Embrace of the Serpent
Films that shaped it
-
I am a big fan of Matteo Garrone. Gomorrah was a film that influenced me a lot, because it's a very realistic approach to violence, very unsentimental. I also took inspiration from his way of using the camera as an observer.
-
I had seen Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo as a teenager and had this fascination for Herzog. I love him, and I think he’s one of the greatest directors of all time, and those films are part of the landscape of the jungle in cinema. Apocalypse Now also. So I think for me, it was more like, I had a great respect for what he had done. But at the same time, I knew it wasn’t the way I wanted to approach the jungle. I wanted to approach it from the perspective of the indigenous, not from the perspective of the white man arriving in the jungle. So it was an important reference for me, but maybe more as something that I wanted to depart from than something I wanted to follow.
