Bob Olson Interviews Filmmaker Wagner de Assis
WAGNER DE ASSIS: “Brazilian medium Chico Xavier channeled the story of Dr. Andre Luiz who experienced an enlightening spiritual awakening after his death. Chico Xavier published this story in his bestselling book, Nosso Lar, which is Portuguese for ‘Our Home.’
“Now this famous book has been made into a movie by filmmaker Wagner de Assis. Wagner wrote and directed the movie titled Astral City: A Spiritual Journey, and he was generous enough to talk with me about the movie, the book, and his extensive knowledge about life after death. This is not your typical interview to promote a movie, but rather an insightful conversation about our spiritual journey back home to the spirit world after our lives have ended. Wagner de Assis and I use the movie as the foundation for our discussion.” ~ Bob Olson, Afterlife TV
If you’d like to watch this video, Does Life Continue After Death?, visit www.afterlifetv.com/?p=455
Afterlife TV is presented by Afterlife Investigator & Psychic Medium Researcher Bob Olson, who is the author of Answers about the Afterlife: A Private Investigator’s 15-Year Research Unlocks the Mysteries of Life after Death.
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Hi everybody, this is Bob Olson with Afterlife TV. You can find us as afterlifetv.com. This is where we search for evidence of life after death.
I’m really excited about our guest today, because it involves a movie that I’m sure you’ll all want to go see. It’s called The Astral City. It is probably the biggest movie that ever took place down in Brazil, and today we have the Director and the Screenwriter. His name is pronounced Wagner de Assis. We, here in the United States might say Wagner, but I’m going to call him V-a-g-n-e-r; that’s the way they say it down there.
Welcome Wagner. Thank you so much for being here, we’re really pleased to have you.
Wagner De Assis: Thank you Bob. I’m the one who has to give thanks because it’s such an important moment for us to be with you and talk about this subject with you. It’s such an important thing for us. Thank you. Thank you for having us.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: You’re entirely welcome. I know that our audience is very excited about this movie. I do want to start by saying, or you can tell us a little bit…. This is based on a book by Chico Xavier. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about that?
Wagner De Assis: The book was channeled, psychographic. So Chico is the most important medium in Brazil. He died nine years ago, but he had been working for 90 years, you know, nine decades. He has channeled more than 425 books from poets and historians and every single kind of book you can find, out of his work. The most important book is the book, which is called Nosso Lar, which in straight translation means “our home.” Nosso Lar is the name of the actual city; one of the several million Astral cities that they are above land. They are in our atmosphere.
So the book is the best seller of his channel books. It was published in 1944, which means more than 60 years ago. It was also a desire for us as storytellers to acquire the rights and tell the story on the big screen. Because, you know, the story is so powerful, and we finally got the possibility with the owner of the rights. Now we come to the movie and we’re very happy.
It is indeed the biggest movie ever produced in Brazil, with its budget. It’s among the Top 10 through the box office, of all times, and now it’s coming to America, which is a blessing for us.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: It is. It’s exciting for all of us, because when something is this big and this important, I love that it crosses over borders to reach another audience. I think you guys were really smart. We will tell people this movie is subtitled, because it’s all in Portuguese, correct.
Wagner De Assis: Yes.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Usually I’m not one to gravitate toward subtitled movies. I loved this movie, because each sentence was so important. I found myself, the second time I watched it, because I did watch it twice; I just found myself rewinding to make sure that I really took in all the words. Very, very important information that comes from this.
You know, I was just saying to you Wagner De Assis, and I think the audience should know; I know a lot of people watched the movie Hereafter, about a year ago. Peter Morgan wrote it, Clint Eastwood directed it. It was about life after death as well. That movie, I think, was only meant to raise questions and not answer them, so I know a lot of our audience was a little bit disappointed because of that.
This movie, I think, actually has the intention of answering some of those questions. Do you think that is true?
Wagner De Assis: Yes indeed. The story is told by a spirit, so it all begins from another point of view. So actually, who is the author really? It is a spirit. His name is Andre Luiz, so he’s the main character of the story. He tells the story of what happened to him after he was dead in the mid-thirties.
