Tabu: A Story of the South Seas. In that case it came from a concrete source. But even that is composed of many references that I experienced in life and my memories as a cinephile who also likes to read and to listen to music. All these things in the world of the imaginary, of fiction, of spectacle come to me and they manifest in my work, sometimes in a more concrete manner and sometimes in a vaguer way.
When I wrote about Grand Tour, I stated it was a concoction of cinematic lies, but the lies are telling the truth. Is that something that you would be comfortable with somebody saying about your work?
MG: Very, very comfortable. I think that's one of the definitions of cinema in general. What cinema can offer when it's working. Truth and lies, and the relation between them, can reach something true from something that is not. It's fictional; it's not true. We need the imaginary world, the world of fiction, and at the same time we need material reality so as not to reject the experience of living in the world and dealing with what we have before us.
The staged sections of the film are particularly “stagey” in that they have an overt, screwball comedy meets melodrama meets boys own adventure styling. How does the film make sense of Asia, especially with characters who are meant to be British or American, but all speak Portuguese.
MG: It is a very artificial world created and staged in the studio. I continue with artificiality, which I really enjoy in cinema, by having characters that are like theatre actors. In theatre there are characters from a different country being played by actors who are sometimes people who are not from the same country. I thought it would be interesting to have Portuguese actors playing English characters but speaking Portuguese. I thought it would be fun.
Do you think that we can ever understand the East as people who don't live in it?
MG: No, but I don't think that we even understand the West. I think there’s this idea that’s a little bit childish that we can have an enlightenment and discover true experience, and very profound things about the other. We can be interested in understanding Asia in a rational way. I don't even think we can understand ourselves, so understanding that experience is more difficult. In the case of Grand Tour, there are all these disconnections between the two. East and West, the man and the woman form the disconnected fractured feeling the film has.
I think it also echoes with something that is one of the main themes of the film, which is people don’t get that they understand nothing. The Europeans, the British characters travel and they talk with people. They don't understand half of what is said. We decided not to have subtitles so the viewer, at least a Western viewer, is in the same situation as the characters that are not understanding. Grand Tour is not like much of our fiction where people go to a different place, finding people different to them, and they suddenly see a new Nirvana and enlightenment.
No, Grand Tour is about people who don't understand what they are seeing, which I believe happens most of the time. That was something happening in the colonial world.
Colonialism is key to Grand Tour. Portugal, like other European countries was a colonial nation. I imagine you have a revolving idea of how Europeans enter other cultures. Reinventing those cultures for colonial understanding, and essentially trying to homogenise them so they can be understood.
MG: Molly is the newcomer. She just arrived and she changes during the journey. Other characters are very disconnected with Asian countries and with what they are doing there.
I'm also not very comfortable with what contemporary cinema does with these kinds of narratives. I think much of the time contemporary cinema is trying to adjust thinking in a manner that is exerting violence over characters to show that they are no good, or over the viewer to preach at them. I think that’s not an effective way to communicate those issues.
It isn’t possible to be living in 2025 and not to have a very negative perspective about the unfairness and cruelty and brutality of the political system called colonialism. But I don't think it's the function of cinema to be a judge and hammer the message to the viewer, “You must see the way the film sees.” Be more generous. It's riskier, maybe, because people will say Grand Tour doesn't have a clear message. I don't think that the cinema exists solely to pass on messages. Cinema exists to give and share something with the viewers so they can be better equipped to come to their own conclusions.
I'm very obsessed with the idea of the relationships between a film and the viewer. Because I think most of the time it's an unbalanced relationship where the film has too much power. So, it can become propaganda, even for good reasons. I don't want to make art like that.
Why would you like people to come and see Grand Tour? What are you hoping that they experience?
MG: Something that’s very important to me is to share the beauty or grace of not only the world, but also of cinema. The world means vastly different things to individual people. On my tour I was able to find grace in someone I met who agreed to sing karaoke for me. I can see grace in how he is singing a song. Grand Tour shares my experience of being alive, offering up something strong, something that affects me. I don't know how it will affect other people, but I'm glad to put my ideas in cinematic form. I cannot know if it will work for all, because people are different from one another.
Watching a film is like dancing with another person. It’s a dual relationship. There's a film and there's a viewer. Each person reacts with their own sensibility, interests, experiences, personality, and humour. I try to be authentic to my sensibilities in order to connect with the audience, or with some of them at least.