Behind the Lens: An Interview with the Director of Water Rats Doc ‘Forever Vacation’

Water Rats with producer Elizabeth Ai (left) and director Gandja Monteiro (right). Shot by Diego Rosenblatt.

In September 2015, the Brazilian punks known as Water Rats were given the opportunity, thanks to Converse Rubber Tracks, to travel to Seattle, WA to record at Avast! Recording Company. The studio touts a discography of range and notoriety: the original location produced the Soundgarden records that helped sculpt grunge, setting the tone for the formative years of the genre. Since then the studio’s churned out records from everyone from Death Cab For Cutie to Queens of the Stone Age to Tori Amos, and High on Fire, to name a few. After Water Rats endured a 30-hour airport nightmare, they finally landed on US soil. Not only were they taken to a historical studio to track new tunes, but they were greeted by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and legendary producer Jack Endino (Nirvana, Mudhoney).

When the 32-year-old self-proclaimed Brazilian-New-Yorker filmmaker Gandja Monteiro was brought onboard to document Water Rats’ trip from São Paulo to Washington, she immediately jumped on the opportunity (watch the full film above). Born in New York’s Lower East Side (she insists it’s not Alphabet City) to Brazilian parents, Monteiro has always had a strong connection to Brazil. When she was young, she spent some time living there, frequently visiting her father and sister in Rio de Janeiro. Now, home is somewhere between New York, Los Angeles, and Brazil. Although she’d never heard of Water Rats before or been to the band’s hometown of Curitiba, she knew how important geography would be in telling the true story of the band. A country the size of the entire continent of Europe with a population of over 200 million, lifestyle and culture across Brazil can change as drastically as it does between the swamps of Louisiana and the streets of San Francisco.

What Monteiro set out to do was tell the story of a group of hard-working and passionate guys who didn’t fit the cookie-cutter cliché story of Brazilian big-city plight. She showed their roots, their family, and their values through beautiful cinematography and visual representation that was indicative of far more than a band winning a competition and recording some songs. We spoke to Monteiro about her approach to creating her short-documentary Forever Vacation and why Water Rats didn’t need to be from the slums to provide a layered, meaningful, and universal story.

Noisey: As a self-proclaimed Brazilian-New-Yorker, were you familiar with the city that Water Rats are from, Curitiba?
Gandja Monteiro: I’d never been there actually. I always said my heart is in Rio but when I discovered São Paulo as an adult, I realized that was where my heart really was. It has people from all over, like New York. A lot of my good friends in São Paulo are from the south, where there’s a very different style and approach to life. Water Rats, some of them are from Curitiba but they came together through São Paulo. I connect to those guys a lot because of the way they approach music and the way they’re so into mixing genres. Their sound isn’t very Brazilian at all but they do show a little bit here and there. Their original drummer is actually very into Brazilian rhythms, which makes their garage punk really multicultural in a sense.

One of the first things you learn in documentary filmmaking is that if you want to get to know someone, you should talk to their family members, but that’s often overlooked in music docs. Why did you decide to go back to Curitiba and meet the families?
From speaking to the guys and trying to understand the best angle to tell the story I realized that Curitiba is actually a very conservative city. Even though there was a grunge or alternative rock movement in the 90s, you don’t necessarily associate rock ’n’ roll with the south of Brazil. A lot of the rock ’n’ roll that became popular in Brazil was actually taking place in São Paulo. The top Brazilian pop stars who came up in the 60s, a lot of them were based there but actually from the north, so people don’t really associate it with the south.

These guys are clearly not the typical Brazilian story. They’re not from the lower class, didn’t grow up in a favela and they’re not black or brown. I wanted it to be authentic to what their struggle has been, which is really not to live an ordinary life. You want to know how and why they’ve gotten where they are. All of them said, “Of course, my parents didn’t want me to do this, to be a punk rocker without a nine to five job.” One dad is a military guy and one is a super successful business owner. Finding out where they come from is the best way into highlighting who they really are.

Were Water Rats cool about it? I would imagine dudes in a punk band would have wouldn’t think it’s cool to let mom and dad go on the camera in their film debut…
Those guys were the most lovely and open-minded guys. They understood what I was going for. Once the film was done, they saw a cut of it and said, “Now I understand what you were trying to do!” They’re all very bright and well-educated guys. They’re not the most typical punk band. They’re very organized, clean, and have gentle souls. But at the same time they like hard-sounding music. They contradict the stereotype.

