Walter Salles, the filmmaker (and billionaire) who won Brazil’s first-ever Oscar

Brazil is an endless factory of memes, which are created at an astonishing speed within a vibrant digital universe. As expected, Brazilian internet users took a brief break from Carnival to celebrate in style the country’s first-ever Oscar win, cheer the defeat of Emilia Pérez, and cry “ageism!” over the decision to award the Oscar for Best Actress to the twenty-something star of Anora, Mikey Madison, instead of 59-year-old Fernanda Torres.

Filmmaker Walter Salles, 68, sent his fellow Brazilians into euphoria when he accepted the Oscar for Best International Feature Film for I’m Still Here, a drama about Eunice Paiva, the wife of a man who was disappeared during the Brazilian dictatorship. Amid the flood of memes, one highlighted a lesser-known aspect of the acclaimed director: his fabulous fortune. “This charming banker would be saved in a revolution,” said one.

Born into wealth in Rio de Janeiro, Salles is as discreet as he is reserved. His fortune, estimated at around $4.4 billion according to Forbes, places him among the elite in Hollywood, ranking just behind Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. The Brazilian filmmaker is the son of an unusual high-society couple who instilled in him a deep love for the arts.

Salles is known for his casual style, opting for T-shirts and sneakers even at galas. At the Academy Awards on March 2, he scored a historic win in Hollywood, a feat he nearly achieved in 1999 with Central Station (Central do Brasil, 1998). With a distinguished career both in Brazil and internationally, he has garnered numerous accolades, including Golden Globes, BAFTAs, the Goya Award, and prizes from the Berlin, Cannes, Venice, Sundance, and San Sebastián festivals.

The truth is Salles is not, and never was, a banker, though he hails from one of Brazil’s most prestigious families: the Moreira Salles family, founders of Banco Itaú, the largest bank in Brazil, and notable patrons of the arts. He does, however, have a brother who is a banker and currently heads the family’s banking empire.

Not a fan of interviews, Salles largely kept the spotlight on actress Fernanda Torres during the Oscars campaign, in which his film earned three nominations (Best Picture, Best International Feature Film, and Best Actress). Torres, incidentally, is the daughter of Fernanda Montenegro, the star of Central Station, who also has a small yet powerful role in Salles’ latest film.

The Oscar win has revived a 2009 interview in which Salles opened up about more personal matters. In it, he discussed the dual identities of being both a filmmaker and a wealthy heir, recalling his meeting with Che Guevara’s family while preparing The Motorcycle Diaries (Diarios de Motocicleta, 2004). “When I first met them in Cuba, Ernesto Guevara’s widow and children were well aware of where I came from, but they are film buffs and preferred to judge me by the films I had directed, such as Central Station,” he explained to TPM.

In the same interview, Salles shared a deeply personal revelation: it wasn’t until after the success of Central Station that he learned his late mother had worked at the very same train station in Rio, located at the foot of Brazil’s first favela, when she was 18, before she got married. He discovered this through a stranger, who turned out to be a former coworker of his mother, Elisa Margarida Gonçalves, known as Elisinha.

Elisinha was a cultured woman with an immense curiosity about the world, and often featured on lists of the country’s most elegant women. She was one of the prominent figures who attended the legendary black-and-white ball immortalized by Truman Capote, alongside icons such as Lauren Bacall, Andy Warhol, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, as recently reported by Folha de S.Paulo.

In a display of extravagance, Elisinha traveled to China amid the Cultural Revolution, and the films she shot during that trip became the raw material for a documentary by Walter Salles' brother, João Moreira Salles. Upon returning, the matriarch published her impressions in a magazine and also sent letters to the editor under the title embaixatriz — a reference to her time as the wife of Brazil’s ambassador in Washington. Walther Moreira Salles, her husband, was a businessman and banker who negotiated Brazil’s foreign debt and rubbed elbows with international personalities such as Greta Garbo and the Rockefellers. Walter Salles Jr. is known as Waltinho to his friends.

This is the extraordinary world in which the Moreira Salles brothers grew up. “We never lacked encouragement,” João, the founder of the magazine Piauí, inspired by The New Yorker, told Folha on the eve of the Oscars. “My father’s vast library and the obligatory museum visits with my mother are part of my childhood memories. It was the price we had to pay to go out and have fun. Much of that stayed with us. She shaped our perspective.” In addition to the documentary about their mother’s trip to China, he directed another one about the family’s butler, Santiago.

A third brother, Fernando, is involved with Companhia das Letras, one of Brazil’s leading publishing houses. The fourth, Pedro, is a banker and the president of Itaú. After Walter’s triumph in Hollywood, a meme circulated about “the debt that all of Brazil owes to Walter Salles — half for the films, the other half for what it owes to Itaú.” In addition to their shares in the bank, the brothers are investors in mining — controlling 80% of the global market for niobium, a precious metal — and in Brazil’s famous Havaianas flip-flops. In the 2009 interview, Walter described himself as the “most foolish” of the brothers.

In his earlier films, where he portrayed the poorest parts of Brazil, whether in rural areas or the outskirts of cities, he explained that he was interested in immersing himself in these unfamiliar worlds.

With I’m Still Here, Salles has portrayed an episode he experienced closely during his adolescence, though it was only later that he fully understood its significance, as he revealed. Salles was a close friend of Nela, one of the five children of Eunice and Rubens Paiva. He was one of the children who frequented their house overlooking the sea, part of a happy family deeply impacted by the dictatorship. Mr. Paiva, a deputy dismissed by the military, was arrested, tortured, and murdered in 1971. His body was never found. At that time, Walter enjoyed driving go-karts and had even considered pursuing a career in car racing. He lived in a mansion that today houses the Rio headquarters of the Moreira Salles Institute, which contains the archive of the writer Clarice Lispector.

In his acceptance speech for the award, Salles explained: “This goes to a woman who, after a loss suffered during an authoritarian regime, decided not to bend, and to resist. This prize goes to her. Her name is Eunice Paiva.” Unfortunately, he misplaced the speech he had prepared and was unable to conclude with the powerful message: “Dictatorship, never again!”

A fan of casual, understated clothing that makes him appear younger, Salles is married to Maria Klabin, who comes from a similar background. Heiress to a paper business empire, she is also a visual artist. The couple has two teenage children.

A fan (and patron) of the Brazilian sports club Botafogo, Salles enjoys attending matches at the stadium. His next project is about Sócrates Brasileiro, a unique footballer with diverse interests who not only excelled on the field but also fought against the dictatorship while scoring goals for Corinthians soccer team.

Salles seems genuinely happy when he talks about cinema, as seen in a video that has recently resurfaced, in which he reviews his nine favorite films. He starts with Raging Bull — “one of those films where each frame contains the entire film” — followed by The Passenger and The Night by Michelangelo Antonioni — “because he is the filmmaker who led me to cinema, the one who best captured the senselessness of industrial society.” Then there’s Kubrick, the Russian movie Andrei Rublev — “I try to return to it every year,” Wim Wenders, and the Jim Jarmusch filmography he revisits to renew his faith in cinema. He also mentions the Brazilian film Vidas Secas (Dry Lives) and the Cuban movie Memories of Underdevelopment. This filmography shaped Salles' own path, one that has led him to become, alongside Fernanda Torres, the hero of the moment in Brazil.

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