Interview with Eduardo Braun Costa on his Film, The Liars
by Katie Kern
by Katie Kern
Image courtesy of Eduardo Braun Costa.
Eduardo Braun Costa's 19-minute debut follows two boys trying to sneak into a film they're too young to see. The film premiered at Sundance in January, where it earned him a Best Short Film nomination and his two leads the Special Jury Award for Acting.
Basta talks to him about the jump to narrative, the cinematic potential of malls, and the influence of Peter Farrelly films.
KATIE: Short films are such a specific and underappreciated medium. Watching The Liars, though, I kept thinking “this story is perfectly suited for it;” it's one small moment in a day that becomes cinematic. Did you ever see this as a full-length feature, or did the short form feel right from the beginning?
EDUARDO: I’ve always thought about The Liars as a short film. What you point out about having a small event at the center of the story was key for me to understand how to make it work. While writing the script, I read many short stories, trying to better understand how to structure a narrative around a single happening. Every scene, every image, needs to amplify the others—like a house of mirrors. Everything needs to reverberate what was already there.
K: In the movie, the children are trying to watch Me, Myself & Irene. Peter Farrelly films really defined early 2000s raunchy comedy, but this feature feels like one of his more overlooked films. What made you put it at the center of the plot? Did you go through other options?
E: I wanted the film to be representative of that time period—its culture and values—almost as a reflection of everything that is going wrong in their world. I started looking at films that were playing during those years, and Me, Myself & Irene felt perfect. It condenses many of the ideas around sexuality and fractured masculinity that the short film explores.
The Liars, image courtesy of the Sundance Institute & Eduardo Bruan Costa.
K: Noah Roja and Filippo Carrozza both won the Special Jury Award for Acting at Sundance. What was your process working with them? How do you direct child actors toward performances that feel lived-in and natural?
E: I think the most important part of the process was the casting. We were very patient, until we found this duo. And, actually, Noah, the protagonist, had never done any kind of acting before. From there, we focused on rehearsals. Together with Sofía Brihet, our acting coach, we created different games and exercises to help them access the emotional states we were trying to portray, and to learn how to work from them.
I believe the best way to direct child actors is to create simple and playful situations they can inhabit, without needing to explain too much. Most of the scenes in the film could be framed as games: stealing candy without getting noticed, stopping strangers on the street. Spying on your mother. It’s about giving them something they can genuinely experience, rather than something they have to perform.
K: The shots of the boys wandering through the mall are some of my favorites in the film. There's just something about a mall (especially a fading one) that’s naturally cinematic. What was your visual approach to the mall setting? Is there a film that inspired how you use space in the project?
E: It’s also one of my favorite parts of the film. In fact, that was the image that triggered the story. A kid wandering through a mall looking for a father. Malls used to be a central space for socialization, especially during adolescence and preadolescence. In my country, the early 2000’s were marked by a profound economic and social crisis that led to job losses, broken families, emigration, violence, and all kinds of very specific emotional wounds. Using a fading mall as the setting was a way of condensing all these ideas of social disintegration.
Films like Play by Ruben Östlund and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance by Michael Haneke were important references. I find interesting how both use public spaces not just as backgrounds, but as emotional and social landscapes. The space itself becomes part of the storytelling.
K: There's this fascinating moment in the project when the stranger you'd expect to be an adult authority figure starts acting like a child himself, getting into it with the mall security guards while the kids run away from him. It feels like the film is saying that some men never grow past that immaturity. Was that something you were deliberately exploring, or did it find its way into the script in naturally?
E: I was interested in portraying masculinity at its most fragile. That character comes from the idea of a broken masculine figure—a man who cannot stop being a son in order to become a father. It was an exploration of that broken quality: the inability to assimilate the symbolic figure of the father, and what that means in terms of limits, authority, and responsibility. It was also a way of exploring the relationship between emotional wounds and the way they shape social behavior.
The Liars, poster courtesy of Bruan Costa.
K: The film does a really wonderful job of capturing the feeling of wandering through an adult world that wasn't built for you. How did you protect that quality on set?
E: All the scenes where the boys wander through the mall and the streets were shot in real locations, among ordinary people who had no idea we were filming. I think that gave the set a very alive and unpredictable energy, which the kids could feel and naturally responded to. That feeling ultimately translates to the screen.
I also believe the strong point of view of the film, and the way the camera frames that perspective, is essential in conveying a distance between the protagonists’ world and the adult world. It allows us to feel their loneliness, and how unseen and unprotected they are.
K: What was it like making your first narrative short? Is the film close to what you originally imagined? In what ways did it become something different in the process?
E: I think making a film is, in many ways, about losing the “idea” of the film and gaining something real. It’s painful to come to terms with that. But once you do, the process of discovering the real film begins, and it’s beautiful.
K: I'm a big Yves Tumor fan, so I have to ask: what made you choose Limerence to play over the credit scene?
E: It’s a very short and fleeting final moment. But it’s the only time in the film where, I think, we’re able to truly penetrate the character’s armor and feel his softness, his warmth, his fear, his pain. But we also feel a sense that something has already been lost, that it may be too late. There’s a quiet nostalgia in it. It felt like the ultimate emotional truth of the film.
I love the song, but it also resonates deeply with those final frames. Limerence has this suspended and fragile quality, a feeling of transitional awareness—of a luminous present that is slowly and constantly slipping away. It somehow completes and carries those feelings through the final moments of the film in the darkness of the movie theater.
The Basta team can’t wait to see Eduardo’s future projects. Learn more about The Liars on the Sundance website.