So all his journey, all his self-transformation, all his learning and everything that he had seen and experienced is put in the book and it came to the screen. That’s why we took a lot of care with all the dialogues and we took a lot of care with the translations as well, because it could be a little tricky if you didn’t go to the very specific meaning of what the characters were saying, you know.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That’s right.
Wagner De Assis: I think it’s a whole paradigm. It’s a new paradigm, you know.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: It is. I did a lot of research online and there were a lot of people who knew the book and watched the movie; not one complaint. Everybody thought it was probably the best translation that they had ever seen from book to movie. How was it you pulled that off because you’re the one who wrote it?
Wagner De Assis: Yes. It was very hard as well, as usual. A lot of suffering and a lot of choices. Of course, there are 50 chapters with so much content and so much information that you do have to make choices. You have to go into the dramatic development of the story.
What we did is we kept working with the main character, which is Andre, and his background is the city; is the spiritual life. So he passes through an area, which is called in the movie Umbrol [sp], which is sort of a purgatorial area. So it had to be there, you know. I couldn’t cut that out from the book, although in the book it is very, very hard. It is much more intense than what we did in the movie. Why? We had to measure what kind of acceptance people would get, you know. It was not easy to find the perfect choices for the screenplay, but we tried to make people be emotional and thinking reflexive, and I think we kind of acquired and reached certain nice results.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: I think you did, in many ways, and one is because – all right, I don’t personally believe in hell. I haven’t seen any evidence of hell or what we would call hell, at least here in the United States.
Wagner De Assis: Me neither.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Okay, but I do believe that – and this is based on people who have had near death experiences, this is based on a lot of mediumship readings that, especially when we first crossover, we get what we expect.
A lot of people that have had near death experiences claim that they die, go into the spirit world, come back to their bodies and back to life. They claim that they had a hellish experience. Then we find out later they kind of expected that; that’s what they expected, that’s where they thought they were going.
I really thought you did that really well. I don’t know if it was your interpretation, and that’s what I’m going to ask you, but the way I saw this movie is this Umbrol purgatory place that the main character goes, Andre, right after he dies was sort of a place that he had created for himself. Did I get that right?
Wagner De Assis: Yes, yes. It is very simple. It’s based on the Law of Action and Reaction. So everything you’ve done, everything you are or you’ve been through your material life, you bring it with you.
He had a lot of flaws as a man. As long as he had a lot of problems as a man, he took it to his afterlife. That happens with a lot of people as well. It’s a dimensional thing, so they leave into that area, into that dimension where they have a synchronicity between them. All those people who had committed and who had been people with that same kind of behavior, or thoughts, or selfish, you know.
This is one of the hardest things to adapt from the book, because the book says that Andre was an unconscionable suicidal. Suicidal, is that okay?
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: We call it suicide, yeah.
Wagner De Assis: He committed suicide unconsciously, so how do you tell this story like that?
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: I know, and I love that part about it. In fact, at first I thought, am I confused here? Am I confused because he’s in this Umbrol place and people are saying, “Get out, get out, you’re a suicide; you caused your own suicide.” Of course, as time goes on I’m realizing it doesn’t look like that was the case. And then I find out it’s this concept of the unconscious suicide.
Tell us a little bit more about that?
Wagner De Assis: Well, I think I need a book.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, well I know.
Wagner De Assis: You know, it’s not only what you do, it’s what you think, what you feel, and how hard you do to yourself, and how harsh you take your life ahead.
So all your actions, all your behavior, it’s kind of moral. It’s a good moral. It’s sort of a Christian moral in a good way; not in a bad way, you know. Which is like you mentioned the Christian moral, people have a lot of second thoughts because of the history, you know. But when you mean idealistic moral, you say, “This is what you’ve done, this is what you’ve done to yourself. You had anger, you were impatient, you didn’t take care well of people. This now belongs to you and you bring this with you to your life, and you have to work it out on you.”
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: I love that because one of the things that you did while he was in this place; he had a lot of flashbacks and it brought him back to these places that he was not obviously proud of. I don’t know if that was to remind him of these or if it’s just when you’re in this place those are the things that you’re thinking of.
