User:Miguel Lunardi

Actor Miguel Lunardi graduated from Casa das Artes de Laranjeiras (CAL), in Rio de Janeiro in 1988. After participating in some assemblies, he realized that his greatest interest was in furthering the training he had received at school in Rio, which had then the presence of the great drama critic Yan Michalsky, from whom he had received a score of 10, entitled to a second note detailing, praising the breadth of his comparative study of the drama of Nelson Rodrigues and Plinio Marcos: “The matter was brilliantly tackled in many ways - aesthetic, literary, dramaturgical, scenic, political, structural, semiotic to some extent - each of which investigated in depth, with great ownership and acute perception, and the sequence of all of them chaining themselves with rigorous logic, to the point of becoming a show that extends generously the communication space between viewer and work. Even though the final part, the comparison itself, does not correspond entirely the expectation caused by what had preceded, we can still carry mentally for it, supplementing it, arguments and observations drawn from comments made earlier about the authors and their works. Excellent work – 10”. Yan came from Poland to Brazil after Second World War and became one of the most respected critics in Rio de Janeiro during decades.

The Beginning

The desire for a more intense and rigorous training, accredited by Yan’s attention, was accomplished by 1991 when he met Celina Sodré, who was coming off a season of workshops with the great Polish director Jerzy Grotowisky at the time based in Tuscany/IT. A year later, they went to Italy where he rehearsed with the Italian actress Luisa Pasello the assembly of Ophelia by Hamlet, which premiered at the Festival of Volterra and was shown in Rio de Janeiro at the Panorama of Contemporary Theatre: “When I arrived for rehearsals, Celina and Luisa had already rehearsed a scene, which they showed me. Ophelia floated gently on the surface of a luminous woman - beautiful, perfect unit, as real as the most real nice person, transcending from the actress in the halo light of a circle of candles – also unbearable: as in the marvelous Hamlet, my father had died two months before and I was shaken by the juxtaposition life/art, so alive in the mind, maybe for the first time not as myself only”.

This was followed by a new assembly, Soul of Kokoschka, with another Italian actress, Silvia Pasello (Luisa's twin sister), both having in common a formation that has passed through the hands of the great Polish actor Ryszard Cieslak (see Mahabaratha, by Peter Brook), of the Lab Theatre directed by Grotowsky. Having played these mounts, along with two great actresses was what he considers the decisive moment of the psycho-technical training he yearned for, another way of doing theater, ‘detheatricalized’, realistic and impactful as it became a self-development, in line with the grotowiskian thesis on the last stage of Stanislavsky.

In 1996, Miguel Lunardi had his feature film debut at the invitation of Monique Gardenberg who, along with Gerald Thomas, had seen his Hamlet a few years earlier. "It was an opportunity to practice the ‘detheatricalized’ performance I had been exercising, but now facing a movie camera for the first time. It was especially important to work with two foreign actors again, Patrick Bauchau, who took part in two films with Wim Wenders, and Henry Czerny. They were two very different actors who ‘forced me’ to sign a technique. Patrick gave me a Buddhist book, and it brought me closer to his technique, his natural way of acting". He had great time, followed by his television debut acting with Betty Faria, directed by Jayme Monjardim e Marcos Schetmann. 1998, along with many other actors, he organized the Actor’s Refinery, in Rio, which lasted two years, with leading by Amir Haddad, where Miguel Lunardi directed dramatic readings starring Alessandra Negrini and Dira Paes - as Yerma and Antigone, respectively. Back to movies, he acted with Fernanda Montenegro, who suggested him to Marco Bernstein to live her son in The Other Side of the Street, "her embrace of an absolute concentration, an actress of an enourmous emotional power". Over the ten years of experimental theater in Rio, in his partnership with director Celina Sodré, Miguel Lunardi worked on characters like Hamlet, Cyrano de Bergerac, Oskar Kokoschka, Bluebeard, King Lear, William Wilson, and moderns Ivan Karamazov and Macbeth. The actor's interest in characters who are persons of great psychological intensity, as well as Celina’s experimentation on the method of physical actions, scored all their training and theater research.

In 2007, the actor toppled two controversial hits: a horror movie, Turistas, the first American production filmed entirely in Brazil, where he played the sinister Dr. Zamora, a character that earned him praise from American critics, beyond the experience of filming within the model of American industry, and the Brazilian soap opera Life Pages, Rede Globo, where he represented the HIV positive serum Gabriel, a character based on Ricardo de Almeida, actor, poet and playwright, author Manoel Carlos’ son.

