The reaction I got from Sônia [Braga] in less than 48 hours after I sent her the script [Aquarius] was so genuine that it left me stunned. Often when you show people scripts, you get polite, absent-minded reactions, as well as exclamations of "What the f - k is this?".

I'm not saying that we need more stories about people of a certain age, we just need more great stories about people.

In Brazil, there is a fear and a denial of our past. Downtown Rio used to display the history of colonialism in Brazil. They had beautiful buildings and theaters, and there was a bakery that was threatened to be demolished, but people insisted against it. They laid down in front of it and said, "You're going to have to go over my body to destroy it." It frustrates me when I see people on Facebook posing in front of old buildings while on vacation, because they could've posed in front of equally beautiful buildings at home in Rio.

You see all these old buildings [in Rio] going down or catching fire overnight, and it is so sad. I am very connected with these buildings because they are our history. It is the only one that we have.

Ultimately, you just have to do what feels right for the film. It really helps when you have great collaborators like my editor, Eduardo Serrano, who kept telling me various scenes should be longer.

Sônia Braga reacted in a beautiful way to the draft I sent her, so we just made the film ["Aquarius"] as I had written it. Emilie [Lesclaux], my wife and producer, told me, "This is not a two-hour film. This is going to be longer." And I said, "Well, let's try and make it work, whatever length it is."

When was it that people decided as a society that your body is in one place and your sexuality in another place, something like a hat, or a coat, that when you leave home you hang it and when you come back home you say, "Ah! Let's wear my sexuality! I might wear it tonight"? It is something that belongs to your body.