Fernando Mereilles and CITY OF GOD: The Hollywood Flashback Interview

(Director Fernando Mereilles, above. In CITY OF GOD, below, Rocket, played by Alexandre Rodrigues, is on the run.)



(This article originally appeared in Venice Magazine and Latin Style Magazine. CITY OF GOD was one of my favorite films of the decade, and I regret that I'm just getting this article online now! I recall Mereilles mentioning that he had a dozen offers from the studios, as in "go" projects, at the time. It was a new experience for him, and CITY OF GOD was just getting noticed in the States. He would round out the decade with the films THE CONSTANT GARDENER and BLINDNESS.)

By Terry Keefe

Adapted from the best-selling novel Cidade de Deus by Brazilian author Paulo Lins, Fernando Mereilles' City of God is the story of three decades -- the 60s, 70s, and 80s -- inside the eponymous, impoverished Brazilian housing project (also known as a favela) and is largely based on true events. The film adaptation is told predominantly through the eyes of Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues), a poor young man with a fierce intelligence and a desire to become a photographer one day. But such dreams are a luxury most can’t afford in City of God, where many adolescents are sucked into a life of violent crime and drug-dealing almost from the womb. To illustrate the alternative path available to Rocket, the story also follows the life of Lil’ Ze (Leandro Firmino da Hora), a gangster who begins murdering from a pre-teen age, all en route to eventually becoming the most powerful criminal in City of God. Along the way, we will also learn the story of Bene (Phelipe Haagensen), a good-natured gangster and the best friend of Lil’ Ze who tries to get out of the criminal life unsuccessfully.



Director Meirelles cast the film largely with non-actors, mostly young males, who were discovered in the various favelas around Rio de Janeiro in an extensive and non-traditional casting process. With co-director Katia Lund, Meirelles enlisted the help of an actor named Guti Fraga, who has run a theater workshop for kids from the slums for many years. Together, they put together a series of “interpretation workshops” in which hundreds of boys from the slums were brought in to read parts of the script. Along the way, all of the boys learned about acting, in particular improvisational acting, and the filmmakers were also able to find their amazing cast.

A remarkable thing about City of God is that while it [is] as fast-paced and entertaining, the violence never feels exploitative. Much of the film has an almost documentary-like, fly-on-the-wall style which never judges its characters but simply presents their actions, allowing the audience to make up their minds as to whether the characters are good or bad. The film also has a strong social message, particularly in regards to how cycles of violence get started in poor neighborhoods not just in Brazil but worldwide.

We had a chance to sit down with Fernando Meirelles while he was visiting Los Angeles in January.

What was your first impression of Paulo Lins’ book?

Fernando Meirelles: Well, Brazil is really like two different countries. One part of the country doesn’t speak to the other. It’s really like an apartheid in the country. The Brazil in which I live is the middle-class Brazil. It’s the “official” Brazil. But in Rio, 18 percent of the population lives in slums. And those slums are like a different country. We don’t know what happens inside. Even me, living so close to this reality, I really didn’t know. Of course, I real the newspapers and all. But when you read newspapers or watch it on TV, it’s only about crimes and always seen through the middle-class point of view, you know? It’s people from this side talking about people from that side. What was extremely revealing in Paulo Lins’ book was that it was really something written from “the inside.” He was raised in City of God and he spent eight years writing this book. So he was writing the book and he’d see some of the characters walking by. It’s a society completely different from the rest of Brazil. Different laws -- there’s no police, no judges, no medical systems. The drug dealers really control the area. That’s why I decided to do the film. Not because of the action, because I don’t like action films at all. But because of this anthropological approach. To show how these societies are organized, how they took the first steps which led to where they are today. Because today, it’s even worse. Today all the slums in Rio are controlled by drug dealers. And instead of just controlling one area, today there are these big chiefs who control like 60 or 70 slums. And the film tries to explain how it all started.

(Douglas Silva as Li'l Dice, above, in one of the film's most harrowing scenes.)

What was the adaptation process of the book like?

