I do not believe in adaptations. Adaptations are always, somehow, a flattening of the original work, an assassination of the original text. Because of this, I define the work done in the miniseries as an “approximation”. Reason why I decided to adopt a different title, Capitu, instead of Dom Casmurro, the original title of the romance. Thus, the idea of approximation would become even clearer, revealing itself not as a mere attempt to transpose from a support to another but rather as a dialogue with the original work.

In the show, I am reaffirming the doubt present in Dom Casmurro as part of the cultural and dialectic process of modernity. And I believe doubt is neither unmoral or immoral, it is not a sin. The writer of the romance, Machado de Assis, appeared as a man ahead of its time, a new aesthetic proposal in relation to the literature at the time that was produced in the country and abroad. The option for the doubt turns the romance into a mythical struggle between the mere appearance of things and the truth of the world.

The very beginning of the romance fill us with emotions due to the idea of continuation. The first time a character speaks in the romance – and this character is no other than Dom Casmurro – says only a word to the young poet that plays him: ‘Continue’. This speech as such an extreme power. I like to think Machado was successful – regardless of the high quality of his literature – because he knew how to continue, to insist in his obsessive themes, assuming all kinds of risks.

The opera, of which Machado was an enthusiast, had a significant role in this approximation I proposed for the romance. He wrote and stated “life is a comical opera, with some serious parts, with some serious melody”. When Machado stated that, he is also reflecting on the world of appearances, where, most of the times, appearances are more valued than truth itself. This is the world of masks. It is the world of opera as a metaphor for social relationships.

Machado was often accused of being an author that failed to talk about our things, of the country, often mentioning Othello and Shakespeare. As I see it, the strength of his literature was exactly this parabolic antenna that the writer himself incarnated. We are now plugged into the internet, receiving information from all languages and through all sorts of manners. At the time of Machado, influences were also plenty. It was the end of a century, the years of great inventions, where there was the idea of a future that would catapult the country to a relevant position in the world, the idea that with the end of the Second Reign the Republic would attract a great deal of progress.

Therefore, it is interest to notice that Machado was already anticipating his moves and, always skeptical, used to say progress was born from ruins, which existed thanks to slave labor. Thus, the idea of ruin is also present in the staging of the show.

In Rio de Janeiro’s Downtown I found a scenario that is a palace (Automóvel Clube do Brasil), practically in ruins, decadent and abandoned, but that was perfect for my aesthetic view of the miniseries.

By the time I realized the budget did not allow me to shoot in several streets and old manors – unfortunately rare and where I would have to improvise a facade here and there – the old palace in ruins became a part of the soul of Dom Casmurro and I decided to tell the whole story inside it, shooting all scenes and situations there.

I clung myself to this opera and ruin idea and jumped in. There is a line from the writer that guided me during the whole work: ‘reality is good, realism is the one worthless.’

The impressive and wonderful writing of Machado in the 19th century has a healthy dialogue with surrealism, such as Dadaism, which prefers to work with assemblages, collages, repetitions, posters, panels and with the proposal of distance between work and spectator. In a way, Dom Casmurro is assembled as a set of collages with temporal and reverse layers.

The whole time we are aware Machado is elaborating a book. He said it himself. The script used by the cast is absolutely faithful to what was produced by the writer. The script is pure Machado, without any interference from me, not even a comma. I tried to get closer to him with the continuation spirit, with this dialectic tune, freeing his text from chaining readings that imprisoned it to the realist school of the 19th century.

Perhaps I have attached myself a little to that Borgean idea of time not being linear, where time is a spiral, and you have within yourself all other times lived. I have created this present figure of Dom Casmurro I did not let him with an OFF VOICE, I really invited Dom Casmurro to interact with the happenings of his memory, as someone who truly misses himself to the point of materializing those moments. He is a voice, but a voice with a body. He is a narrative power and he is here transcending time and space. We are in the 21st century talking about this body of Dom Casmurro.

The characters of Dom Casmurro, once removed from a real world, were all placed by the writer inside the literary world, which belongs to the domain of imagination and thus they are immediately gifted with mythical aspects. There are neither eight families nor 15 mothers. There is ‘the’ mother, Glória; ‘the’ sun, Bento Santiago. They are not to be seen as characters belonging to naturalism. They belong to the mythical world of literature.

As already said, each will imagine their own Capitu – as I hope. My attempt was to picture the phantasmagoria of my Capitu and of my Dom Casmurro in such a point that it is capable of dialoguing with the imagination of the viewer.

All such characters belong to the world of a large library, to a world of the literary unconsciousness and where they must remain. This is the only way we can dialogue with them, to look them in the eye, to meet them and then later, guide them back to literature.

The artist has a spiritual and vital need of continuing. He carries with him something to say, some seed that may never fully develop. But if this seed is genuine, then maybe it will be harvested – we do not know by whom – centuries later. And this idea of continuation is the thing that outlines the aesthetic perspective and dialogue between artists ages apart.