You know a lot of people will talk about a life review. You get to the spirit world and you have a life review. It’s sort of what he was going through at this point and feeling quite ashamed and maybe regretful of some of the behavior that he had while he was here on Earth. But then the movie goes forward. I love how he gets out of this place.
First, he sees some people who are asking for help; they are crying for forgiveness really. Some people come and take them away into the light. At first, he’s not ready, then eventually, he starts crying out for help from the deepest depths of his soul, you might say, and when it came from that very honest place is when someone came and brought him to the Astral City. Is that correct?
Wagner De Assis: That’s the key answer for those who are suffering, even in material life, you know. When you ask for forgiveness, when you forgive yourself, when you want to start all over again, there’s always going to be a hand to be given to you. There’s always going to be someone there to be standing to help you out. So there’s no eternal fire, there’s no eternal hell, you know, as there is no eternal paradise. It’s a constant transformation.
So we try to make it as clear as possible that he spent so much time revealing his life that he decided to start all over again somehow. He didn’t really know how at that moment, but he then realized there were people who were praying for him, who were able to be there; they were ready to be there whenever he was going to ask for it. I think this is the most important thing to be understood about this area. It’s not a long term suffering, it’s a suffering that you put to yourself. You present it to yourself as long as you don’t want to start all over again.
I think everything in the movie may be put to our real life now, you know. It’s like you know there is life after life? Yes there is, of course. I call it life after life; did you see it? Did you get it?
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yes, yes I did notice that.
Wagner De Assis: I don’t call if life after death, you know. But you know, the important thing the movie tells; the real underlying subtle idea is that you can change your life now. You can change the paradigm of your life now.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That’s right, I agree. And I loved that, I believe the character who came to take him out of that purgatory was Clarencio [sp], is that correct?
Wagner De Assis: Yeah, it’s the Minister of the city.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That’s correct. So when he came, and just before he left with Andre, he reached out to some of the other people who were there and they backed away; they weren’t ready. Is that sort of what was happening there?
Wagner De Assis: Sure, you got it! It’s perfect like that. You can see a fiancé, you can see a couple attaching to each other, you can see different people, and you can only figure out what kinds of mistakes or what kinds of things they have done in their previous lives, you know. There is always a hand. There is always someone there for you.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Just ask for it. Life after life; I love that. I actually saw that. I noticed in the movie the second time I watched it, and there’s a book out – it’s probably worldwide – but it’s hear in the United States by Dr. Raymond Moody, who wrote about near death experiences, and that was the title of his book back in, I think the seventies, but it was called Life After Life.
I love that term because really, a lot of people who, we’ll say work in this field; a lot of mediums, don’t even use the word ‘death’ anymore. They talk about crossing over or passing on, but they don’t really use the word “die” or “death.”
Wagner De Assis: It’s not that you’re not afraid; that’s not the point, you know; of course, you are afraid. But it’s trying the understand the extension of things and trying to understand how you can change your life now. That’s the idea.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That’s right. Now the story takes place in three locations, right? Describe those three locations.
Wagner De Assis: Well, one is Earth. It is really life that takes place in the thirties, and it’s his family; his wife and kids, the woman who worked at his house as a servant, and so on. Then there are the other dimensions. One is the Umbrol, which we have mentioned before. And the other one is Astral City, which is called Nosso Lar, which means ‘our home.’
The idea is there are several cities above our land, you know; 40, 50 kilomoters. I don’t know in miles how much that would be, but I can think about kilometers. These cities, they are places where they shelter people that are disembodied, desynchronicity .
It’s a place, a new school, a new hospital, or a place for people to gather again and, as the story tells; get ready for another life, which is the idea of life after life after life after life, until it doesn’t need to recreate anymore. Until you get a relative perfection, where you can be able to help, and not be helped anymore, you know.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: I loved when Lisias talked about reincarnation and talked about people reincarnating, and he said that it made him sad. It made him sad to think about the ministry of reincarnation. And the movie showed this; his loved ones, people we might call it a soul group, went back to have another lifetime.