The importance of dramaturgy – Matters of Fact and Accuracy

The actor’s speech: "Zamora was not a great character and I never cheated on this - but I give him great value for the work he enabled me, in terms of technique, or psychic technology, as I theorized then”. Hal Astell, a great enjoyer of world cinema defined well: ‘There’s very little opportunity to build character here, with Zamora, the master villain of the piece, really the only one given much depth. He has motivation and will and opportunity and he’s someone who could easily be discussed and debated at length. There is a deep moral question at the heart of Zamora, who’s played with chilling matter-of-factness by Brazilian actor Miguel Lunardi… Yet this doesn’t get much opportunity to flourish’… “These are attentive and generous words, which reminds me the scene I sketched in English to support my performance in the film - a speech to Zamora in the operating room, which expanded his mind and rooted it in cultural history, the structure of what there is, its ultra-deep emotional reasons that induced him to acts of extreme coldness, but spontaneous and natural (the emotions and conclusions a life development encapsulated in the heart, so his emotions would exist without being only superficial)”:

Tourists – Scene 90a - Surgery Room (Dr. Zamora to Finn over Amy’s dead body) …You’re desperate. What are you made of? You’re God’s shit? Man… Think you’re gonna face Death? Nurse, remember me to build a Pyramid for this guy… Oh fucking narcissism. Sweetheart, there’s no such thing as Death. Is it bad news? No hell, no nirvana - no Death. Oh yes, this woman is dead now -, for you, for me, not for herself… Let’s face the fact that we don’t know what happened to her soul – no truths, no lies… Man, you live for another chance afterwards, but you’re in Hell here now… You can’t face an alien face… You do love your life, or you don’t, ‘cause you fear it – and commit yourself to the illusion of Death – that’s the question. You’re in Hell. Yeah, and as for me, this means… civilization is Hell.

An improvising scene that made more the actor confident in the script, written amidst Zamora's main scenes filmed. “I needed to capture the spirit of Zamora from what could be an emotional experience wrought in its clash with the real world - I needed to lift him up from the bowels of a genre film for a moment and let it breathe more extensively what men aspire to think really, when in the midst of their agonizing conflicts. Zamora mixes a bit of Hamlet and Macbeth, in this strict sense. No matter the scene was not shot, it was not meant to. I realized it was a film genre Tarantino had stimulated - in his movies violence is senseless and grandeur, but has a greater psychological dimension, brings in a structure not to be seen, impacting ingeniously. It is kind of a cinema not afraid to be intelligently infamous”.

And he adds: “The point is an actor always needs more refinement to distinguish mental intricate psychic aspects - he is an analyst. What the best analysts know is not available in culture. This Turistas immersion was also important for the American cast who dared to cross the border and venture outside their own culture, I guess. I like to watch Olivia Wilde in his appearances in House, there is a ‘Persona in Mind High-Definition’, in the inception of her character - as I define: Persona is the fiction a person – real or fictional - believes to be. Beau Garrett, in only one episode, reprised here, also acted quite well. Of course in this case there is the factor Hugh Laurie (Dr.House in ‘Hyper-Definition’, an intriguing character) who clearly knows what he is doing and is a parameter, an attractor for all performances. Clearly, the character repetition through the chapters replaces theatrical rehearsals and greatly enriches every performance. But there is another important factor: in the best examples, the actor is admitted to think the script and assess it –so to base his character as much as possible as a real person: that is, one who besides being a ‘person’ also has a fiction about himself, even – and this seems to be case of Dr. House - to cancel the identification with his own, or known, Persona – so this character realizes he is in fact also an actor, while others insist to believe ever blindly in their ‘Selves’. High-level performances raise the category of a text. Often the script maps a focus that has important affluent in its fringes and one needs to scan the field around until its edge - if doing so, one goes to the brink of the impossible, doesn’t matter. One needs to find the intuitive point of emergence of the ‘anatomy’ of this other body, the character – I mean to scan it without looking for, the mind knows how to find what it needs, it’s its specialty - the production of personas is one of its supreme artifices - the Being is first of all a persona (remember Zelig): and so anyone can realize the artificiality of Being, no matter how spontaneous, natural and sincere one may seem. And so an actor can realize the status and calibrate the drive of each character, dosing it every time – with ad hoc solutions. The technique, however, is very delicate and what I saw being acted by those Italian actresses could maybe only be done far away from the market and its economic pressures, at that moment. However, today a new refinement can be infiltrated into commercial products - if the actor is responsive in a high-level, if he knows how to dribble ‘a Lower- Definition pattern’, let’s say – sometimes it us surely impossible, though. But in some cases market pressures may even encourage the renewal of the art”.

