The 5 rules that guided 'The Secret Agent'

Filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho breaks down the ethos behind the thriller starring Wagner Moura

- Story by Robert Abele

BRAZILIAN FILMMAKER AND DIE HARD CINEASTE KLEBER Mendonça Filho relies on a certain creative method. “I will go wherever my thoughts are taking me,” he said recently over coffee at a West Hollywood hotel.

“And hopefully it will make sense to you,” he adds with a laugh. But he’s serious. “It’s really the pleasure of adding ideas to other ideas, making free associations.” That's how the research for his previous film, the essay documentary “Pictures of Ghosts,” which centered on memories personal and cinematic of his eclectic hometown of Recife, led to “The Secret Agent,” starring Wagner Moura. In 1977, during Brazil's dictatorship, and against the backdrop of the country’s riotous Carnival, Moura’s widowed researcher Marcelo hides from hired killers while conducting his own private inquiry. At heart the film is a sinuous expression of its writer-director’s notions about people, movies, places and the past.