Wagner De Assis: His spiritual family.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, spiritual family. I love that. They would go back to have another lifetime and he would miss them basically.
Wagner De Assis: So it’s the opposite. I mean, separation is always hard for everyone, and it’s risky when you go to be reborn again, to leave again, because you’re going to forget the past, first thing. Because you have to forget the past, otherwise you’re going to be killing your enemies forever; you’re going to have enemies forever. So the mercifulness here is like you forget what happened in your previous life. You have in your soul the planning, everything that is set for your new life and you temporarily forget. When you forget, you can start all over again, but it’s risky, because you can fall.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Right, right, not do what you hoped you would do when you got there.
I loved it. You know it’s so subtle the way you handled these things, these concepts that you just talked about. It’s so subtle the way you did it. What you did was you covered each and every one of them. It’s amazing the levels of teaching that are going on in this movie.
Wagner De Assis: Thank you.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Just level upon level. To be able to do that in a movie is amazing. You really did it well. I love it, and again another reason why I think it’s so important.
Wagner De Assis: Thank you, Bob.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: I do want to say the beauty of the movie is amazing as well. First of all, I watched some of the bonuses afterwards, and I could see, again the Umbrol; just this huge sand ditch that you worked with in…
Wagner De Assis: Yes.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Absolutely humongous, and then the Astral City itself; really, so angelic, so beautiful. It wasn’t cheesy, it was so well done. To me, it was like…
Wagner De Assis: Thank you.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: …you could’ve really been filming in a place like that.
Wagner De Assis: We didn’t really want to bring the idea of paradise, you know. We were struggling to avoid everybody in white and angels flying, because this is not what the book describes. It describes a life as regular as our life that is here in this spiritual world. And I think this is what makes people really surprised when they die, maybe. Oh, nothing changes. Of course, nothing would change.
Why?
I mean there are certain and very specific changes. You don’t have a body any longer. Your feelings are much more on your surface. You can’t hide who you are, and then you have to face yourself really and truly. But you know, we don’t understand, and the book describes it very well. It’s kind of hard to bring to the movie, but the different levels of material, you know; the materials they build houses with. “Oh how do they build the house?” They build the house manipulating, you know, manipulate magnitudes. It’s all in the air, and you can do that. You can do that even here on Earth.
In Brazil, there are several mediums that operate on people. Some are successful, some aren’t, but they do kinds of operations that they do of magnitude. So this is the same stuff for the spiritual life.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: So true. There was a point in the movie where Minister Veneranda is speaking to a group of people in the Astral City. I love it. She says – I wrote it down – people weren’t told that mental creation is almost everything in life. What does that mean to you, Wagner De Assis?
Wagner De Assis: You got it, you know. You can create everything, just what she says. You can use your mind to be in several different places at the same time. Of course, you can’t be with the physical body, but when you don’t have any physical body anymore, you can do that spiritually. It’s like ubiquity. I don’t know that word in English. You can be in different places at the same time. You have an ubiquity property, you know.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Ubiquity, yes, yes, yes.
Wagner De Assis: And this is how you develop a city, this is how you develop a custom, you know, an [21;08.4]. This is what makes it possible for people to live and to be born again, you know, mental creations.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Well, and Lissias comments a couple of times to Andre that things on Earth are very much the way they are there in the Astral City. I remember he was getting on the bus; what was the bus called?
Wagner De Assis: Air Bus.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: The Air Bus.
Wagner De Assis: We used the word in Portuguese, which is called Aerobus, which is the same thing; it’s an air bus, you know. And that was written in 1942, Bob. Think about it. There was no idea about having air buses, you know.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That is amazing, yeah. I mean you’ve got to admit, that’s interesting because if you think back to when that was written, I mean some of the scenes like the air bus kind of reminded me a little bit of Disney World.
Wagner De Assis: Yep. Why wouldn’t have Walt Disney been inspired?
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That’s what I’m wondering, exactly.
Wagner De Assis: Or why wouldn’t George Lucas be inspired when he created the hologram communication, you know what I mean? Why wouldn’t they use computers in the thirties in the spiritual cities, when computers were created 20, 40 years ago?