About Don Juan

‘Don Juan and the Stone Spirit’, an adaptation of Moliere's Don Juan, is his theatrical debut as a translator and dramaturgist: "I wanted it to be the result of a deep drawing of the actor in me: I started in Hamlet and now needed a Don Juan of my age, to distance myself from Turistas - a film in the world market made me ultimately to grow an new dimension inside – that of a modern, a yet non-existent Don Juan" (‘Turistas’, much criticized in Brazil, is a 2929 Productions, the same that five years later also produced The Road, starring Viggo Morgensen, Charlize Theron and Robert Duvall). As examples of recent great theatrical performances, he highlights two foreign productions: the ‘Quartett’, by Bob Wilson, with Isabelle Huppert (“who said a character doesn’t exist, what can be assumed as completely right, as much as one assesses personalities as a mythical thing”) , and ‘Hamlet’, directed by Lithuanian Eimuntas Nekrosius (2001). Here it is worth noting that the actor also directed the Nelson Rodrigues Theater in 1989 and 1990. The second year in particular, when he scheduled the theater with a great variety of shows, with great Brazilian directors like Antunes Filho - ("I produced that and it was a resounding success - he hadn’t come to for already ten years. I think that has triggered his coming more frequently"). This activity actually occurred in the period between graduation from CAL and the meeting with Celina Sodré: "I had no experience of the day-to-day life of a theater - it was there I learned how it works, managing, coordinating, programming. I made several trips to São Paulo, I wanted agility on the agenda. The production by Dueto, for performances by Gerald Thomas and Daniela Thomas, who were scheduled as I arrived, The Kafka Trilogy, served as a model for my management. But not only: this experience has struck me artistically, it was Gerald Thomas’ major phase, a great moment of Antunes - very fine mounts that I could watch over and over again". In time, Miguel Lunardi had secondary training in accounting and computing - has also had advanced training in English at Brazilian-North American Cultural Institute, in Porto Alegre, the city was born, which has allowed him with some fundamental artistic experiences - and graduated in Economics from PUC/RS, but “since then the 'economy of libido' (read, emotional energy) has become my main interest - and the theater has to do with mind and its psychic economy - which was in a way fairly typical of a time, when 'libidinal mass consumption' - as Michel Houellebecq spoke -, and entertainment society, had emerged dominant. But I wanted to understand the process rightly - I do not think it should be concluded by the naively of computing desire as licentiousness – it is more complex, although the boundaries of cultural identity are frankly narrow for an actor. Well, nothing that a ‘psychoanalytic Gnosis’ could not solve"- which is interesting, considering most psychoanalysts define themselves as agnostic.

On these ideas, after the end of the long theatrical partnership with Celina in 2003, Miguel Lunardi developed the concept of Actor’s Technology, a theoretical basis for his performances: “It is an effect of the inception of the term ‘detheatricalize’, taken as an order to obey both as person and actor”. In this way, he also helped in the preparation of actress Letícia Sabatella for the character Marisa of the miniseries JK, as revealed by her in an interview with journalist Marilia Gabriela, by GNT.

The ‘Turistas” case

Said the French filmmaker Georges Franju, a master of fantastic cinema and director of "Eyes without a Face ¹" (Les Yeux Sans Visage), 1959, considered the most beautiful and terrifying French horror movie of all time: "... (In this movie) there would be no mad doctor for the following reason: ... a man who is visibly abnormal acting in an abnormal way, is normal. However, it is much more frightening, if he looks normal, but acts abnormally”. His film is about a doctor who does not seem crazy, but wants a face transplant for her daughter, who had the face completely disfigured after an accident, leaving intact only her eyes - a time when such a procedure, innovative even today, had no basis in any scientific technique. To do so, the surgeon kidnaps and mutilates his victim.

