Miguel Gomes on ‘Grand Tour’ & colonialism: ‘I want the Western viewer to be a little lost’

Miguel Gomes (left) and stills from his film 'Grand Tour', which won him the Best Director award at Cannes Film Festival 2024, now streams on MUBI.

Among the filmmakers that Payal Kapadia pays tribute to in her film All We Imagine as Light (2024) is the Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes. Incidentally, at the Cannes Film Festival last year, both were competing for the same award in the main competition — the Palme d’Or. Kapadia walked away with the Grand Prix — the second-highest award at Cannes, a historic first for India — and Gomes’ won the Best Director for his latest Grand Tour (2024). Kapadia, a self-avowed fan of Gomes thanked him in her acceptance speech, as Gomes sat in the audience. Kapadia’s diploma thesis at Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune, zoomed in on some of Gomes’ films.

It must have been a surreal experience for Kapadia to share the same global stage with one of her cinematic inspirations. In October 2024, at the New York Film Festival, the two filmmakers — both practitioner of artful docufiction — came together to speak about city symphonies. In both their latest films, the urban setting or cities become a character influencing the life and relationships of the other characters. Kapadia has said that watching Gomes’ films — his style of coalescing cinematic forms, taking risks with the narrative, the lack of it, at times, letting the film meander, etc. — was liberating for her as a filmmaker. Film Comment, published by Film at Lincoln Center, wrote, “The resonances between their latest films go beyond Cannes laurels and directorial inspiration. All We Imagine as Light traces the stories of three women in present-day Mumbai, while Grand Tour follows a British colonial officer and his fiancée as they traipse across various East Asian cities in 1918 — but both films are city symphonies that centre love stories within broader political contexts and are driven by the pulsings of female desire.”

Grand Tour’s central story is about a man (British civil servant Edward, essayed by Gonçalo Waddington) running from his fiancée (Molly, played by Crista Alfaiate) through colonial Asia was derived from a few pages of a Somerset Maugham novel, The Gentleman in the Parlour (1930). But, in this film, the director of Tabu (2012) and Arabian Nights (2015) gives a spin to the epic film, to historical drama, by blending documentary with fiction, colour with black-and-white, incorporating the sounds and images of the present-day (including folk cultural artforms) with the colonial past re-imagined, conflating time periods seamlessly, and all of it shot on celluloid. It is, what the New Yorker calls “a country-hopping screwball movie”, that deconstructs cinema’s relationship with time and artifice, the real and imagined, the seen and reacted to. Its kinetic motion and smooth editing plays with space and time.

At a recent online roundtable of global film journalists, Miguel Gomes addressed a few questions, as follows, and amid it all, he says, “I hope the film has the ability of receiving what people project in it. That’s the most important thing in cinema is to be able to receive, to be available for an encounter with the viewer, as every viewer is different.” Gomes’ Cannes award-winning film, Grand Tour, is now streaming on MUBI.

Edited excerpts from an exclusive interview:

The narrative takes place in the colonial era in 1918, and you mix the story of Edward’s run in the first half and Molly’s chase in the second half with documentary footage and images, including of puppets, from today. What do the masks and puppets — which seem to fill in for something — stand for?

There are many puppets in the film. And I was explaining that I had the sensation that puppets are a little bit nobody. And because they are nobody, they can be everybody. This applies not to puppets but also to cinema characters, which are a different form of puppets, and cinema is a different form of puppet show. It comes from there. And, so, this emptiness or this empty space that the characters and films, for me, should have is precisely what gives the opportunity to the viewer to mingle with the film. And this means that every time the film is seen by someone, it’s a different film.

Grand Tour plays with time, space and cinematic formats. What was the process of developing a story that crosses different eras and visual styles?

It was a strange process, a non-orthodox process. Because if everyone is making the film in the traditional way, writing the script, looking for actors, shooting them, and editing, then, it might look so much alike an average, normal film. The film is created by also the process of engaging. I’m afraid of the blank page. I think the blank page is like being in the position of God. So, you have all the possibilities before a blank page. And I’m glad to have something that puts some limits on this.

So, before writing the first page of the script, we went on the travel, we followed the same itinerary of the characters in the real world, in the real Asia. And only after we wrote the script and we went to the studio, that this [film] changed completely. Shooting the jungles, bamboo forests, cities, and situations in all of these countries gave us limits for writing. Because when we were writing sequence No. 3, let’s say, we knew that we would, maybe, use these images we shot in Myanmar and then we would cut from studio afterwards to this place in Vietnam. And so, we were reacting to what we shot by making the fiction. And I need this, maybe because I don’t believe I’m so skilled as someone who looks into a computer and types everything from his own head, even with the collaboration with other screenwriters, because I think we need something from the exterior world to force us to react. So, the process was like this.

Stills from the film 'Grand Tour'.

In spirit and the lens you use, how different is Grand Tour from Tabu? And what has been the film’s relationship with colonialism?

Well, they are different films, first of all, because let’s say that Tabu, in a way, is closer to a love film, a film about an encounter. And this film is like the opposite, because it’s about many of these encounters, which have something to do with this issue of colonialism, because these Western characters look a little bit lost.

And I want the Western viewer to be also a little bit lost, and this was one of the reasons of our decision not to put subtitles, when Western characters are seeing something, like there’s an example in the beginning of the film. There’s a situation with three women in the jungle, discussing in front of Edward, the main character. We sense that this discussion might have something to do with him, with Edward, but we never know. If you don’t speak Malaysian, you’ll never get it. I knew what I had asked them to talk about but I will not share this with no one, you have to ask a Malaysian person.

