Director Miguel Gomes embraces Oscar campaign for ‘Grand Tour,’ Portugal’s cinematic blend of history and fantasy
MUBI’s “Grand Tour” is Portugal’s 2025 Oscars entry for Best International Feature. Although this is director Miguel Gomes‘ third film selected (he was also chosen in 2008 for “Our Beloved Month of August” and in 2015 for “Arabian Nights: Volume 2 — The Desolate One”), he has never truly campaigned, until now.
Gomes says he’s “playing the game” this time, and he kicked off his American promotion for “Grand Tour” with a special screening and Q & A hosted by Gold Derby at The Aster in Los Angeles on Dec. 3.
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“Jesus, it’s a high responsibility,” the Best Director winner from this year’s Cannes Film Festival said about representing Portugal at the Oscars.
“Grand Tour” is about a man named Edward, a civil servant who flees his fiancee Molly on their wedding day in Rangoon, 1918. His travels replace panic with melancholy. Molly, set on marriage, amused by his escape, trails him across Asia. Gomes has said he was inspired to make the film on the day of his own wedding, but he admits that’s a bit of an exaggeration.
“That’s a more romantic version of the story, so I kind of like it, but it didn’t happen,” he cleared up. “There’s this book called ‘The Gentleman in the Parlour’ from Somerset Maugham. This book is about this journey in Southeast Asia. There are two pages in this book where he says, ‘I met this guy, a British guy in Burma. And he told me the story before his marriage.’ And the story goes like what you see in the film. This guy apparently was engaged for many years and for some reasons it never happened. And after seven years of engagement, she came and he was waiting for her in the pier, in Rangoon, and he got scared. And so he ran away. And he got to Singapore and he already had a telegram from her saying, ‘Okay, my dear, I totally understand and I’m arriving.'”
“So he panicked again and he continued for months and months,” Gomes elaborated. “And in the story they married because she caught him in Chengdu. And so the consul of Chengdu marries them in 1918. And as it’s written in the book, they are living very happily after this marriage. And so, we checked the authenticity of this story. We contacted Chengdu, the British consulate of Chengdu, and there are no records of this marriage. So I think it was not something that happened, it was a joke. It’s a joke about men being cowards and women being stubborn.”
Gomes then clarified, “So, what happened is I was reading this book some months before getting married. I have to say, I didn’t run away from my wife, and most surprisingly, she didn’t run away from me.”
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The Grand Tour was, in fact, a trip many Europeans were taking across Southeast Asia at the start of the 20th century. Before even writing the script, Gomes decided to take this tour himself, filming various locations that Edward would have stopped throughout his travels. The images captured show these countries as they are today, and his documentary-style film is creatively edited throughout the rest of the movie, which he filmed in studios in Lisbon and Rome.
“We wanted to create a false continuity in the film between two different times, and to provide a cinematic experience from these passages between the world today and the world from the past,” Gomes explained. “You have to project the characters into the images you are seeing, which for me is interesting because I’m not only a filmmaker, I’m also a viewer. This is a very important thing for me because I think that it’s an unbalanced relationship. Cinema can tell you what you have to think, what you have to feel, what you have to do…cinema can be like a prison.”
While discussing their filming locations throughout Asia, Gomes stated, “I imagine that being a traveler 100 years ago would be much more adventurous than today because today we have the feeling that everything is already seen. There’s no place for amazement, there’s no place for being surprised with things. You go to Google Maps and there’s selfies of billions of people in every corner of the world. So everything is seen, and there’s no place for amazement. This kind of innocence in cinema is a little bit lost and traveling is the same thing, where is the place to be really amazed by the things you see?
“So this was the criteria we used to choose what were going to shoot in these countries,” he continued. “The things that we would be amazed by. Because they were so beautiful, or so funny, or something that would touch us. It’s as simple as that.”
Shooting in studios proved to be the more complicated task for the director. “Sometimes I would get angry with the artistic department because we’ll notice that this is not the real bamboo forest, for instance,” he explained. “And they were worried because we didn’t have that much of a budget. So, they were always worried with the scale of things. And I kept saying to them, ‘No, it’s good because we have already shot the world. The world is big and you have thousands of people there.’ So now if you only have money for 20 people and everything is quite miniature, it’s okay. In a way, I think of one of my favorite films, ‘The Wizard of Oz..'”
“And ‘The Wizard of Oz’ is what?” he continued. “It is about this girl named Dorothy that lives in Kansas. And Kansas looks like a studio, but it’s daily life. It’s reality. So it’s her life, it’s common life. So in a way, cinema exists to film things from our life, from what is close to us. But she senses there’s another world over the rainbow, but it can be in another place. We don’t need a rainbow. Somewhere there’s another place called Oz in the film. And this world comes across in cinema. So cinema is a parallel world that is not life, but in a way it exists for us to help us to reconnect with our lives. And so in my films, I work always with Kansas and Oz, that’s reality, life, and another world…cinema. So our work doing this, was trying to film Asia nowadays and also creating this fantasy world that doesn’t look like the real one, it looks like a studio, like an old-school studio. Nowadays, when you go to the studio, it doesn’t look like this. We did it with construction, with old-school Hollywood. And for me, it’s very important to have both.”
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