Walter Salles began his career in the late 1980s, directing documentaries and feature films in Brazil. International acclaim found him with the 1998 release of Central Station. The film won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival and earned two Academy Award nominations. The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) and On The Road (2012) further solidified his keen eye for compelling, true-to-life stories. His latest project is I’m Still Here — a deeply personal narrative set in 1970s Brazil during the military dictatorship.
More: Walter Salles (The Treatment, 2004)
For his Treat, Salles opens up about how Michelangelo Antonioni's 1975 drama The Passenger made a lasting impression on him when he first saw it as a teenager. The film follows BBC journalist David Locke (Jack Nicholson) as he discovers a mysterious dead man in a hotel in Chad, Africa… then decides to assume his identity. The film struck a deep chord with Salles. He found himself resonating with its themes of self-discovery and escapism, and marveling at its technical ingenuity.
More: Director Walter Salles on subtraction and crafting emotion in I’m Still Here (The Treatment, 2025)
This segment has been edited and condensed for clarity.
I'd love to talk about Antonioni's The Passenger because this is the film that took me to cinema. I saw it when I was 15 [or] 16 years old. I saw it in a cinema that was full — maybe 300, 400 people. At the end of the session, everybody left [but] I couldn't leave. I was crying like I don't think I had ever cried before, and it took me a while to understand why.
The film is about a BBC journalist, he's a reporter at large and he is in Chad. This guy is played by the absolutely brilliant Jack Nicholson, as we know, and the name of the character is David Locke. So David Locke is in a Chadian village, a very small village. He's in a hotel and the only person in that hotel is a mysterious man called Robertson that the Jack Nicholson character befriends. One day, as he comes back from a frustrating attempt to reach the rebels, he finds Robertson dead in the hotel and next to him is a gun, and next to the gun are the notes of encounters that Robertson would be having in the next weeks. David Locke (Nicholson) is more and more intrigued about that, to the point that he actually decides to switch identities with the dead man, to become Robertson, and to try to lead Robertson's life.
The only person surrounding him that understands Locke's decision is the Maria Schneider character, a character of a student that he meets in Barcelona who understands what David Locke is really fleeing away from. That is, he's fleeing away from himself.
Each scene contains the film as a whole, and this is so rare to do in cinema. Each and every scene in the film embraces the whole filmic experience. Then the structure, the narrative structure, has a lot to do with music; in the sense that every single scene is impregnated by the previous scene and somehow echoes in the following scene.
The Argentinian writer, whom I also love, called Jorge Luis Borges used to say: ‘All art forms aim to be music, but very few manage to.’ I think that Antonioni made music in that film.