Also this issue:

Crack Shot
A hopped-up Brazilian gangster yarn hits the target dead-on.
-Sam Adams

TV or Not TV?
Was The Gong Show's Chuck Barris a CIA assassin? Says Confessions of a Dangerous Mind: Maybe.
-Cindy Fuchs

Screen Picks
-Sam Adams

January 23-29, 2003

movies

Gangs of Brazil

City of God&'s director talks about his brand of “new neorealism.”

by Sam Adams

³I don't like action movies, and I don't like violence," says Fernando Meirelles. It's not the kind of thing you'd expect the director of a movie as unremittingly brutal as the teenage gang saga City of God to say -- but then most of the great movies about violence have been made by artists who at least profess to abhor it. (Sam Peckinpah and John Woo might be the leaders of that school.) What attracted Meirelles, who grew up in São Paulo, to Paulo Lins' massive novel based on his childhood in the slums, or favelas, of Rio de Janeiro, was the opportunity to investigate a world that every Brazilian has heard about, but few have experienced for themselves. "When you go to a favela, it's like a country within a country," Meirelles says. "It's a different society, with different rules, different laws, different cultures. I was interested in showing that society."

Meirelles' own background has little in common with the novel's characters', but rather than immerse himself in research -- which, he says, is inevitably written by "middle-class people like me, talking about the other side" -- he chose to rely upon the novel as well as its author, and to use the experiences of his large cast of almost entirely non-professional actors, as well as to employ a co-director, Kátia Lund, who had experience shooting documentaries in the favelas.

Without telling the children they were auditioning for a movie, Meirelles set up an acting workshop for children from the favelas, and it was during the six months of workshopping that, he says, "I really began to understand the film. I was involved with those boys, 200 of them, from nine in the morning until nine at night every day, talking to them every day." When it came time to shoot the movie, Meirelles and Lund didn't burden their young actors with memorizing lines; they'd describe the scene's outlines, have the actors come up with their dialogue and then whittle down what they'd improvised. Meirelles estimates that City of God is "about 30 percent written," the rest developed on set.

That makes the film something of an oddity, filmed like a work of classic neorealism (Bicycle Thieves et al.), but edited like a whiz-bang music video. Meirelles doesn't like the suggestion that the film is overly stylized, offhandedly dubbing it "new neorealism." Hyperneorealism would work just as well.

Part of the movie's style comes out of necessity -- Meirelles was dealing with an immensely popular 700-page novel with dozens of characters, and opted to condense rather than streamline -- and partly by accident. In fact, he admits "the film is faster than I wanted. But I didn't want to do a long film, because I knew I would lose some audience. So I just trimmed it down. And my editor added a lot of himself. He was 23 when he edited the film, so this is the way he tells stories, the way he understands."

Not "losing some audience" was a major concern, not just in terms of box-office success, but because Meirelles wanted to make a movie that would draw the attention of Brazil's masses to the problems of the favelas, which "have only gotten worse" in the 20 years since the movie's events end. "I didn't want to show this film in art houses or something like that," he says. "I wanted to release it in malls and shopping centers, for those guys that never see Brazilian films, and people who know nothing about the slums. The style of the film is very easy to watch, and I did it on purpose, because I wanted to grab this audience who doesn't normally see this kind of film, who isn't normally interested in seeing favelas." At least at home, the strategy worked; the film was a smash, and has fanned the debate started by Lins' novel about the future of the slums. Despite its unflattering portrait of Brazilian poverty, it was chosen as Brazil's official entry for the Academy Awards.

Meirelles' initial plan was to follow City of God with a more manageable project -- "two guys, great actors, in a room talking" -- but Hollywood has come knocking, and he's been mulling over more ambitious projects, including one he jokingly calls Intolerance, Part II, a sequel of sorts to D.W. Griffith's four-part tale of injustice through the ages. Meirelles' film would concern "the relation between the First World and the Third World," and would be shot in Brazil, the U.S., China, Indonesia and Kenya. For the moment, it's just a possibility, but it seems to set the tone for whatever Meirelles might do next. "I don't know what it will be, but if I do something in Hollywood, it's going to be big."