The 2002 Meirelles film City of God was to many film-lovers a breath of fresh air. It approached violence with luster in a completely non-Tarantino way—that is to say, it showed violence for what it caused, without kitsch or over-sentimentalizing its effects. The film was possibly the year’s most visually vibrant, and, maybe most importantly, it introduced the world to Fernando Meirelles, a director who most closely resembles your next-door neighbor but whose films pack the wallop of political importance and riveting excitement.
On August 31, Meirelles’ sophomore offering, The Constant Gardener, opened in theaters nationwide. Last week in San Francisco, recess film editor Brian McGinn caught up with Meirelles and his film’s elegant star, Rachel Weisz.
recess: What attracted you to The Constant Gardener?
Fernando Meirelles: It was really talking about all those themes: talking about the pharmaceutical industry, talking about how corporations and governments work together nowadays. They decide our lives. So there’s a lot of talking about Africa, which has been forgotten, and how we consider them second-class people. It was also a beautiful love story, which really interested me-this guy who really understands his wife after she dies. It’s a different way of telling a love story. I read it ,and I loved it.
r: One on the things that really struck me about The Constant Gardener was the photography. It really seemed to have the feel of a documentary, especially in the Kibera sections….
FM: Actually the idea [behind] shooting the market and Kibera like a documentary was [so we would] be able to use the place without interfering with the place… The actors, like Rachel, were just walking in Kibera and the camera would follow [them] with a wireless microphone, and nobody really knew that we were shooting a film… Doing this, you can show the place how it is, you can show the real light, and for some reason—I don’t know why—but when you watch it, you feel it is real. I mean you can produce, you can bring the best extras, but for some reason it’s not the same. You really feel that this [way] is real, and that’s what I wanted.
r: It seems like your style is to work quickly, with few takes and kind of an improvisational style.
FM: Yeah. Well, not always. Sometimes, there are some scenes that are so well written that you really can’t change [them]. For instance, there’s a… conversation in the restaurant. I mean I really tried, I really wanted to make it shorter, and I tried hard to cut a line or cut three words, but it was really perfect. You can’t change anything [in that situation]…. But [then] there are some other scenes that are all about mood. What we have to establish is energy between Tessa and Justin, so for those scenes, I even asked [the actors] to improvise a bit, to bring new lines, to try to keep it fresh and real because the important thing was really the mood, more than what they were saying. In those cases they would just perform the whole scene from the top to the end without breaking or anything, and we would shoot like a documentary.
Rachel Weisz: I think the film has, as you said, very classical scenes shot classically, with reverses and wides and the more expected film language, and then there were the other scenes which were the intimate scenes between myself and Justin, Ralph’s character, and they weren’t so plot-based. It was just about feeling natural and raw and like a real couple. So in those scenes we could stray a little from the written word and play. I like to do lots of takes though.
FM: This is a problem.
RW: [laughing] I drove him nuts.
FM: Not only her. Her and Ralph [Fiennes]. Shooting the film was easy—the hard part was to convince them that it was very good, that it was an excellent take, that we don’t need anything else. “It’s done, let’s move on!”
RW: [mimicking] “But, just one more, just one more!”
r: Rachel, is it that you want to alter one little bit of it and try to give Fernando a number of different options when he goes to edit?
RW: It’s just a feeling that there’s something, that there’s some other way of doing it. It’s not an intellectual “I’m going to do A, B and C” [thing], it’s just kind of a feeling: “Oh well, there was one moment in it where [I] didn’t feel it was right.” It’s just instinct, it’s not a very logical thing.
FM: Yeah, this is a line I heard a lot, especially from Ralph: “You know when I was saying this line I felt something here that I want to explore, this, this—-maybe [we could] just do it again to see what I felt.
RW: Yeah, yeah.
r: Rachel, is it tougher for you to act when you know your entire character’s back-story?
RW: No, you just don’t think about that. [You think] “you’re alive, you’re in love, you’re angry,” whatever. It’s down to the director and the editor to structure thing—-you can’t think that; it would screw you up.
r: On set, do you think about each individual scene as a piece of a puzzle or do you just work in the moment and arrange it later with an editor?
FM: In this case I knew that [the latter is] how I work. I was just getting material, and I knew even from the beginning I would have to change the structure of the film because in the script, the story would start with Justin in the desert, and while he waits for the people to come to kill him he would be remembering [what happened]. The story was all in flashbacks. But I was not very sure about it…. So what me and Claire [Simpson, the editor] did when we finished the film was we first edited in a linear way, and then we asked for one or two months just to try to find different approaches to the story. Really the order of the film was created in post[production], in the cutting room with Claire.
RW: And do you ever work in a way that you think “I need to get X, I need to get this from this scene….”
FM: Oh, yeah, always.
RW: You do?
FM: That’s exactly how I work.
RW: In this film too?
FM: Yeah, in this film too. I know exactly what I need, and I have in my mind: “What is the fundamental here, what do I really need here?”
RW: Right, right.
FM: Because sometimes you don’t really get what you were expecting, but you get other things. But in each scene I know: “This is the line that has to be exactly this way.”
RW: You have a very gentle way of getting that.
FM: [laughs] Pushing people to [get what I want]….
RW: Yeah, it’s very gentle. You just said that sometimes it becomes other things too, and you allow that to happen.
FM: Yeah.
RW: Where some directors are so, they just want that one thing, and they inhibit you [from being] free.
FM: I know my intention, but I have to keep all the options open. Also because I think I feel very comfortable telling a story. I’ve done, I’ve shot so much in my life, [since] I’ve been doing commercials [with] all kinds of actors…. I don’t need to plan it. On set I can come up with solutions. The solutions come very easily.
r: You’ve mentioned in some other interviews the politics of your films.
FM: Yeah, I think a film can affect people; [it] can bring awareness… but it really doesn’t change things. Maybe bringing awareness is enough to bring change, you know, but I don’t think that film is such a powerful thing that it can really [change things].
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