Orson Wells once said that “raising money is my profession, making movies is my hobby” and sadly he spoke the truth. Whenever I feel frustrated by the amount of time it takes to get a movie made, and bemoan how many seemingly inactive years a filmmaker piles up, I re-examine the case of the great Portugese filmmaker Manoel De Oliveira. Born in 1908, Oliveira made his first film in his twenties and on and off over the next thirty years produced a few obscure documentaries (he ran a vineyard and came from a well-off family). In other words he probably appeared to be nothing more than a talented dilettante, somebody unlikely to leave much of an impression upon cinema history. And then, at the age of 63, he found the financing that apparently had been eluding him for years and directed his second feature narrative film, Past and Present, a social satire that both set the standard for his film career afterwards and gained him recognition in the global film community.  After this he directed twenty-eight more features and a number of shorts and documentaries. He lived to be 106 years old, directing his final film ‘Gabo and the Shadow’ in 2012 at the age of 103. Now, the most remarkable part of this story isn’t, for me, the ability to restart the creative engine at an age when most people are hanging it up…but how he kept up with the physical demands of directing a movie. For directing is a wearying profession–exhausting both mentally and physically. But Oliveira seems to have found the secret of a cinematic fountain of youth and he demonstrates it in the above clip. It’s a superb mimicry of Charlie Chaplin dancing and it was shot when Oliveira was 99 years old. After spending this morning deep-diving this extraordinary man’s acheivements, I’m freshly determined to stay the course and keep up the vexing process of putting together movies. De Oliveira certainly was a survivor and not without his own darkly humorous take on life. He once said that he enjoyed being a Catholic because “it’s a religion that permits sin”. (Never thought of it that way…have you?) And in an interview when promoting his last movie, he said somewhat ruefully that while he was proud of his work “most people know me for my age, not for my movies.” To which I say a resounding: so what? He did what he wanted and, once he found his path, never stopped. Even if he got a late start…