Lucas Millions Dutra represents Portugal with film in Cannes: “They looked at me and realized ‘no, no, he’s not just the soap opera actor’”

Lucas Millions Dutra welcomes Expresso in the hustle and bustle of a busy Wednesday. Around 4pm, lunch continues to be postponed, due to the various (and consecutive) interviews and photo sessions of the day, almost all of them framed by the city green of Avenida da Liberdade.

The frenzy of journalists is caused by the success of the short film he made. “Do Outro Lado” won the Portuguese edition of the “48H Film Project” and, after that, against the winners of international editions from 45 other countries, it won the award for Best Film at Filmapalooza, which takes it to the Cannes Festival for the second time. consecutive year. Furthermore, he continues at full steam with the promotion of the feature film “Revolucion sem Sangue”, in which he participates as an actor.

The new trip to the French city, in the second half of May, follows a first one, in 2023, when he won the global TikTokShortFilm competition with “(Nos) na Cabeça”.

This marks a turning point in the career of Lucas, better known to most Portuguese people for his participation in several soap operas than as a director. At the age of 24, he already made it to generalist channels: he started at 13 on RTP1, after that he went to SIC and is now on air on TVI, with “Cacau”.

The young man does not deny this origin: “Any actor in Portugal who manages to work is satisfied. We know that this medium is difficult and giving me proof of confidence in continuing to make soap operas, no matter what prejudice there is against them, it is always an incredible job”, he highlights.

“Being able to play new characters and have new characters entrusted to me is something that I value a lot”, he says. However, he does not hide his satisfaction at “erasing the soap opera’s stamp a little”, thanking Hermano Moreira and Rui Pedro Sousa for the opportunity, who invited him, respectively, to “Hotel Amor” and “Revolucion sem Sangue”, two feature films. films, the latter already on display.

“In Portugal there is still a lot of this prejudice that a theater actor does theater, a film actor is a film actor and a soap opera actor is a soap opera actor, and we all benefit when we eliminate these barriers, and manage to have unbelievable jobs”, he highlights.

Awards opened doors to achievement

“I was doing ’48 Hours’… in the middle of filming, I was in the bathroom peeing, when I received the news from Tiktok that we were going to Cannes”, reports, between laughs, the actor and director. “And then we were chosen again to go to Cannes with this film. Winning in Lisbon, for me, was already unbelievable, then going to Filmapalooza, which is a very big and international festival, even more so.”

But what, after all, is the “48 Hours Film Project”? As the name suggests, the participants’ mission is to make a film in 48 hours, between Friday and Sunday.

“The process itself I think is very simple: on Friday night the ‘genre’ is drawn [género] of the film we have to make. We got science fiction. We receive a character that we must include, a mandatory object, and a mandatory speech. We chose the theme, which in this case was artificial intelligence, “he explains.

The film details a physical and humanized version of the hidden “other side” of an artificial intelligence system like ChatGPT, called “ChatBotBuddy”.: “If this is ‘the other side’, if it is already the machine within the machine, let’s keep things physical, analogue”, he continues.

In this story, the protagonist, Gabriel PT, maintains a daily routine, in which he receives requests, in the form of tickets of paper, which is dispatched, stamped and punched, at the same time as it receives updates, in the form of boxes of books that store in a knowledge database that are several shelves. “We literally humanized artificial intelligence, giving it the shape of a person, and telling the story of a kind of ‘couple’, in which we portrayed almost a romance between artificial intelligence and malware, the virus that will affect it.”

It was the fascination with artificial intelligence, but also the fears it causes them, that motivated the team to tackle this topic: “This is the world we’re living in now, and honestly, I’m both fascinated and scared. I have some fear about the issue of artificial intelligence. At the moment they are tools, but will they always be tools. And can’t these tools used for good things also do bad things?” “We tried to deal with a topic that was current, but that, in some way, was close to people”, she reveals.

