Night Stage: Filipe Matzembacher and Marcio Reolon on their public-sex thriller

In Night Stage, two men meet on a dating app and share a fetish for having sex in public. Matias (Gabriel Faryas) is an actor starring in a dance-led play, while Rafael (Cirillo Luna) is a politician hoping to be elected as the new mayor. While both strive to achieve professionally, this steamy erotic thriller sees their desires leading them into increasingly risky al fresco situations.

Writer-director duo Filipe Matzembacher and Marcio Reolon had the idea for the film in 2018 and managed to get funding, only for two major obstacles to arise: “The pandemic came, the Bolsonaro era started in Brazil, and he froze all the funding,” Matzembacher explains.

Night Stage, which is the closing night film of this year’s BFI Flare: LGBTQIA+ London Film Festival, was eventually filmed over 31 days in 2024 in the sultry Brazilian city of Porto Alegre. It’s the pair’s third feature together, following their 2018 webcam-performer provocation Hard Paint, which won the Teddy Award at the Berlin Film Festival. The same festival hosted Night Stage’s world premiere, and it’s here that we met Matzembacher and Reolon to dig into the film.

How did you come up with the idea for Night Stage?

Filipe Matzembacher: It started with this idea of characters that have double personas; they have to perform different lives. They have a public life to achieve a level of success and achievement in their careers but also have desires that clash with these public personas.

Marcio Reolon: We are actors, so we love talking about performance and bringing that into our work. To have these two characters that could go in and out of character within the film, like public and private lives, for us was very fascinating.

Matzembacher: And also to play with genre was something very beautiful to us. We are cinephiles, so we love thrillers in general, erotic thrillers, noir.

Were there any erotic thrillers you had in mind while you were writing it?

Reolon: We went through a lot of Hitchcock and noir films. But then later on, while we were developing the project, we realised this is more an erotic thriller. So we started diving into more of those. Brian De Palma and Paul Verhoeven are huge references for us. There were quite a few that we would constantly look back to, and they were good sources of inspiration for dialogue.

Matzembacher: Our previous films are more grounded, more realistic. On the last one, we always used to watch Running On Empty (1988) by Sidney Lumet. With this one, because it’s like a melodrama, it’s a different kind of film. The last one we watched was Basic Instinct (1992).

Out of the three core ingredients – the political plot, the fetish of the guys having sex in public and the dance elements – which drove you the most?

Reolon: All of these things are expressions of performance. They are just different manifestations of it.

Matzembacher: Something we realised in our previous films is that we love bodies in motion. Body movement is something we love to shoot.

Reolon: Through sex, violence, dance, whatever.

You mentioned the idea of double personas. In Hard Paint you had a man with a double life as well. What interests you about this idea of having two separate lives?

Matzembacher: We create personas to navigate different circles. Sometimes, depending on the circle you are in, you have to change yourself a little bit and to a certain degree it’s okay, but after that it starts to become damaging to who you think you are.

Reolon: In Hard Paint, our desire was to play between the material world and the virtual world; now this time between public and private. But the logic remains the same.

You’ve obviously got a lot of love for your hometown, Porto Alegre. What is it that attracts you to make films there?

Matzembacher: We love and hate the city. In Hard Paint, Porto Alegre is the antagonist of the film. It is the city that’s holding the character, and in this film it’s a dangerous city but also seductive. It’s the city we grew up in. It used to be very progressive in the past, but then, at the beginning of the 2000s, in came this wave of very right-wing, more conservative politicians. They took over and they are in the city hall too nowadays. So the city has changed a lot. 

When we were discussing the places that are very important to us, we thought, “What’s the role of Porto Alegre here and what it can add?” We realised the city has been changed so much because of real estate, and I said, “Okay, they have to be the enemy,” because we could see the city has been changed by the people with money. They just take over.

Reolon: When we’re designing a story, we always think of the relationship between the characters and the environment. This time was no different. Regarding this process of real-estate companies destroying old spaces to build new ones for profit and erasing the city’s memory, as filmmakers we also feel an urge to document these places while they still exist. Because maybe in a few years time many of them will be gone.

Matzembacher: I think this film is already that. A few months after the shoot, a huge flood happened. Many people died.

Reolon: Many spaces that we filmed were destroyed. The theatre, for example, doesn’t exist anymore.

Matzembacher: The main road, when Camilo is driving Matias back home, that street was completely underwater. You can see that suffering, you can see the level of the water on the streets, on the buildings like a scar. That happened because of the bad management of the local politicians. This was important to try to capture – the moment that the city is living. To try to find the poetics, the stories, but also to create these images.

I was really reminded of the work of Pedro Almodóvar, especially his earlier films. I wondered if his movies have been an influence?

Reolon: I think it makes sense, this comparison. Almodóvar was never a direct reference for us, someone that we thought of while we were making this film. But I can obviously see connections, and we love when people see these connections, because he’s a filmmaker that we super admire. So we’re flattered.

Matzembacher: We were more connected to the filmmakers we mentioned. Also, there’s a Brazilian film called República dos assassinos (1979), which is like a queer noir from the 70s. That’s amazing.

Reolon: Alain Guiraudie as well, who did Stranger by the Lake (2013), because he also plays with this idea of noir and features cruising in a super-interesting way.

The public sex fetish that these guys have runs through the film. Did you do any research on that scene?

Matzembacher: Most of the places that we shot are close to cruising areas.

Reolon: The park itself embraces this sort of cruising. Not directly in the place where we shot it – because we didn’t want to spoil their fun with our shooting – but yeah, it happens there. And also [we used] a bit of empirical knowledge, as well.

Matzembacher: For us, this was a place where we knew cruising happens, but we wanted to see how we could make it more cinematic – create the idea of a stage here. Because even in the cruising areas, there’s this feeling of theatre.

Night Stage is the closing night gala of this year’s BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival.