January 22, 2003

BAY GUARDIAN: The prevalence of guns was shocking in City of God.

Fernando Meirelles: In the middle to late 1970s, armylike weapons were introduced into Brazil's drug trade. In the beginning of City of God, which takes place in the 1960s, all you see are small-caliber guns. It was only when more money came into the trade when the arms dealers started to show up. Now there's an arms dealer in every favela in Brazil. These people are very interesting because they perpetuate drug wars by supplying arms to both sides.

BG: Many American films that have similar themes tend to glamorize the violence.

FM: I tried to do the opposite. I avoided the spectacle of violence as much as possible. The violence is understated. In City of God's climax, where a full-blown drug war begins, I avoided turning shocking scenes into gratuitous violence. For example, the scene where a rape takes place could have been sensationalized ... but the viewer never sees it; they just know it has happened. They hear it, but they don't see it. Whenever I could, I tried to hide the violence, which is the opposite of Hollywood's approach.

BG: One of the most exciting things about City of God is how real the performances are. How were you able to elicit these from children [some as young as five years old, with no previous acting experience]?

FM: We didn't want to teach them to be professional actors. Instead [codirector] Kátia Lund and I developed a method to work with amateurs. We interviewed 2000-plus kids from City of God [a Rio de Janeiro housing project] and selected 200. For the next six months we rehearsed improvisational technique every day for two hours. After those six months we selected 106 kids to be in the cast and started to rehearse the film. I explained the situations in scenes and tried to get them to arrive at the lines. The process demanded a lot of patience, because it would have been easier to just tell them what to do. I held back, let the kids do it their way, and that is why the film has such spontaneity.

BG: Viewers are made to feel that they are right there in the favela....

FM: It was the product of enormous patience to get the kids to arrive at what we wanted. Only 30 percent of the script made it to the screen; the rest came from the rehearsals and the [words of the] kids themselves. That's why I chose to work with kids from City of God, because I knew that they would bring in all this material that we couldn't have come up with. They understand the movie a lot more than I do. So I let them run with it.

BG: Were any of these kids dealing?

FM: Some were dealers ... our condition for being in the movie was that they had to stop dealing. Even those who were not dealers had experience with it – through friends, cousins – because it is so pervasive in the community.

BG: You're from middle-class São Paulo. How was it going into a favela in Rio to shoot the film? Was there any stigma?

FM: It radically changed my life. Especially because I've been a director in the Brazilian advertising world for 10 years. I had to completely change my image from suits to shorts and flip-flops. I was immersed in a completely different reality. It was a learning experience that I was open to. Before we began our workshops, we made an agreement with the neighborhood committee of City of God that we would hire as many locals for the film as possible.

BG: What is it like with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva [Brazil's first socialist president] in power? How did you view the fact that he highlighted drug trafficking throughout his campaign?

FM: Lula asked to view City of God before it was released in Brazil; after that he started to mention the film in his speeches. In December, Lula was named "Man of the Year" in Istoé magazine [similar to Time or Newsweek], while I was named Istoé's "Man of the Year in Culture." At the ceremony Lula came up to me and joked that I should put him on my payroll for doing so much P.R. for City of God. He said that the film changed his vision for public safety in Brazil. The traditional way of increasing public safety is by increasing a police presence, but in the film you realize that the problem is about children. Lula realized that you shouldn't use police against a 14-year-old gang lord because other kids will spring up in his place.

BG: Color was very important in evoking emotion throughout City of God. How did you achieve the look of the film?

FM: We shot in 16 and 35mm and transferred to digital video to utilize digital postproduction techniques. This is called telecine transfer, and it enabled us to manipulate color. There are other effects that the viewer will see and many that the viewer won't realize are there. For example, many backgrounds are collages of images from locations within City of God.

BG: Did you have a foreign audience in mind while making the film?

FM: No, I made it for the Brazilian middle class so they would see a different side of Brazil. I thought it might be brought to some art houses abroad. I didn't think I had an international market. England was the only place the film was released outside of Brazil, and it exploded there.

BG: It's been said that Brazilian audiences don't like to watch themselves, i.e., they prefer to watch Hollywood blockbusters over Brazilian films. But four million Brazilians have seen City of God, beating out recent big-budget imports. How do you explain the domestic success of City of God?

FM: City of God inadvertently changed that perception. We broke all the rules ... there are no well-known actors, no sex, and the story is violent. I'm curious to see how the film will be received in the U.S. I really don't know what else to expect from this film; it has completely surprised me.