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___________[__S C R E E N__S A V E R S__]   -----Return - - - - - to - - - - - sender BRAZILIAN FILMMAKER WALTER SALLES TALKS ABOUT THE INSPIRATION BEHIND "CENTRAL STATION," HIS AWARD-WINNING FILM ABOUT LETTERS NEVER SENT. BY LIZA BEAR Walter Salles, the director of two small art-house releases, "High Art" (1990) and "Foreign Land" (1995), has hit the big time. "Central Station," a road movie set in Northeastern Brazil, represents the fulfillment of his 10-year dream to work with Fernanda Montenegro, Brazil's first lady of stage and screen. His patience paid off: Montenegro is in the running for an Academy Award for best actress (the first ever for a Brazilian actor), and the film also won a best foreign film nomination. The Oscar nod is a well-deserved accolade for 69-year-old Montenegro, whose supremely subtle acting talents in leading theatrical roles have put her on a par with Jeanne Moreau and Giulietta Masina. In "Central Station" she plays a former schoolteacher named Dora who accompanies precocious street urchin Joshue (Vinicius de Oliveira) across the desolate mountains of the Sertao in search of his missing father. Though small mishaps test her mettle on the journey, her initial reluctance is overtaken by the child's spunkiness, and bit by bit, in a fabulously understated performance, Montenegro's Dora recovers her joie de vivre. A native of Rio de Janeiro, Salles has family ties to the Brazilian hinterlands where "Central Station" was shot. His father was born in a village of 500 inhabitants in the state of Minas Gerais, his mother in a suburb of Belo Horizonte, the capital of that state. Salles lived in France for seven years when his father became a diplomat. What have been the main influences on you as a filmmaker? When I returned to Brazil [in my early 20s], I finally saw films from the Brazilian "cinema novo" movement and was struck by how humanistic those films were, and how much they represented our own culture. Living in France I'd had a very eclectic background as a cinephile. I started out as a documentarian. I don't think you can reproduce reality if you don't know its texture. You have to immerse yourself in it. Which is why every time I finish a feature, I try to do a documentary. What got you going on "Central Station"? Basically I wanted to do a film about a woman who understands the importance of sending the letters she has never sent. Did that come out of something in your own life? Yes. I had done a documentary on someone who did send a letter -- a woman in prison, although she was partially illiterate, to a sculptor who's a friend of mine, a 73-year-old sculptor who survived the Holocaust. He came from Poland. And that changed her life. The effect that had on me was really enormous. I started to think about what would happen if somebody did not send the letters she'd written. I also wanted to show that a character such as Dora, who represented a certain culture of cynicism and indifference, can in fact change. The film shows that even if you're at the end of the rope, you might get a second chance. Five years ago I couldn't have done a film with that quality, but I sensed the desire for change and for a life-affirming moment in my own country. And this need for a humanistic approach to life, and maybe to cinema, is something that's in the air. Maybe this is what explains the strong reaction that the public has to the film. It was seen by more than 1.2 million people. It has the highest per-screen average of the year in Brazil. Fernanda Montenegro has been compared to Vanessa Redgrave and Melina Mercouri. She is a Brazilian icon in many [respects] -- she's not only the most respected stage actress in Brazil, but she also participated in the movement against dictatorship, against all forms of repression. She's a human rights activist, and she's very courageous. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - N E X T+P A G E+| A great actress with the courage to wear no make-up