The Power of One
"I heard of Marcelo da Luca from a TED talk. When I found out, that he was a flight attendant that had taught himself how to build a solar powered car, I just had to do a piece on him. So my producer Shasha, called him to see if we could come into his life for a day."
"Well that one day turned out to be the hottest day ever in the history of Toronto. And there we were, about to spend 5 hours in this tiny cramped garage in his backyard. Fortunately for Marcelo, he was OK with the humidity having grown up in San Palo in Brazil. In fact, that was why he wanted to do a solar car in the first place. As he grew up, San Palo became one of the most polluted cities in the world thanks to economic progress."
"As a presenter, Marcelo was a natural. The only problem is the way he presents, tends to be in sound bites. So the hardest thing was really getting him to expose more of himself and to tell the story rather than narrating the film."
"So here we are in this amazingly small garage full of old prototype seats, body mouldings and other bits and pieces. And then you see the car! At first it didn’t look like much. Its sort of like a sunflower seed split in half, so when the top goes up, there are all these different mechanisms inside. It really doesn’t look like much, until you put the top down. And then wow, it's really very impressive and beautiful. It's such an incredibly well designed and elegant piece of technology."
"I was obviously impressed by the car. It's such a marvel of engineering and he's not even an engineer, he's a flight attendant! It took him more than 5 years to build it, whereas most engineers can take twenty to do the same thing. He doesn’t even have a degree in engineering. But then again, you don’t need to have a degree to do things you love."
"My piece on Marcelo was only to be 3 mins, so I had to be very disciplined in what I could shoot. My problem is that everything I see, I want to shoot! So when I went inside his house I naturally wanted to shoot everything. But unfortunately, we couldn’t fit this in the film. But that's another story!"
"Marcelo is a bachelor, so there were things inside the house you wouldn’t normally expect. For example, he has this hammock inside his living room and recycled stuff as art pieces. All very eclectic really. And then there's his study, which was full of old maps and schematics. He just lives and breathes what he feels and believes in. I really gravitated towards that, and really appreciated that about him. I was obviously impressed by Marcelo as most flight attendants you meet, don't have a hand built solar car in their garage!"
