Biography for
Walter Salles More at IMDbPro »

Date of Birth

12 April 1956, Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Birth Name

Walther Moreira Salles Jr.

Nickname

Waltinho

Spouse

Maria Klabin

(? - present) 1 child

Trivia

Brother of João Moreira Salles, Pedro Moreira Salles (b. 1959) and half-brother of Fernando Moreira Salles (b. 1946) from his father first marriage to Hélène Marie Blanche Tourtois.

In 2003, was voted by UK newspaper, The Guardian, one of the 40 Best Directors in the World. (#23)

Speaks Portuguese, Spanish, English and French fluently.

Born to Walther Moreira Salles, a diplomat and banker, and his wife Elisa Margarida Gonçalves, he has two brothers, Pedro and Joao, and a half-brother, Fernando Roberto, from his father's first marriage.

Uses a Macintosh laptop.

Member of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 2002.

Member of the jury at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2000.

His son Vicente was born in July 2006.

After studying economics at the Pontificia Universidad Católica in Rio de Janeiro, he went to the University of California, where he graduated with a degree in audiovisual communication.

Is an avid racing fan and competes in the Brazilian GT3 championship.

One of 105 people invited to join AMPAS in 2008.

Although considers car racing just a hobby, he has been a race car pilot for 30 years. Competed as a kart pilot (winning twice Rio de Janeiro's championship) and Stock Car Brasil. In 2008, came back to professional competitions running, alongside pilot Xande Negrão, in the GT3 Brasil car race.

As a big fan of car racing, his idol is the former Indy and Formula 1 champion, Emerson Fittipaldi.

Son of Walther Moreira Salles (1912-2001) and Elisa Margarida Gonçalves (1929-1988).

Protested against the arrest of Jafar Panahi, detained on 1 March 2010. "Jafar Panahi is a uniquely sensitive artist. As a Brazilian filmmaker, I came to admire and to learn from the memorable films that he has directed, such as 'The White Balloon' and 'The Circle'. The fact that such an important artist cannot express himself freely and is now under arrest in his own country is not only an act of violence against Jafar Panahi and his family, but also against all who admire his work and support freedom of expression throughout the world".

Listed by Forbes as #440 richest person in the world and #14 in Brazil, with a net worth of $2.6 B as of March 2011.

Personal Quotes

I don't think we can say what the Latin American identity is, but I think we can try to look for it, and look for the reverberations from it.

I'm completely uninterested in what you may call a career in film-making. I'm much more interested in living specific experiences in films.

You have to be careful not to open all the windows and be totally free and unprepared, but you have to try to capture reality as it happens. You see that very much in a refined and yet very simple form in [Abbas] Kiarostami's films, and I'm so impressed by the immediacy and the truth that you find in his films that it just transports you to a completely different level, as if nothing is truly staged.

I come from a country and also a continent whose identity is in the making. We're a very young culture, and I think that things are not yet crystallised. So the films that are made in our latitudes, I think, carry that sense of urgency. It's as if the people that you meet on the street and the stories that they bring can influence you directly.

I think I turned to documentary film-making very early on as a way to know a little bit more about my country and my roots. My father was a diplomat for part of his life and I jumped from country to country and culture to culture. So when I was very young, I longed for Brazil. I really wanted to know the heart of it much better than I did.