The film goes from the rise to the fall of Eike Batista, who was once the 7th richest in the world

When she visited the set of “Eike – Tudo ou Nada”, a film based on her eponymous book about Eike Batista, journalist Malu Gaspar was startled by the personification that the biographer took in the figure of actor Nelson Freitas.

In addition to some physical resemblance duly reinforced by the characterization of the makeup and the willingness to study the character, the interpreter had the trump card of having lived with the real Eike, from whom he was brother-in-law for about a year and a half.

Few people remember the actor’s romance with Isis de Oliveira, Luma’s sister. That was well before Eike reached the billions of dollars that would take him to seventh place in Forbes magazine’s ranking of the richest people in the world. It was in a period prior to the cut chosen by producer Tiago Rezende and by directors and screenwriters Andradina Azevedo and Dida Andrade to present the story of the entrepreneur on screen.

But Freitas kept from his ex-brother-in-law the perception of his Minas Gerais DNA, on the part of his father, who survived amid his mother’s German heritage and the years spent between Switzerland and Germany. It was from Governador Valadares that he absorbed those barely camouflaged by the carioca accent of so many years in Rio de Janeiro.

Freitas also brought to the performance that smile of someone who tilts his head slightly and almost closes his eyes when he opens his teeth.

“It’s one thing to see the person on television, giving an interview, and he was in the news all his life. But the people who lived with him will notice. I had a desire to do that without wanting to promote an imitation, without being a caricature” , says the actor.

“When you make a character, you have the possibility to create, to invent the way she walks and talks. But this character exists”, he continues. “And there is a lot”, reinforces Malu Gaspar. “He’s here, he’s contemporary, and that was perhaps the biggest challenge.”

The feature shows the rise and fall of Eike, right in that moment of economic euphoria in Brazil when he decided that he would enter the dispute for the search for the pre-salt layer. There are entire dialogues from the book transported to the screen, but there is also an entirely fictional family, created from scratch, but believable — it is the core that exemplifies the level of confidence that Eike tried to instill in his business, leading even small investors to bet everything they had in their OGX.

The story begins to be told in 2006 and continues until Eike’s arrest, five years ago, when he was the target of Operação Eficiência, a spin-off of Operação Lava Jato, in Rio de Janeiro. The businessman was accused of being part of the corruption scheme moved by former governor Sérgio Cabral, imprisoned since 2016.

In the prison scene, reserved for the last day of filming, Nelson Freitas shaved his head, leaving only a few stray lints, and sported an appliqué like the one Eike had when he was arrested. The remaining wires were liquidated in front of the cameras.

Vain, although not as vain as Eike, Freitas says it was therapeutic to shave his head for the first time, but he left for Australia soon after. He went to visit his daughter and grandson, who live there, but the trip would come in handy so he wouldn’t be seen bald. “People would ask ‘what did you go to Australia for?’. ‘Wait for my hair to grow’, I would reply.”

It was Ciça Castello, the film’s casting producer, who suggested his name for the role. “It was an unlikely idea, Nelson is known for comedy, was he going to play a drama role? But me, Dida and Andradina, when we saw it, at the same time that it seemed crazy, it seemed very obvious”, says the producer Tiago Rezende.

According to Freitas, interested in repositioning his career to show that he was not just the “lol actor”, as he says, the proposal seemed tailored to reinforce that he could be more than the face of “Zorra” and “Zorra Total”, comedy shows in which he participated for many years at Globo. Even soap operas, he says he refused to be Eike.

The actor does not deny that making people laugh is still much more complex than making them cry, but he is committed to proving that he can travel on both lines of emotion.

He says he was inspired by Al Pacino helping Sofia Coppola on the theater steps in “The Godfather 3”, when Michael Corleone silences the expected cry of despair when he sees his dead daughter, “because he doesn’t breathe”.

In the case of “Eike”, the reaction came when the businessman leans on a screen that points to the unbridled fall of OGX shares. It is despairing even for the spectator who understands nothing about the financial market.

Three days before the end of filming, the actor was surprised by appendicitis. Rescued on set and taken to Clínica São Vicente, in Rio, he tried to negotiate with the doctor some medication to finish the film and return to the hospital in three days, to finally operate. “You don’t understand, the operating room is already being prepared”, she would have warned.

The team tried to settle several pending issues without the presence of the protagonist, who only returned to film two weeks later.

The cast also includes Thelmo Fernandes, Marcelo Valle, Bukassa Kabengele, Juliana Alves and Xando Graça, as employees of OGX, Jonas Bloch in the role of a banker and André Mattos as governor of Rio de Janeiro, alluding to Sérgio Cabral. All are given fictitious names.

Of course, Luma de Oliveira cannot be missed in a film about Eike, the name stamped on the famous necklace-choker worn by the actress in one of her memorable performances as queen of drums at the Tradição samba school. But it is good that no one goes to the cinema just for the expectation of seeing the representation of the actress by Carol Castro.

Oliveira is just a brief mention in the feature film. The character is seen in a moment of almost hallucination by Eike, a sequence that the directors call Fellini, in which he revisits his past and the woman’s exuberance through virtual reality glasses that a charlatan tries to sell him.

But, after all, what to expect from this media figure that attracted so much spotlight? Guilty? Innocent? “When I launched the book, there was also this question: Is Eike a bandit? Is he a profiteer or is he an innocent”, provokes Malu Gaspar, who says he liked the cut chosen by the film’s team and the solutions adopted to tell this story. on the screen.

“I’ve always said that he’s a very complex character, I think he’s not innocent. I’ve said that many times. He’s not a person who didn’t know what he was doing, but he’s a person in an environment, in a certain context. , and it’s hard to get that to the screen. I had as many pages as I wanted, you only had an hour and a half”, the journalist told the film’s directors and producer.

Rezende endorses, with reservation. “I don’t think he’s the [Sérgio] Cabral, who is in prison, I think he has a very interesting vanity thing, because he wanted to be loved all the time, he wanted to be in the spotlight.”

Son of producer Mariza Leão, the producer has only been working with cinema for six years, but has a degree in economics and frequents the financial market, an item that has character in “Eike”.

The sum of Rezende’s knowledge and the two writers’ and directors’ lack of awareness of this universe was fundamental, the three say, to achieve a palatable narrative, but without didacticism, capable of attracting even the least understood in the cruel little world of actions.

“We thought that this period portraying his life reflects a very interesting part of Brazil’s history, with that pre-salt euphoria. I remember that we used to say ‘wow, Brazil will now have a lot of money, the World Cup will come. World, there will be the Olympics, we will win an Oscar’. And Eike is a person who materialized all this”, says Andradina Azevedo.

Filmed during the pandemic, the feature does not follow the most recent decisions of the Justice on the character, who continues to answer for the accusation of crimes against the capital market, use of privileged information and market manipulation.

“Eike – Tudo ou Nada” premieres this Thursday, a few days before the first round of elections for president, governors, senators and deputies. And, if the film can contribute to the voter’s reflection, this occurs through the perception that it is necessary to be suspicious of miraculous promises.

“How could one imagine that a guy was going to extract the same amount of oil from under the ground that Petrobras had not taken in 50 years? And people wanted to believe that”, recalls Malu Gaspar.

“Brazilians have this habit of thinking that someone is going to come down from the sky and solve our problems”, he says. “‘Eike’ teaches that when you believe in miraculous, fallacious, pyramid-like solutions, it will go wrong.”