Did you go out of your way to try to make it more than just a “fish out of water” cliché story? The piece could’ve easily been presented like “Here’s a band that doesn’t fit the traditional expectations of where punk grows out of!” But it seemed like there were more layers to it…The truth is that Brazil is such a complex country. I lived in there when I was little but I didn’t fully grow up in Brazil, so my understanding of the country is this outsider-insider point of view. One of my biggest concerns when I was approaching this was that I didn’t want it to come across as another typical Brazilian story.

But just because these guys didn’t come from the slums, I didn’t want it to come across like they’re playboys or their life is easy. I think any artist’s life is not easy. The choice to be a musician is immediately throwing you into a slightly more difficult social environment or financial environment. It’s not going to be like it is for someone who has a nine to five. A lot of the time routines are a lot easier than alternative or avant-garde lifestyles.

My approach was definitely to tell a differentiated idea of Brazil. It isn’t just favelas, drug wars, samba, and beaches. I felt proud that I was getting a chance to show another side of society and culture that isn’t really shown to the rest of the world. The rock ’n’ roll movement that emerged out of a couple of guys going electric in the 60s in Brazil became the inspiration for so much great Brazilian rock that nobody knows about. That goes beyond Os Mutantes, who people mention because Kurt Cobain was into them.

So as a director, you really did find that geography was incredibly important part of telling this story…
I realized that being on the road is such an essential part of being a musician, and the connection between cities. They are from different cities, but because they’ve all been in rock bands before, they’ve always traveled through São Paulo, the main city in terms of business and culture. So we went to Curitiba and they showed us the city they grew up in. If we just stayed in São Paulo that we wouldn’t be representing the band fully. Water Rats started out as a fun project, it wasn’t a band that was going to rehearse all the time. The idea between what they started as and what it became were completely different.

When we interviewed Thurston Moore, one of the most interesting points he made was exactly that. Being in a band and traveling from town to town, it’s like being in a family. It ends, and then you move onto the next one. That gypsy lifestyle is such a part of being a musician. I myself very much so have that lifestyle. I definitely relate to it. After hanging out for about two or three weeks, I felt like I wished that we’d started filming at that point, because I’d have such an interesting take on everything.

The title of the film is Forever Vacation. This is a hack interview question, but where did that come from?
Forever Vacation is the band’s motto. It’s actually the name of a song, too. When we talked to Thurston about it, he said it really made sense. The idea that a musician or the Water Rats, can be on the road from city to city and they’re doing what they want to be doing. They’re not working at an office job and dealing with paperwork. They don’t have a boss. There isn’t that claustrophobic pressure that the system gives you. Talking about “the system” can be pretty cheesy, but I like the idea of living life as if it was worth it. It’s not just going through a day in order to get by or to pay a bill. Two of the guys have tattoos that say Forever Vacation. It’s funny because I don’t think they necessarily wanted it to be the title of the film, but it most told the story.

Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore in Seattle with Water RatsThurston in the studio with Water Rats

At one point one of the guys looked out of the window of a building he used to work in. He said he used to look across the street at the people in the mental hospital and be envious of them. Can you tell me about that moment?
Pedro is one of the two vocalists, he writes a lot of the lyrics. He’s probably the intellectual aspect of the band: He’s the brooding, more pensive member. He was talking about exactly what feeds into the Forever Vacation idea. You, me, we live alternative lifestyles, but we are still kind of in the rat race. We’re still going day-by-day and checking things off a list. But someone who’s at a mental hospital, his or her life is completely different. Their take on life is like a complete outsider’s view. But how do they see us? How do they lead a life with the lack of integration into the “real world” as we see it? That’s what he was contemplating.

One of the fathers said the chance of being successful in music is the same as winning the lottery. But then you see how committed and driven they are. They were working on writing while in the van on the way to the airport in Brazil. Are they driven people?
What most surprised me was how hardworking they all are. You tell a story in a 12-minute film, but I wish we could put so much more in it. For example, this isn’t in the story: Alex [Capilé] (guitar/vocals) co-owns a music studio that records a lot of indie bands. Bi [Coveiro] (bass) is a painter who just showed in Art Basel in Miami. Pedro [Gripe] (guitar/vocals) is a filmmaker who just made a documentary. Renê [Bernuncia] (drums) owns a bed and breakfast and has a kid. The other drummer, he’s a top-notch drummer in Brazil. It makes sense why they’ve gotten so much done in the band’s very short career.