But, yeah, the film is also dealing with this issue of colonialism by working with two different times. There is 1918, which is a colonial time, I think it’s even a moment important, it’s after the end of the First World War. And it’s the beginning of colonialism as a political system. And then, you’re seeing a travelogue film today.

And I didn’t try to force nothing, when I cut it from studio to reality, I was not trying to make a comment on the studio, but I knew something would happen. But it was not me that was talking because, sometimes, I had also the sensation that, many a time, cinema, or the filmmakers, or the screenwriters, or the film itself, has a too clear idea of what to say to the viewer. And he’s saying in a very direct way. And for me, as a viewer, this is troubling. Because I want to see things and arrive at my own conclusions. I don’t want to be like the children in school being given a lesson. And, so, I create the conditions for people to talk about the issue of colonialism, trying not to impose too much of my own thoughts about this.

Has the making this film, and the documenting journey you undertake towards that end, changed you as a person or your perceptions about the East?

This film is not about enlightenment. For me, this idea of going to a faraway place, a place that is culturally different from the place where you live... but even in every one of these countries, there was very different habits. Say, between Japan and Philippines, there’s no connection at all, for me that’s visible. But, yeah, going to a faraway place and suddenly starting to change or understand better the many things is a kind of childish idea. I don’t believe in it. I believe that what happens normally is what happens most of the time in the film. So, people just don’t get what they are seeing. For instance, there is a sequence in the film of karaoke in Philippines.

The guy that is singing the karaoke starts to cry, no? And if you ask me why he’s crying, I can try to give an answer, but I’m not sure. What made me want to shoot the karaoke scene My Way in Philippines was the fact that I knew that my cinematographer [Rui Poças; the film has three cinematographers] who shot in the studio, he told me that many years ago, he was in Philippines, in a bar with a karaoke machine. And these guys had come up to him with a gun, they pointed the gun at him and said: ‘sing My Way [Frank Sinatra’s] or we’ll shoot you.’ He was really scared but he sang My Way and got the maximum score and then he was spared and everyone was happy and there was beer for everyone. I didn’t believe it until some years after when I was reading the newspaper and there was a small article that said: My Way gang was caught and put in prison in Philippines. So, apparently, these guys actually existed, robbing people and even killing some. And they were obsessed with the song My Way. So, when I got to Philippines, I said, okay, I know there are lots of karaoke bars in Philippines. Apparently, it’s like a national hobby. So, let’s see what happens if someone sings My Way... what is the relation between this song and the karaoke singers in Philippines. Maybe I got lucky, but this guy started to cry. I was happy to shoot this, to have this luck and to share this with you. What have I learnt from this? Nothing. I don’t have any idea what’s going on with My Way in Philippines. But I was just amazed by this wanted to share it with people.

Stills from the film 'Grand Tour'.

You talk about your subjectivity in art and the cinema. There’s a scene in the film about a donkey and someone says how beautiful freedom is and the donkey, in the back of the scene, snaps and takes off. It is such a wonderful scene. Could you talk a little about creating it?

Cinema is many things, thinking about many things, having the desire to shoot this person, to shoot this place and ideas, ideas that you want to have in the film. So, it’s made with all of these desires and ideas. But it’s also made with chance, bad chance. So, what happened with the donkey was that we were in the studio and we thought in the end, this donkey can get a little bit too nervous. And the actress who plays Molly was just behind him. And I thought this can end in a bad way, because if the boat starts to move a little bit and we put smoke on the floor, maybe the donkey can get nervous and hit the actress. So, when we understood this, I said, let’s do a shot with the donkey, then we’ll put the voiceover saying that the donkey has run away. In this case, it was not like an idea of a screenplay, it was something that was happening, it was too dangerous. I said, let’s imagine that the donkey is smarter, more intuitive than humans. So, he will go and run away from this boat that will sink. And that the donkey knows. So, we just invented it on the set. But for this to happen, it’s true, a film should provide the space for these kinds of things to happen because if it’s all blocked, all written in the screenplay, in the end, nothing like this will happen. The film should have the space for such things to happen and for people’s, the crew’s or the actors’ ideas to appear in the film. If the film is so closed that even if there are like seven elephants passing by, no one will point the camera to them and film them, you’ll lose everything, because everyone will be reading from a paper, this sequence and that sequence. This is a kind of handicap that can happen in a very industrial environment. We just don’t do this.

Stills from the film 'Grand Tour'.

You’ve said that Grand Tour is about belief. What kind of beliefs are you referring to? Can we read this as a metaphor for how the West has historically viewed Asia?

When I was talking with belief, it was like having faith. Maybe, I’m Portuguese, so I cannot avoid the cultural environment of Catholicism. But in this case, it’s not faith on God. It’s faith on cinema. Because I’ve seen miracles in cinema, some miraculous things happening in cinema, I never saw miracles outside cinema. There’s a connection with the last sequence of the film. But I won’t give spoilers. It is this idea that even the characters, apparently Molly believes too much, has too much faith on herself, on Edward. And, apparently, Edward doesn’t have any faith on Molly, or himself. But the big issue is will the viewer will have faith in the film that takes place in 1918 and, at the same time, it cuts to a world with cellphones and contemporary cars. We still have to have the faith in fiction, and like children be available to believe in the unbelievable. Like we did on hearing bedtime stories, we had this pact with fiction. But then something got lost and we got less innocent. That innocence was always a very important thing in cinema. Can we still have innocent viewers, or viewers wanting to make this pact with cinema?