ANAHEIM, Calif. — Actress Fernanda Torres knew her friend, the director Walter Salles, intended to make a film based on a real-life Rio de Janeiro woman who fought for justice for her family after Brazil’s military dictatorship abducted her congressman husband in 1971.

But the idea that she would play the role of Eunice Paiva?

No. Never considered that, Torres says.

And that her performance would be so acclaimed that she would be talked about as a potential Academy Award nominee – a quarter-century after her mother, the actress Fernanda Montenegro, was nominated for an Oscar for one of Salles’ earlier films?

Crazy to think that she, Salles and the Brazilian film “I’m Still Here” might reach such rare heights.

“I knew that Walter was going to make the movie,” Torres says in December, a month before she won best actress in a drama at the Golden Globes — perhaps the biggest surprise of that night. “But I didn’t think he was going to invite me, because I was older than Eunice was at that time.

“He gave me the script before inviting me,” she says. “As a friend, just to read it, because we did so many movies together. And one day, he asked me for coffee. I thought he was going to – because I’m also a writer – ask me to write a script for him in the future.

“Then he said, ‘Do you want to play Eunice?’” Torres continues. “I was in shock.”

“I’m Still Here,” which opens in theaters in L.A. and New York on Jan. 17 ahead of a wide release on Feb. 14, spans more than 40 years in the lives of Eunice and Rubens Paiva, their five children, and Brazil. When Rubens disappears in 1971, Eunice must keep the family together while trying to find her husband, the latter quest her quiet but relentless struggle of many years.

To Salles, Torres made perfect sense for the part.

“What was really striking here was that Eunice’s form of resistance was quite unique,” says Salles, whose 1998 film, “Central Station,” earned Oscar nominations for best foreign film and best actress for Torres’ mother, who also was nominated for a Golden Globe that year but did not win. [“I’m Still Here” is short-listed for the Oscar for best international film this year.]

“She’s a character defined by restraint on one hand, but on the other hand she’s also like a volcano who is brewing and boiling and never erupts – but almost does,” he says. “So the wavelength with which an actress could express herself was one where you had to say a lot with just the essence of things. Just the minimum amount of gestures or words.

“You need a truly extraordinary actress,” Salles continues. “I had worked with Fernanda twice before, and I knew how incredibly talented and resourceful she could be, and also how incredibly intelligent and perceptive she would be.”

Not only in her work on screen but behind the camera as a storyteller and screenwriter, too, he adds.

“She’s kind of a renaissance woman in her own right,” Salles says. “More than casting an actor, I wanted to work with almost a co-author on this. And she was the exact perfect person to do that.”

A personal resonance

For Salles, who adapted the memoir of Marcelo Rubens Paiva, the son of Eunice and Rubens, the story of the Paiva family held a remarkable personal resonance for him. As a teenager, he was taken into their circle of friends and spent countless hours in their home before Rubens Paiva disappeared.

“When I was an adolescent, 13 years old, 14 years old, I met Marcelo’s sister, Anna Lucia, the sister in the middle of the family,” he says. “It was a very different family from the ones I knew, because, first, there was a free speech being exercised by every single generation in that house. People mingled, talked about music. Censored music was playing on the turntable.

“There was a vividness in it,” Salles continues. “The human relationships, the affection that existed in that house, was also surprising to me because it was very different from my house. I think the other kids that gravitated to that house felt the same. And so for a year and a half, almost two years, I was constantly in the house at the heart of the book and at the heart of the film.

“Therefore, the relationship with every single person in the family extended to the point that when that house was hit by a tragedy under the military dictatorship, this kind of stipulated a before and after in all our lives.”

Salles felt such a personal connection to the family and their story he was unsure whether he was the right person to make the film.

“I really think that it was Marcelo’s incentive to pursue it that really allowed me in,” he says. “Then I interviewed every single one of the sisters and all the friends of the family who were still alive, in order to have a more ‘Rashomon’-ic perception of the story as told by different angles.

“Which allowed us to finally, through the years, decant this and find the narrative.”

Like a Greek tragedy

Torres knew of the Paiva family but not until reading the memoir, also titled “I’m Still Here,” did she understand the quiet strength that Eunice discovered in the years after Ruben’s disappearance.

