Miguel Gomes’ travelogue through Southeast Asia is a spellbinding journey to both ends of the spectrum of feeling. Grand Tour won the Best Director Award at the 77th Cannes Film Festival.
In one of the more pleasurable and joyous films at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, Miguel Gomes’ Grand Tour, delivered a triumphant journey through Southeast Asian following the runaway and cowardice fiancé, Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), fleeing away in its first half, while following the hungry and determined fiancée, Molly (Crista Alfaiate), in the second. Through this structure, we see an interspersed cultural travelogue epic of performance arts, cinematic waltz, and sumptuous visuals. A film about feeling and seeing the joys and sorrows in life and how cinema can forever be an expression of pure emotion, Gomes captures the worldly spectacle and the personal sentiment behind any individual.
During the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, we were lucky to chat with Miguel Gomes for a short time to talk about his latest film in the main competition, Grand Tour.
Film Fest Report: What was the decision to go back to shooting in black and white and color?
Miguel Gomes: More than 50% of the film was shot in a studio due to shooting on sets. We wanted to do it in the old fashion way, no digital effects. The sets are much more complex to do it in color. That’s why black and white was a decisive choice. We knew from the start that we would want to mix this with the contemporary images like the journey archive.
Film Fest Report: Before the production, what were you feeling going into the film?
Miguel Gomes: I was feeling a little bit scared because I was about to get married. I was reading a book (The Gentleman in the Parlour) by a British writer, Somerset Maugham. It is a journey book on where he was visiting through a trip to Southeast Asia, describing temples, markets, cities, forests, and encounters.
There were two pages in the book about a guy that told Maugham about him about his marriage. It was about a man who was happily married, but panicked when his bride appeared in London and escaped. He did the Grand Tour and was established at the beginning of the 19th century. In the two pages of the book, the guy tells Maugham that he was caught in China by his wife. I don’t think it ever happened. I think it’s a joke telling how men are cowards and women are stubborn.
From this departing point, I tried to create something and told the producer, “Will you let me make the Grand Tour with other screenwriters, but also shoot it through travelogue and try to react to these images and create this unique cinematic time and space which blends reality and studio?”
I don’t have any idea if I can do it, but it looks amazing to try this and I guess the producer is a little bit crazy because she said yes without having any money or script for the film.
Film Fest Report: How close was the script to the final film? I imagine that it was an instinctive shooting, adaptive process, and a lot of research.
Miguel Gomes: We were imagining the structure of the film through the Grand Tour without writing the scenes. We would imagine the precise path they would have. We made decisions on certain countries that he would go to and countries she wouldn’t go to. We made these decisions to choose which countries to shoot in.
Film Fest Report: These places have certain languages and machineries. How did you go about finding what to shoot in each country?
Miguel Gomes: I think it’s important to shoot what we want to shoot. It’s the principle of desire.
In the first sequence, there is a Ferris wheel with no motor. The workers are manually pulling the wheel like acrobats. We first saw it on YouTube and it was amazing. It’s the desire to shoot. We organized the map for the shoot through this type of research.
Film Fest Report: Can you talk about how the music takes space in the film such as the Johann Strauss’ The Blue Danube Waltz?
Miguel Gomes: We also read some books as part of the research. Thailand was smart because they were never colonized and were always negotiating and making deals. We read about big parties in Thai Palaces with their princes and kings with Europeans. We were thinking of a waltz that begins in the Thai Palace prolonged into a ballet of motorbikes in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam.
The idea was for music to orchestrate the spectacle of the fiction and the spectacle of the world. Walt Disney was the first to do it in Fantasia.
Film Fest Report: What about the thematic modern music such as My Way by Frank Sinatra?
Miguel Gomes: There’s a big tradition in karaoke in Philippines. There was a My Way gang that apparently robbed or killed people and asked them to sing My Way karaoke before doing so.
So, while in the Philippines, we organized a jeepney with karaoke and chose the best singer to go to the red-light district to sing My Way because for him and Filipinos, this specific karaoke performance can evoke very strong emotions.
Film Fest Report: Can you talk about how cinema history impacts your filmmaking?
Miguel Gomes: It is one of the secrets of Portuguese cinema. We still have a very good Cinematheque in Lisbon that shows how cinema is a big constellation of different things, as well as Portuguese’s beautiful cinema history. I am quite attached to it and I often go there.
I don’t think I can pretend to do Raoul Walsh or John Ford films. I am a Portuguese and am living today so I can’t pretend to be making Westerns in Hollywood decades ago, but I do have the memory of these films.
I am more attached to the idea to use cinema more like a puppet show in an artificial way. It’s not the same world we live, but an artificial world that can teach or tell us things about life. It also can show us how we relate to people and to the world. For my taste, there is too much natural cinema trying to convince us that we are in the real world. We are not in the real world; we are in cinema. Cinema is one thing, life is another.
Film Fest Report: Since almost all your films have non-fiction and autobiographical elements, I was wondering if you can comment on my reading of the film as a love-letter to your wife?
Miguel Gomes: That is a romantic vision of my film and I don’t want to destroy it, but in a way yes because it is dedicated to my wife. Mainly, it is connected to the idea of getting married. If I am Edward and Maureen is Molly, you can assume that. By the way, my name is Miguel “Eduardo” Gomes. I’m like Edward, but I will not assume that responsibility.
Our reporters are on the ground in Cannes, France, to bring you exclusive content from the 77th Cannes Film Festival—explore our coverage here.