In the film ‘Turistas’, by director John Stockwell, actor Miguel Lunardi, acting mostly in English but also in Portuguese, lives the character Dr. Zamora, a surgeon-physician who acts in a brutal way to extract bodies of foreign tourists, and doesn’t seem to be crazy. “First of all, the psychopath, Zamora (Miguel Lunardi), is not a total psychopath. He doesn't do his deeds because he's a total madman or the victim of nuclear fallout material. No, he's got the moral high ground on his side; or, at least, thinks he does”, Scooter Thompson reports. Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer, comments: “And then there is Zamora (Miguel Lunardi), the sick-o bad guy. How sick? In lieu of a mere reprimand, he jabs a kabob stick in the eye of a bumbling associate. This good fellow oversees a gang that lures foreigners to his jungle lair, where he then performs surgery: extracting kidneys and livers for use in hospitals back in Rio and Sao Paulo”. But Rick Kisonak said: “This makes him an unusually issue-oriented movie villain, and it’s one of the film’s many problems. He’s not scary — his politics are”.

On the actor’s performance, critic Cole Smithey says: “the house that Kiko brings the throng to is the headquarters and operating room of the evil Dr. Zamora (Lunardi) who steals the movie when he delivers a blood-curdling monologue of malice while removing the kidneys and liver, sans anesthetic, of a female victim. The Grand Guignol torture scene is notable for its ideologically driven theme, with Miguel Lunardi channeling the diabolical Vincent Price in one of his finer moments. Revenge is in the eye, and hands, of the torturer. Second world survival never seemed so dicey”. Owen Gleiberman is surprised by Zamora: “Would you believe it if I said that the fearsome homicidal baddie in Turistas is the most humane and morally responsible person in the movie?”. And Chris Cabin shows his disappointment: “Sadly, both Lunardi and Stockwell seem dead-set on turning the doctor into a monster, leaving the character with less dimension and depth. A scene where the doctor sticks a kebob spear through the eye of an insipid henchman paints the character as a man who delights in his torture rather than building on the "good" side of his doctor work”. Owen Gleiberman also sees problems in the humanization of explicit perversion of Dr. Zamora to the operating table: “This guy, in other words, is Leatherface meets Doctors without Borders. The movie, with the exception of that lone squirmy surgery scene, is Hostel without sadism, thrills, or funky severed-limb F/X. It quickly turns into a very dull escape thriller. Turistas actually has a talented director, John Stockwell, who made Blue Crush and crazy/beautiful, but his attempt to humanize a genre that was long ago taken over by sniveling gore geeks results in a film that thinks it's doing something it's not: giving kids a message”. However, Jay Antan sees no contradiction: “a cabal of underground organ traders led by a Zamora (Miguel Lunardi), a sinister doctor who'll tend lovingly to a local child then turn around and impale an incompetent henchman with a wood skewer through the eye. This guy doesn't fool around”.

Marc Savlov praised the film: “into the isolated bed-sitter of the aforementioned physician (very well played by Miguel Lunardi), where, as they say, the magic happens. Turistas is being tagged as a down-market version of Eli Roth's Hostel, but that's lazy criticism and obscures the fact that, if anything, this is the more compelling film, commingling as it does echoes of everything from Ruggero Deodato and Umberto Lenzi's ultrarealistic green hell horrors, the spelunking aspects of The Descent, and Marino Girolami's scalpel-happy Cannibal Holocaust aka Doctor Butcher, M.D. Very believably acted throughout and featuring a literally breathless underwater sequence of cat-and-mouse, Turistas is, surprising, given its lousy marketing campaign and thankless release date, a solidly visceral piece of work. Socialized health care never sounded so good”.

“It’s actually a much better film than it deserves to be, considering that it blatantly steals “Hostel’s” premise”, wrote Robyn Citizen - and adds: “This begins a terrifying journey to escape a vengeful anti-American doctor (played superbly by Miguel Lunardi) and return home”. But Stacey Lane Wilson partly disagrees: “While I enjoyed Turistas and would see it again, it's not without its drawbacks. There are a few places where the story sags, and the antagonist, while well-acted by Miguel Lunardi, just doesn't have that "spark" needed to make for a memorable movie villain”.