“In this book, she’s the heroine of the family, and we discover this woman, in a way,” she says. “I was in awe with that. I started to watch all her interviews.”

Torres, 59, came of age during Brazil’s military dictatorship, which lasted 21 years from 1964 to 1985. The film brought back personal memories of her young life in an artistic, intellectual world like that of the Paivas.

“This film has so many things of my past,” she says. “Eunice reminds me a lot of my mother, these intelligent women that were young in the ’70s. My house, we didn’t have so many parties, but it was just like that house. My father is also an actor, producer and theater director. My mother, she’s in the movie too [playing Eunice in old age], I mean, she’s like this Brazilian Judi Dench. That’s the best definition I can give.”

She vividly remembers the threat of censorship that confronted her parents’ work then.

“My father had a play, ‘Calabar,’ a musical that was forbidden one day before the opening,” Torres says. “I remember all the costumes in my grandparents’ house, waiting, because perhaps one day it would be back. And it was never back.

“The end of the dictatorship, there was a coup that tried not to have [a return to democracy],” she says. “My parents, they had bomb threats in the theater, and they received gunshots in the house they were in in São Paulo.

“So we lived with this for a long time, but art was really powerful. Really powerful.”

Working with Salles, the cast and crew, Torres describes a filmmaking process unlike many. Rehearsals with the actors playing her family for a month, living in the house that was their set, shooting the story in chronological order.

“The surprise I got — me and, I think, the other actors — we don’t look like we’re acting,” she says. “This is very rare because normally you act with some codes, fiction codes. They are good; it’s not that they are bad. But in rare moments you achieve something that it’s different.

“That’s Walter’s slow process. I remember him telling me, ‘Trust me. Do less. Trust me.’ But it’s very difficult. It’s not the problem of doing less. It’s the restraint of Eunice. This politeness, this femininity, together with this deep sense of injustice.”

The work reminded her of a Greek tragedy in many ways, Torres says.

“I remember one thing that once my mother told me,” she says. “She said, ‘You know, Nanda, when you do Hecuba, you cannot start to cry in the first bad news. Hecuba, she endures. Tragedy is about enduring and not feeling self-pity. It’s so terrible that there is no space for self-pity.”

Starting conversations

For Salles, Torres helped him and the film capture a realism that breaks down walls between an audience and the screen.

“Much like her mother elevated ‘Central Station’ and inspired us to be better than we thought we could be, I think that Fernanda did the same here,” he says. “She found and was comfortable within that bandwidth that I described. We really managed to create a form of acting that also allowed me to invite the spectator to spend some time with those characters for the length of the film. Which is different from creating a family and peeking at them from a distance.

“Here it was more like trying to find again what I felt when I was 13 years old,” Salles says. “To be part of that family and go through that whole range of emotions with them.”

Audiences at film festivals in 2024 often told Salles they felt like they were living with the family. “It’s a gift to know that can be sensed, perceived in this manner,” he says.

In Brazil, the film had only opened in December a few days before our separate video calls with Torres and Salles.

“There was this buzz,” Torres says of the anticipation for the film there before its release. “This national pride because of the buzz around the Oscars and Walter with me, with my mother. But now that the film was released, people are not talking about awards or reviews.

“Suddenly the film is a phenomenon,” she says. “People are going in waves, and with the family, the grandmother, the grandchildren, adolescents and middle-aged people. People get together at the end in the foyer, people who don’t know each other, just to talk. And they are crying. Some kids on TikTok, they are showing their faces before and after the movie. It became like a pop phenomenon.

“Walter said something beautiful. It’s like the house of the Paivas in the beginning of the movie, with all kinds of generations. That house was alive again in the theaters.”

Though “I’m Still Here” begins in the ’70s, as countries around the world, including Brazil, tilted from democracy toward authoritarianism, Salles came to see its increasing relevance today.

“The fact is we started doing a film about the past, and we realized suddenly it wasn’t about the past, it was really about the present,” he says. “That was again, as you see in the film, happening in the Paiva house. That gave us a sense of urgency. Gave the film a sense of urgency as well.

“It ceased to be a period piece, about the vividness of the ’70s, but also the urgency of the present,” Salles says. “It was about doing what I think cinema is meant to, which is to offer reflections of who we are at a given time, so that we can ask what kind of future we want to build.”

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