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Right, and that’s it. And that goes back to – just to make sure that our audience gets this. So Chico Xavier, he’s a medium around that time, well for 90 years, but around that time in the forties is when he wrote this particular book. The idea is, if people didn’t understand it, that he is channeling books from the spirit world, specifically through his spirit guide, Emmanuel, right?
Wagner De Assis: Not really. Emmanuel was only one of the authors.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Oh, okay.
Wagner De Assis: Emmanuel was the one who was coordinating the spiritual side of the job, if I say so.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Is it the same Emmanuel that was in – it is, okay. He’s the Minister of Communications?
Wagner De Assis: He’s kind of working as the Minister of Communication, you know. He was working in the communication area. I didn’t want to really give him a title, as we don’t need it. Even in the book, you don’t need titles. They use titles so that people can understand it better, but they are the coordinators of the communication part. So I decided to put Emmanuel there so we can make a link to the real like, to the real chakra, you know.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Oh, I like that. So what Chico Xavier is doing is he’s communicating with these people in spirit now directly, in whatever the book might be about. In this particular case, he’s communicating with Andre Luis, about his lifetime, and that’s what this story is about.
Wagner De Assis: So Andre wrote 16 books in a row, after Nosso Lar. He just decided to be like a journalist, you know. He was a doctor previously, so he decided to write. He wrote a book called The Messengers, right after Nosso Lar, which means the work of people who work as guardian angels, the work of the people who work as mentors, you know.
It is something very different from what people realize of what angels do. Angels do work a lot, as they say. Angels do help us a lot, and they cannot interfere in our lives. So then he went on to describe that in 16 different books. Most of them are in English already, I’m pretty sure. Our Home is in English, The Messenger is in English. There’s another book called Workers of the Eternal Life. I mean, you can find is easily on…
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: On Amazon.
Wagner De Assis: On Amazon or there is International Spiritual Printers; they are in America already. You can find them on the internet. It’s called Adjusay [sp]. I think you can maybe afterwards find the link for them.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, I will.
Wagner De Assis: All these books are available now in America.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That’s beautiful.
Wagner De Assis: You know Bob, there’s something there that really strikes me, just as one thing. America is such an impressive country in that way. I’ve been in America a lot of times; that’s where I think I had an American previous incarnation, you know, because I really feel comfortable there, I feel like I’m home, you know. It is impressive because there are so many mediumships, there is so much spirituality in America, but it is so squeezed by the regular sense of being of America as consumers, as citizens, as being in America in the world.
I see the need for these kinds of talks, the need for these kinds of answers. And how moral and ethics have to be together with all this discovering. Because it’s not only about, you found out there is a spirit. Did you see a spirit already? What if you see it, it doesn’t change your life because you’re not going to change your heart and your soul. And this is what I wanted to do when I tried to acquire the book.
I want to tell this story to the Brazilian audience, and who knows if God helps to the foreign audience, because this is something that’s so true everywhere. When I read about America in the 19th Century. When I read about Fox Sisters and Andrew Jackson Davis, I realize this is a country so powerful. This is a country that needs so much about this love, merciful love, merciful ethics and moral behaviors. And then the rest is going to come. The seeds are there, they just have be grown better again. Am I clear?
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Perfectly clear, perfectly clear. It makes complete sense. And a really important message in this movie, and it sounds like in all these books; really important messages for anyone to learn, even the mediums – you know we have our website where now we have about 700 mediums on that website.
I will tell you that in my first few years, I’ve been investing the field – it will be 13 years in January, and when I first started to get to know a lot of mediums, I recognized that they were not all spiritual people. Kind of as you say, just because they can communicate with a spirit, doesn’t mean that they necessarily have a lot of integrity, follow ethics, or anything like that.
Wagner De Assis: Think about that. Chico never get a single penny for all the books he has channeled. He has donated all the books rights, and he was living by his work. He was living as public worker, working for the State in a very small job. People would wonder, “Why do you do that Chico,” and he would say, “The books don’t belong to me, why would I charge for them? I just borrow my body, my hands to the spirits; it’s their jobs. So they don’t need money. So we have to give money to donation, to charity with the money,” that’s what he does.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Is that what he does with it?