Let’s talk about the original drummer Renê. The band starts getting all of this attention and that almost directly coincides with the birth of his child. You seemed to bookmark Water Rats’ story with Renê. He said he didn’t even want to think about the experience that he was missing out on, but then at the end he was Facetiming from back home. How did that all work? Was it uncomfortable that the band went without him?
The other drummer, his name is Pindé. They both have history with the band. Renê is the official drummer, but he just had a kid. Because he is a good man, he wanted to be responsible and take care of his family. The timing was interesting, he felt like sending his friend and fellow drummer was the correct thing to do. He’d replaced Pindé before in another band. It wasn’t odd at all.

Did it add tension knowing that he wasn’t there? How do you think the rest of the band felt about it?
He had no idea that Thurston Moore and Jack Endino were going to be there. Of course it was difficult for him and it hurt. But it’s also one of those things where life happens in such a weird series of events that I don’t think he could’ve really helped it. He was sad, but he was really happy that we went to Curitiba.

I liked the way you used Thurston, he kind of narrated the introduction and then he comes back in at the end of the piece. It seemed based off of the studio footage that Jack Endino was really the one producing and Thurston was more of a spiritual guide…
So much of what Thurston said in our interviews was so wise. He’s been touring without Sonic Youth for a while, so he’s been in the same exact situations as them. He’s not touring around VIP. He’s actually in a van just as they are. His lifestyle is similar, but his age brings this wisdom and this experience, but he is just another band guy. He actually reminds me of them a little bit. He’s got a very artistic or intellectual look at all of this. He’s well read, very well spoken, but also very easy to talk to. He shares his wisdom but without any sort of pompous attitude. He was very excited about their sound and understood what they were trying to do. He didn’t go there with any sort of criticism as if what he does or knows is different or better.

At one point Jack Endino talked about why it made perfect sense that he’d be working with Water Rats. Did that fit translate in the studio?
What’s interesting is that Jack has worked with one of the most successful Brazilian rock bands, Titãs, and of course he’s had so much experience doing what he does. The way he works is super smart. He has this instinct. He’s not trying to impose his sound on the band. He’s trying to pull out the sound that the band naturally makes and shape it to the best of their ability. It could’ve been any other Seattle producer, but he’s produced a lot of first albums without much time or resource; these guys had a day and a third, and the rest was mixing. It came out really good. I think it’s exactly the sound that they were inspired by.

For me to nerd out, I love the shooting. Did you have a visual style you were going in thinking about silhouettes in the diner, the rain in Brazil under a streetlight at a bus station, an overheard shot of trucks on a highway, walking through the grass fields. What was your vision?When I’m doing documentaries I always try to make sure that life comes across the way we perceive it. Life is completely subjective, that subjectivity is what adds the spice and poetry. If you just listen to someone speaking, there’s this beauty to it, that if it were just written out as journalistic text, it might not come out quite as powerfully. Me and the cinematographer and producer always come at it with a ton of references, a ton of visual preparation work, even though we were capturing real moments, we need to make sure there is a specific visual style that we could implement so that each piece is different. If you watch all my work, you’ll see a visual through-line, but if it’s a rock’n’roll story, it’s going to be shot differently than a hip-hop story. You don’t just point the camera and go. Just because it’s real life doesn’t mean there isn’t a lens through which we’re looking at it.

I love at the end when they’re walking through the field and performing the track. What was the deal with that closing scene?
Seattle is such a character in the story. I wanted to have a moment of them interacting with the city. To them, it was such a big deal to be recording in Seattle, where so much of the music they love and they grew up with was born. It was the end of our shoot and you can see the joy and them being in the moment. They were fully living it.

They seem super relaxed and confident in that scene too. How did that contrast to the vibe in the studio? Was it nervous energy?
They were really giving it their all. It’s only natural to be intimidated by being in the presence of a producer like Jack Endino and Thurston Moore, but just because they were in the presence of these legends, that didn’t mean that the legwork that they’d done in the past wasn’t worthwhile. In the beginning they were a little unsure, but as it went on, it became more obvious they were prepared. That confidence grew and grew. Jack’s approach to recording is about being doing it fast and being authentic, it’s not about glossing it over or over-manipulating it. The raw energy is what is key.

Forever Vacation is part of four films that tell the story of four bands shot by four different filmmakers in conjunction with Noisey and Converse Rubber Tracks. Watch all the films here.

Derek Scancarelli studied documentary filmmaking in New York. Nerd-out with him on Twitter.