Watch ‘The Secret Agent’ Director Kleber Mendonça Filho Tell Guillermo del Toro the Story Behind the Film’s Hairy Leg

There’s a tangle of peculiar storylines on the periphery of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s “The Secret Agent,” but maybe none as strange as the disembodied hairy leg that pops up throughout, eventually coming to life to stalk the streets of Recife. It’s an odd, fantastical moment in what’s otherwise a very grounded film, but for Mendonça, it’s also deeply connected to his own childhood.

Explaining the origins of the leg in a new featurette that IndieWire exclusively premieres, Mendonça said he remembered reading stories about hairy, disembodied legs while growing up in fascist Brazil during the 1970s. Years later, he would discover that these stories were an urban legend created by a journalist to talk about police brutality and homophobia.

“When you look back to the newspapers in the archives, you can find the original articles about the hairy leg, and they were written with a straight face,…