Wagner De Assis: Yes.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Oh my goodness!
You know, one of the subjects that you cover in there; so here’s this Andre Luis, he’s a doctor and he lived well. He now goes to the Astral City and still sees himself as a doctor, still sees himself as maybe one of the elite. It’s very interesting the way – I’m sure the book did it, the way you did it in the movie is sort of to see him recognize that these things of the earthly life. Someone says, “Oh you people and your earthly diplomas,” says that to him at one point.
Wagner De Assis: The nurse, yeah.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: They’re meaningless. They’re meaningless things, and he ends up realizing that it’s just as important for him to sweep the floor as it is for him to help heal people.
Wagner De Assis: The importance of small things, right. It’s not what you’re really doing, it’s why you’re doing this, you know.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That’s right.
Wagner De Assis: There’s a lot of philosophy going on in the movie. It’s nice because people like to talk about it, and I’ve been receiving a lot of questions, which is really cool. Everyone wants to make a movie that makes people feel and think at the same time.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That’s right. That’s right. I heard that you had read this book in the eighties. At what point had you decided that you wanted to make the movie?
Wagner De Assis: On the first ten years.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Really?
Wagner De Assis: I had finished one feature film, it was 2004 and I thought to myself, you know we now have better resources for computer graphics. They’re not so expensive as when Jurassic Park was done. We now have change of times; we’re beginning a new century and maybe, what if we could tell the story now. I’ve given this book to several people in the last 20 years, and I know how powerful this story is. It’s very powerful. It brings a new paradigm of life. You really can start to think of changing your life for the better, if you really understand what’s going on, so why not? Then it was 2005, when we kind of started to do this.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: When you started to pull it together. Now I found it really interesting to learn that the actors actually prepared for this movie for five months before you even started filming. Why was it and what were some of the things they were doing?
Wagner De Assis: They had to experiment the idea of the spiritual world within us. They were watching workshops, they were listening to speeches, they were reading books. We had been discussing their questions. Why you have to put your hands? What comes out of your hands when you’re trying to heal people? What if I don’t want to go to Astral City, do I go to another place? I mean it would be any sort of – what could be a dumb question – but in fact, they weren’t dumb at all, they were very important questions, because this is what people are going to think when they get in touch with this kind of story, you know.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah.
Wagner De Assis: And the main actor, Andre, which is Renato Prieto, he had to lose about 20 kilos, which I don’t know how much in pounds that is. But we were going to start shooting from the Umbrol and I wanted him like a castaway, so I made him lose 18 kilograms within three months, which was really hard for him. I had him growing a beard, growing hair. I had him going through an experimental kind of work, you know and it helped him a lot. Then he went back to makeup, to the regular movie makeup thing.
I think I needed that because it had to be intense and it needed to have a certain way of acting. It was not overacting or low acting; it had to be very specific. Like those people, they live in an eternal way. They’re not going to die anymore, so they lost fear of death. Think about it.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah. The actors, I thought, were brilliantly cast and I thought they did a brilliant job.
Wagner De Assis: Thank you.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: I absolutely loved it.
Wagner De Assis: Thank you.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Even the main character, Andre, I didn’t feel like he overdid it, he didn’t under-do it, I just thought he was just right. Lissias, I don’t know he sort of stole the show a little bit. There’s something about his energy as well. He did a great job. I didn’t find anybody where I was thinking, oh what happened there.
Wagner De Assis: You know Bob, a lot of actors and a lot of artists from the movie, some of them don’t even believe in God.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Oh really! Well this must have been an interesting five months for then preparing.
Wagner De Assis: Amazing, amazing because somehow, it is not that I wanted them to change you know. You don’t make anyone change. But somehow, you start to see how they didn’t want to think about it. It isn’t something people do with their regular lives. You don’t really talk about, “Oh what about the spiritual life?” And this is something we do a lot in Brazil. We do a lot in the spiritual centers, we do a lot in the soap operas, and now the movies are doing that as well.
