Brazil Special: Vellas

His Soul for Leica was lauded and awarded and he shoots for top brands from Apple to Ford, yet director Vellas barely seems to register success as he frenetically strives to perfect his art and sort the fine details of filmmaking, even down to the right lunch

It’s Saturday afternoon and we’re drinking beer in an empty hotel restaurant. The room is devoid of atmosphere apart from the fizz of energy  around Vellas as he animatedly discusses the rigours of his job: “It’s so fragile, there are so many people involved, so many layers to get through to do something good. You go to meetings and you know you’re going to lose something, you have to choose what you’re going to lose – you might lose the actor you want but you win a location. A guy picks the actor, so he’s happy, I’m happy. I say ‘So give me the blue car, not the black car, okay?’ He says, ‘Okay, okay, the blue car.’ But then the boss of the boss might not like something, maybe he’s overtired, maybe he had a bad lasagne at lunch and he says, ‘Nah, I don’t like the script,’ so the script gets thrown out.”

Vellas is pitching the scene to me and I’m right there with him. “Then you shoot something but you have to defend it, you have to fight for it, then you lose it, you get depressed, so you call the guys, say, ‘Come on, guys, present my version, please, please, please!’” I’m starting to feel anxious by proxy, but then the mood changes when he describes the good times, shooting Leica’s Soul, an exquisite monochrome film inspired by war photographers that won a slew of awards, including five Lions at Cannes 2013, plus a spot on the Saatchi & Saatchi New Directors’ Showcase. “It was cosmic,” he rhapsodises, “everything was just right. Even the bad things ended up being right: I lost a location hours before the shoot, but found a better one; the actor was so nervous he was shaking but that helped to create tension in the scene. Everyone was incredible, the agency, the client, the DP, the Cuban crew. I didn’t screw up! It might be difficult to repeat that. If anyone at any point eats a bad lasagne, including me, a film might not work so well,” he laughs.

Unable to ensure the quality of baked pasta dishes throughout Brazil, Vellas recently opted to increase control over his career by co-founding his own production company, Saigon, with EP Marcelo Altschuler and directing duo 2. Before that he’d had a long and successful association with Sentimental Filme. “Sentimental was great, they helped me a lot, but it’s natural to move on,” he says. “This market is tough so to get to the top, I think you have to be in charge. Now I’m also the owner I can spend more money where I think it’s worth it. For example I can shoot in another country and I might make less money but the film will be better.”

His determination to make great films is palpable, though he actually started off in advertising as an animator and art director after studying marketing at university then dabbling in design. “In 2003, I called Paulo Sanna at Ogilvy & Mather and said, ‘You don’t know me, I don’t know you, but I want to work with you.’ He told me to come in and I showed him my portfolio.  He said ‘Your work sucks but you have balls so I’m going to hire you.’” He worked for top São Paulo agencies such as DM9DDB before moving into production, then his interest in creating images led to him directing. “I take pictures all the time, every day and always with film. When you shoot with film you think more about what you are shooting because, you know, with digital it’s like you’re shooting a machine gun.” He mimes, starts firing. “Also, with film, I forget what I shot a month ago and then I get it developed and think ‘What the hell?’” He tells me about his old Japanese guy downtown who develops his prints for him. “He’s always losing things, he’s old but when he dies I’m screwed.” I realise that everything he tells me comes with a story, with visuals and dialogue; he’s a natural filmmaker.

Filming in Gotham

Half Italian, he was born Felipe Vellasco in Rio, spent his childhood in Germany and moved to São Paulo as a teenager. Maybe that peripatetic upbringing has given him the outsider’s perspective that often makes a good storyteller?  “It was good growing up in different cultures,” he says. “I was always changing schools and cities and I think it’s made me less fearful of change.” I detect something universal about him: his dark humour has a northern European edge, his ebullience is Latino and there’s an Italian flavour in the romance and sensuality of works such as Soul and Suas Escholhas, his spot for Brazilian bank Itaú. There is a fluidity about him and his vision – he says he’s fascinated by locations that have the look of someplace else. For his recent Ford spot, The Last New Fiesta, with JWT, the theme was the end of the world: “I wanted to shoot in Chernobyl, but then the Ukrainian conflict started so we had to change location. I’d remembered pictures I’d seen of Detroit, abandoned places, houses falling apart. I called a guy I know there and he sent me pictures – it was perfect,” he recalls. “I love to mix things up. Like you shoot one day in Buenos Aires, one day in Chicago, then another in São Paulo and you mix the scenes up. So then you think, ‘Where the fuck is that?’ It’s like Gotham City, you know? It’s nowhere. So that nowhere thing for me is really interesting.”

I ask him how he sees his career going in the future. “I want to make feature films but I’m only 32, so I think I can make a career in advertising first, like in five or 10 years maybe, and then after that work on features, or TV series and stuff. I think that in Brazil the feature film market will grow.” And what if things don’t grow, don’t go so well for Brazil? “Well, then I think it’ll be time to change again and go somewhere else...” Wherever this guy is going, it certainly won’t be nowhere.