Yeah, I don’t agree. I think any good artwork tends to capture the zeitgeist—the anxieties, the joy, the fears that we as a community are going through. We all know that we live in a very polarized moment— and not only here, everywhere—and we all know that polarization is a threat to democracy. 

Are we saying there’s going to be a civil war in the U.S.? Not at all. But we all know that polarization can lead to social conflict, and so I always felt that I was doing a very important … I mean, I am a political person. The only film that I directed in my life is a very political film about people that resisted the dictatorship in Brazil. I like Costa-Gavras. I like Gillo Pontecorvo. I think Alex managed to do something extraordinary, which is to make a potential big Hollywood blockbuster that is also a very strong political film. I think most people were expecting the film to be something along the lines of liberal/conservative, and it’s not about that at all. It’s about the aftermath of a polarized situation.

With “Civil War,” American viewers may be shocked to watch the types of war scenes they’re used to seeing in movies that are set in foreign lands take place on U.S. soil. Being from Brazil and being a political person, do you see any analogies between what you’ve experienced back home and what “Civil War” shows happening in America?

I think it’s going to make sense everywhere. In Brazil, we also had the election deniers, and we also had an invasion of the institutions in Brazil, exactly in the same way that happened here. Brazil is very polarized, as every place else is, unfortunately. But for Americans, it has a special scary feeling—the images that you guys are used to seeing taking place in the Middle East, in Africa, in South America, to be seen with the amount of realism that Alex shot this movie in the White House, in Washington, D.C., I think it creates a cognitive dissonance in the American audience’s brain.

I wonder, from your perspective, if it indicates just how innocent or naive Americans are—we haven’t experienced many of these commonplace traumas on our home turf. 

Talking about the invasion of the [U.S.] Capitol—and in Brazil of institutions—Brazil was very quick in sending people to jail, finding the financiers and denying political power to the guy who was responsible. The former president, he can’t be elected anymore. We acted really fast, not because Brazil is a stronger democracy—no, it’s the opposite, our democracy [is] full of problems—but Brazil was under a very heavy dictatorship from ‘64 to ‘85, so Brazilians know how bad that is. It’s a collective memory of that—we don’t want that to happen again. 

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