The story of a new victory

At the Filmapalooza final gala, “I was almost sure I wasn’t going to win.and suddenly I’m like ‘well, let’s go, final film and so on, I’m going to get up to leave’… and out of nowhere they start talking about the film.

“This is for a team of talented young people who managed to combine many elements in terms of history and achievement… it goes to… ‘Du Ótrô Ládo”, because they don’t know how to say it, right? And I look at Eduardo [Queiroz, co-argumentista] and shout ‘that’s our movie!’. We started a party, shouting, hugging each other, we went to meet Ricardo, from 48 Horas de Lisboa. It was unbelievable.”

Achievement has asserted itself in Dutra’s life: “This space that I have been gaining, fortunately, has been through awards. The TikTok award, as much as it is on TikTok, opened doors for me at TVI, to perform the Pitch on CNN Portugal, and in the market in general”.

“They looked at me and realized ‘no, no, he’s not just the soap opera actor’”, admits. “He’s not just an actor, he’s doing things as a creator, as a director and as a screenwriter and it’s going well,” she says.

“It’s funny how suddenly I almost have more recognition as a director, at least in terms of awards and market placement. It almost feels like I have more value now as a director than I did as an actor,” he says.

“I never thought in my life that at the age of 24 I would be going to the Cannes Festival twice and working as an advertising director, planning projects [de ficção] and trying to sell them to streaming platforms and bigger things”, he confesses, while hoping that Cannes can open doors to new projects and businesses.

“Portugal stops. Whether it’s half an hour or an hour, we stop and sit down to eat.” On Netflix “they give us a box of packaged food”

Recently, Lucas Dutra got his first role in the foreign series “Vikings: Valhalla”, on Netflix. When asked about the biggest difference between what he saw in this experience and what he experiences on the scale of a Portuguese production, the answer is not surprising: “Money.”

“It’s as simple, it’s business, it’s as simple as that”, he says, smiling. “Actually, with money comes many other things”, he says. “What changes most is the time we have to do it, and the production”, he highlights.

“Suddenly, here I want to do a scene with a horse. In Portugal I have a horse, and maybe it’s a pony. Outside I have six horses and I can have six horses all running, and I have technicians to monitor the horses. There are things that the Portuguese way can overcome, but there are others that cannot, where the difference in production value will affect the product. And I think this is unanimous”, he reflects.

However, not everything is roses. “There are small details that I find super interesting to put on the table”, she says. “Here we are talking about a large production, where supposedly there is time, there is catering, there is food… and we simply didn’t stop to eat, they brought us a tupperware of packaged food and you ate standing up while they prepared the next scene”, something radically different from what would happen in a Portuguese series or soap opera.

“There is one thing that we Portuguese maintain, and I think it is one of the most incredible things we have: Portugal stops, whether for half an hour or an hour, we stop and sit down to eat. It’s super funny how we have this intrinsic to the way we work,” she shares.

“No, no, wait, it’s lunch time, man. Stop, sit down and let’s eat good food”, underlines, repeating the words of an imaginary member of the team, while highlighting the “family spirit” that is experienced in national teams. “There, what I could see was that there is a greater separation between the cast and coaches, and here in Portugal this barrier is increasingly tenuous, and this brings many advantages”.

In the internationalization of his career, another objective still remains to be achieved: Brazil. With dual Portuguese-Brazilian nationality, Lucas Millions Dutra was almost able to achieve this before the pandemic, in 2020, in the soap opera “Salve-se Quem Puder”, on Globo. “Everything was closed, I was going to buy the tickets and suddenly, hey, there’s a strange cough here…”. And that’s how the desire to work there “as an actor initially and then, who knows, as a director too” was put on hold for now.

Will there be eternal indecision between actor and director? “At the end of my career I want it to be on the tombstone, or wherever it is – ‘Lucas Millions Dutra, director/actor… maybe screenwriter. Director and actor must both be there, without a doubt.”