The script is quite different from the book. The book is very episodic. The version I read was 600 pages with 250 characters and no structure at all. He presents a character and you follow this guy for 15-20 pages, then that guy dies and he presents a second character and so on. With no structure. So to do a film, we knew we would have to create a structure. First of all, we decided to create this main character of Rocket, the person who would tell us this story. So we said, “Let’s put Paulo Lins in the film.” Then we decided to split the stories into three different time periods. After that, we did big lists of all the storylines and all the plots. And we’d choose 15 characters and 20 plots that we liked, and then cutting, cutting, cutting, we’d come down to our main characters and stories. It was really more about cutting things and selecting things than creating things.

Are Lil’ Ze and Bene remembered in the slums still? Have they been eclipsed by so many other drug dealers in the passing years that people have forgotten them or are they still famous in the slums?

They’re famous. Everybody knows them. The only reference we originally had about this story was the book. But then we went to City of God a couple of times to really understand the place and the locations. Talking to people, everyone older than 35 really remembers those guys and still talks about them. It seems that Lil’ Ze was really cruel, a really tough guy. Every 2-3 years in City of God, the bosses change. They go to jail or get killed. But because of the way he was, Lil’ Ze is still remembered. And Bene also, everybody still loves him. It seems he was a very cool guy. Everybody says, “Oh, he was great. He’d pay for our beer. He helped a lot of people in City of God.”

(Alexandre Rodrigues and Alice Braga, above, in CITY OF GOD.)

You mentioned that City of God has gotten progressively worse.

Yeah, I think so. It’s always changing. Now City of God is split into four different areas with four different bosses. But I had the best news in the last year yesterday night. There’s a rapper in City of God who was really pissed off about the film. Two weeks ago he sent a letter to all the newspapers, saying we were using all their stores and the community didn’t get anything and that we were stigmatizing City of God. He wrote this letter, very aggressive. And because of that, some ministers from the federal government came to visit City of God. And they decided to create a project for City of God. Like a pilot project, that they eventually want to do in all the other slums in Rio. So City of God will be the first slum in Brazil which will have the help of three or four ministers and the Mayor. They really want to change City of God now, to use it as an example. So this is great. Everybody in the community is very excited. It’s a big, big thing.

When did you decide to use non-actors in the film?

When I decided to do the film, I wanted to do it with the same feeling as the book, this “inside” feeling. I knew I couldn’t get this feeling with professionals. And I wanted to use the expertise from the people inside the slums for the film. Whenever I gave them the script, instead of giving them the dialogue, I’d tell them what the intentions of the sequences were and let them improvise. Doing those improvisations for about ten months is how we came up with all the dialogue. If you read our fourth version of the script, the one that I decided to work with, I think like 30 percent is actually scripted. The rest they made up, that’s why it feels so natural. They were a co-author of the film to be sure and that’s why it works.

You put your cast together through an “interpretation workshop.” Tell us some more about that process.

This was the first thing we did after writing the script. I called Katia Lund, she had done a documentary about drug dealers; she knew a lot about drug dealers. So I called her to help me with the actors, finding these boys and creating this school. We did 2,000 interviews around all the slums in Rio and we brought 200 boys to this place in downtown. Over six months, we did improvisation exercises. Our classes were always the same thing. We did warm-up exercises in the beginning, for like a half-hour. Then we’d give them an idea to work with. Like, “You two are going to be the police. You two are going to be the drug dealers.” Give them sort of a plot. Then after a half hour, they’d bring something to us. After watching all the plays, everybody would give comments. So that’s how we worked for six months. After this first six months, they really got used to improvisation. They learned how to create interesting things and how to work the little audience. So after the six months, we got our lead actors and we did the same process, for four months, to rehearse for the film. In the end, you could give them an idea and in ten minutes they would bring you something. Always something very interesting.

(Meirelles directs CITY OF GOD, above.)


An actor named Guti Fraga played a pivotal role in making the interpretation workshops a reality.