As Clint Eastwood, in his movie, Clint was trying to put questions, yes, but like other movies were also trying to put questions and nobody was there to give answers. What I tried to do is like give a little bit of answers. They are not the final answers, they are not the only answers, but they are trying to raise more things to give more elements, more tools for people to talk about it.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Well I love that, and I love that you put them through that. I know that actors prepare and stuff for movies, but in this way, it’s like you put them through a program. I’ve never seen anything like that before. Some of them – or I even heard like a pretty good percentage of them are part of the spirituals community. Is that true?
Wagner De Assis: Andre and Renato, the main character; he does attend a spiritual center. He does understand, and this is one of the reasons why I’ve chosen him; he really does understand better what it is to be spirit-like, to be in the spiritual world, or to deal with the spiritual reality, which kind of helped him a little bit, although it was his first movie.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Was it really?
Wagner De Assis: Yes.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Oh my goodness!
Wagner De Assis: That was challenging and it made everybody scared a lot. I think I was the only one that really put trust in him. People don’t really put everything together, but when you’re directing, you’re putting all the pieces together and it make sense, you know.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Well, between the two of you, you did a great job. I love him. I thought he did a wonderful job. Hopefully, he’ll go on to more himself, as well.
Wagner De Assis: Thank you.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: In Brazil, is it a big spirituals community? Why was this movie so popular? Two million people saw it in the first weekend, that’s amazing.
Wagner De Assis: In the first week, yeah.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Why so popular? A very spiritual group down there, right.
Wagner De Assis: Yes, it is. Indeed, it’s a very spiritualized country, in a sense. There are a Catholics, a lot of Protestants, but a lot of spiritualistics. I think the Catholics and Protestants have a very good sense of the spirituality, because a lot of people went to the movie just for curiosity. They were just wondering. Some people went for the artistic side, which was cool as well. But most of them went to see how is life in the afterlife. How life is when you die.
And I was kind of having fun sometimes because I would say, “Hey guys, it’s not a documentary okay. Those people are actors and those are stages,” because it kind of provokes so much reflection and so many discussions about that. Which makes me think that it is common sense, you know wondering about it, and I think it’s everywhere in the world. This is why it makes me really happy to have the movie in America now and the whole crew understood that.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: They did.
Wagner De Assis: Not only the cast, but our directors, the producers, and Yuli, the DOP. So everybody in the end, one day before the principal photography started, I thought to myself, is everybody telling the same story? Are we on the same track, because it is so easy to be off track, and the answer was positive, thankfully.
Wagner De Assis: It really was. And you could even tell that, like I said, in the bonus clips that they show at the end, sort of the behind the scenes stuff. People, you could tell that people were in love with the movie, they were in love with the story, they were having a great time. Even the Director of Photography, Yuli, said that he had the most fun on that set than any other set he had been on.
Amazing people that you had as part of your movie. I would just mention here, Yuli Steiger that we were just talking about, Director of Photography. He was in Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow, and Austin Powers. Phillip Glass, who wrote all the music; the composer was amazing. He wrote for The Hours, The Illusionists, The Truman Show. And you had this great company from Canada, right, Intelligent…
Wagner De Assis: Intelligent Creatures.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Intelligent Creatures. They did Watchman, The Found, and Babble, and they did a lot of digital work for you.
Wagner De Assis: They did all the digital work for us. They are a small house. They used to work with Hollywood and independent producers as well, so they really understood what we needed and what we could do. Because the limit for imagination when you’re doing movies like this is money, you know. So we had to put all that we could in the budget we had, you know.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That’s right.
Wagner De Assis: I have to mention that also that Jaffe Briggs [sp], the producer in Brazil, which is a young producer, a very talented one, Lia Hanger [sp], which is our director; she’s an architect. She was like having fun every single day of the work because she was really creating a city, you know.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yes.
Wagner De Assis: And we had all the models you can imagine. You could see that behind the scenes, right.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: You could, yeah.
Wagner De Assis: You had several models, and she was like, “Let’s build a pool like that. Let’s build a wall like that on the street.” She was honored with the prize at the Brazilian Film Fest in Miami with Best Art Direction…
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Oh my goodness!