“Miguel Lunardi, who plays the crooked Dr. Zamora, should have been on for much longer. Not only does he exhibit the strongest screen presence, but had his character's evil motives been explained, then he would have been fantastic. I give him credit regardless, but he does his show and then leaves”, sayd Phil Calabro. Rick Kisonak thought alike: “By making the stay at Zamora’s tourist trap so brief, Stockwell blows his one chance to build a little tension”. Rick refered to what Dennis Harvey, Variety, defined as: “Then sinister Dr. Zamora (Miguel Lunardi) arrives by helicopter, and hints of a murderous organ-transplant trade prove true as, during the next 15 minutes (arriving almost exactly an hour in), the protags' ranks thin rapidly. About the tension in the film, Cole Smithey thinks otherwise: “A local renegade doctor (Miguel Lunardi) has committed his life to capturing foreign visitors from whom he steals internal organs to give to needy natives. Director John Stockwell ("Blue Crush") electrifies the barbed wire horror, from debut screenwriter Michael Arlen Ross, with gut-wrenching suspense that attends the painful trajectory of several characters”.

To Miguel Lunardi, the intriguing commitment of the character to his cause goes beyond the limits of the script to move forward on issues less discussed but perhaps more disturbing: "There is a question of principles in Zamora that is deeper than his own conscience. His nature revolves what appears to be the result of a cultural friction that no one is talking, but it nevertheless emerges as a symptom that should be considered: the possible racism against Brazilian people and alike, while strangers (aliens) and somewhat rebellious to the canons that support the power in the West. In the imaginary of 'Turistas' it is the very flesh of Brazilians which, though a ‘commodity’, is worth nothing. Therefore, the revolt of my character, his desire for a reversal of values, even if in a distorted way. But this subliminar level makes the movie important, not deplorable”. This hypothesis of racism may seem absurd, but considering that, for Americans for example, the behavior of Zamora is sign of xenophobia and anti-Americanism, maybe the other side of the coin can be exactly the issue of racial discrimination on account of a people by another. The Folha Online has brought the following news on 28/12/2006: "Supreme Court decides that the flight attendants will answer for the crime of racism: - Fifth Class of the STJ (Superior Court) denied appeal in habeas corpus and, therefore, decided that two Americans flight attendants account for the crime of racism against a Brazilian passenger. According to the complaint of the prosecution, the discussion came during an American Airlines flight between New York and Rio. One of the commissioners would have offended the passenger to say "tomorrow I'll wake up young, handsome, proud, being rich and powerful American, and you'll wake up like naughty, vicious, ugly, miserable bastard and Brazil"… In considering the request, the minister Felix Fischer, reporter of the case, held that, with the act, the commissioners have placed themselves as superior, what "attempted against the Brazilian population”. The Supreme Court says the charge is supported by witness statements from the discussion. “Turistas plays its suspense trump card as the first American film shot entirely in Brazil", reports Cole Smithey, and may have unintentionally touched a sore spot of culture: the persistence of barbarism inside Western civilization.

For the creation of the character Zamora, the villain of 'Turistas', the actor was inspired by personalities of the Shakespearean drama as Coriolanus and Titus Andronicus (two Roman brutal generals), the fearless and noble young Marco Antonio, as well as banditry in the Brazilian film 'God and the Devil in the Land of the Sun', by Glauber Rocha. Tito Andronico was particularly a pleased reference to John Stockwell. "In real life, Zamora might do remember Timothy McVeigh, the American who after blowing up the Oklahoma building maintained his own beliefs until his execution, arousing the interest of Gore Vidal. In all these, revenge is the main theme, but the internal links will open in a more complex network around the issue of political power, "says the actor, who two years before the movie had lived in theater a modern Macbeth: "I'm not afraid of brutal characters, though I do not prefer them - as an actor I present them in conformity with a neutrality that seems fair to me – it is not for me to judge - and the viewer must be impacted so to want to judge for himself”. Also considering the fact that his character would be creating, in the real world, by such means not much skilled, a serious international incident that could potencially stop the traffick of organs in his country - and the inside metaphor of the desecration of the bodies in times of medicine as an information science - it becomes clear the power of metaphor is not allowed in so many minds, of those who prefer to keep a straight point of view, murdering metaphor, as Borges once noticed.

And: “The real actor is the one whose mind is able of not being, for little but remarkable whiles… People are real things but mythical beings - when babies they take the mythology around - and got what they’ve found for granted. The emotional power of determination, plus the profound information implied in the inner constitution of each Person is decisive in formatting the connections of the mind in the brain in the first six years – the time everyone needs the fantasy of being like somebody else, a Zelig of a one and only role. And that is where there is much more than people usually afford to know. The bad thing about human cultures is to keep this going on religiously, even if it has to be so".

Interview with journalist Laura Mattos (Folha de São Paulo, only in portuguese), link http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/ilustrada/ult90u68519.shtml Pictures on his page on YouTube, link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xJSR-R96rE