I think he was the most important guy in the process. He’s had this group for 13 years, a theater group in a slum. He knows how to deal with those boys and how to test them and how to have some discipline. This type of process, I had never worked like that. He was the boss and Katia and I were like his assistants. In the beginning, we didn’t tell the boys we were even going to do a film. We invited the boys to a workshop for actors with a certificate promised at the end. Guti presented me and Katia as his assistants. Which was good. Because we were sitting there with the boys on the floor, barefoot, and they’d say, “Go get a coffee for me.” So there was no respect. [laughs] This was great because finally after three or four months they discovered we were going to do a film and we were the directors. But it was too late, we were so intimate and then there was no hierarchy. This was very helpful. We were very close.

Were there any discipline problems? Were any of the boys criminals at the time?

Yeah, there were a few boys who were drug dealers in the group in the beginning. The first week when we selected our group, it was our own condition for the workshop that nobody could go to the workshop in the morning and drug deal in the night. If you wanted to keep drug dealing, then leave. And two or three boys, they worked for a while and then decided to leave. But then four boys who stayed with us, they didn’t go back to dealing. They stayed with us and I think they’re out (of the criminal life).

You opened their minds to another world.

Yeah, and they loved that. I think 40 percent of drug dealers are killed by their friends. Guys are betrayed because of a girl or because of money or any reason. So all their relations are very unstable. They don’t trust. You have a friend but he’s not your friend. When they found this incredible group with Guti Fraga, the first few months he was just trying to create the feeling of a group. So they really became friends with each other.

Do you feel responsible for their lives now? You kind of created a surrogate family for them.

Yeah, it’s true. We created this group, we call it “Us from the Cinema.” On the weekends, all the boys keep going to these meetings we have. We have workshops on writing and lighting. So in the last year and a half after we finished shooting, they made two short films. On their own. Doing cameras and everything. No they’re working on a documentary about the group. We’re trying to raise money for the group. Even here, Miramax is doing a few screenings to raise money for the group. Jennifer Lopez is going to present one of those screenings. She loved the film and wants to help. It’s amazing what a hundred dollars can do for this group and for those boys. It’s like having 50 sons, you know? There are ten or twelve of those boys that I’m sort of taking care of personally. I took some of them from the slums and brought them to live in Rio, which is very complicated. The boy who plays Lil’ Dice for instance. He was the main character in some episodes we shot for television. He walks down the street and people ask for autographs. But he was still living in a very poor slum, very dangerous. So I brought him to live in Rio with his mother and five sisters and brothers. And the guy who plays Rocket, we moved him also and the whole family. The guy who plays Lil’ Ze wants to be a photographer, so now he’s doing a workshop and we’re helping him study. Each of these boys is a different story. There were three boys who were very close to drug dealers. One year (after the movie wrapped), they went back and were hanging out with drug dealers, etc. So I brought them to Sao Paulo where I live and they’re working in my production company and using cameras. Just to try to keep them out. And I don’t know how all this is going to finish. I created a big problem for myself. [laughs] We became very close, so I can’t just say goodbye.

You created a film which is very entertaining but has a strong social message. That must have been a difficult line to walk as a filmmaker. Were there any rules you set up for yourself in advance, as in lines you wouldn’t cross?

I didn’t want to use violence as a show. The film is very violent but every opportunity I had to create a show of violence, like blood and things exploding or guns pointed towards the camera, I avoided doing that. So in the film, there’s a rape sequence but you don’t see the rape. Even in that very violent scene where the boy kills that other one, you don’t see that. The camera is hiding behind his neck. I think if City of God were an American action film, that would be the great sequence and show all the angles. [laughs] So I tried to avoid creating a show of blood. I think I used a lot of tricks to bring the audience into the film and I’ve been criticized because of that. A lot of people in Brazil, critics and all. They’re saying that the film is like a commercial, that it’s superficial because my narrative is very commercial. These people were saying that the film is just commercial bullshit and that nobody thinks about the film. But no, what happened is that there was a lot of debate in Brazil about this (because of the film). Finally now City of God will be the place our government is going to change things. So it made people think. I’m very happy because of that.