Wagner De Assis: …which was very happy for us. We were also honored with the Best Art Visual Effects at the Brazilian Cinema Academy, last year, which makes us happy.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: It does. Of course.
Wagner De Assis: He’s a genius, man. Phillip Glass is a genius. He read the story and he said, “You know I can do that.” Simple as that.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Really, that easy.
Wagner De Assis: Yeah.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: My goodness! Well, obviously they had a lot of faith in you as well. There’s no question in my mind.
I do have to mention that one scene with the wall, was so well done. Everything about it. A very emotional scene in there, in the middle of the movie where during World War II, you have a lot of people coming to the Astral City. A very emotional scene; people should get ready for that.
Just amazing! The wall when it comes back together, it closes after they walk into the Astral City, and you just see all the stones sort of moving closer together. It just looks so real, is all I can tell you. It didn’t look like there was anybody that didn’t know what they were doing. People knew exactly what was going on. You hired some real professionals in it and it showed in the ultimate result of this movie.
Any last things you want to say – we’re running out of time – about this movie?
Wagner De Assis: I’m really happy the movie is getting to America. I always say, “Give this story a chance, you know Bob. I always say that. It helps if you say, “It is based on the channel book,” where people can say, “Oh I don’t get it.” You can say, “It’s about life after life.” “Oh I don’t believe it.” Okay, but just give it a chance. Get the DVD. See it alone in your house and play it and let it flow and then see what happens.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Well that’s what I love about the fact that here in the United States we can get it on DVD. You can get it on ITunes. They can download it on ITunes, after December 6. Amazon.com will be selling it. Strand Releasing – I’m going to show you that name right here. Strandreleasing.com, they’re website is also going to be selling it.
The great thing about the DVD for me was that I could stop it. These are subtitles. I don’t want to miss anything myself, so I was able to sort of rewind, go back and look. The other thing is, you can watch it once and you catch all the dialogue, the words. You can watch it a second time just to see the beauty of the artistry that is within this movie; absolutely beautiful. Even the costumes, the costume designers and everything. I can go on and on about it. Obviously, people are going to know I love this movie.
Wagner De Assis: And if whoever sees it, if they want to give feedback for us, we have Facebook, the website, and Twitter. We have everything online where we can get feedback, if they want. We are there.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: I will put all those links below this video. Here’s another copy. This will be what the DVD looks like, and I’m actually going to put a link to the trailer below this video as well, so people can watch that.
Wagner De Assis: Thank you Bob. Thank you.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Wagner De Assis, thank you so much for being here. I know that our audience is going to be excited to see it. They were excited to get sort of some behind the scenes information from you. It’s a great honor so thanks for coming.
I want to let everybody know you’re in Brazil, I’m in New England, so we’ve got quite a bit of distance between us.
Wagner De Assis: Yes, thank you very much. It’s a pleasure. I’ll be here whenever you need, and let’s hope the better for this movie. This movie has already been at the Shanghai Film Festival, in New Zealand, in Japan, in Australia, and in South Africa and other countries in Africa. It’s also going to be in all Latin America, so I think now it’s time for America to wake up, you know.
A movie doesn’t change society, of course, but I hope this movie helps peoples’ heart, you know. I hope this movie shakes people you know. Hey wake up, it’s time for a better like, it’s time for a better world, you know.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: I agree with you. I love when you said it’s not meant to be literal. Let people make their own interpretations. But it gives you something to start with, to go on and to start conversations and start your own brain thinking about this. To me that’s what it’s all about, you know.
Wagner De Assis: Thank you Bob, thank you very much.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Best of luck with you.
Wagner De Assis: Congratulations for your search. You’re going to get there. You’re always going to get there.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Thank you.
Wagner De Assis: Searching is more important than finding results, so congratulations for that.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Well thank you very much. Bye now.
Wagner De Assis: Bye-bye Bob.
Afterlife TV is presented by Afterlife Investigator & Psychic Medium Researcher Bob Olson, who is the author of Answers about the Afterlife: A Private Investigator’s 15-Year Research Unlocks the Mysteries of Life after Death.
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