Friday, March 7, 2008

Talking with Paulo Morelli, director of CITY OF MEN

Director Paulo Morelli (right) on the set of City of Men.

Paulo Morelli: Man of the City
by Terry Keefe

This article is currently appearing in this month's Venice Magazine.

While a film could do worse than be seen as a sequel to the much lauded and beloved 2002 film City of God, director Paulo Morelli wanted to make sure that his City of Men wasn’t that. Not exactly anyway. Explains Morelli, “I wanted this film to have its own personality, and to be a film about the favelas that can stand by itself. Not as a sequel.” Morelli is a long-time collaborator of City of God director Fernando Meirelles, who is also a producer on City of Men, and the new film takes place in the same City of God favelas, those being the rough neighborhoods which dot the mountains surrounding the city of Rio de Janeiro. But the viewpoint has shifted from focusing directly on the drug dealers who run the favelas, to two young friends who are doing their best to survive the neighborhood by staying on the straight and narrow, with all the difficulties that entails. If City of God was about the Rio most visitors didn’t see, City of Men is about the City of God that moviegoers haven’t really seen yet.

While sharing some of the multi-character tapestry of City of God, the plot of the film centers predominantly on Ace (Douglas Silva) and Wallace (Darla Cunha), both who are on the cusp of their 18th birthdays and facing some very tough decisions. Although basically still a child himself, Ace is also a father to a young baby boy. And Wallace has finally found the long-lost father he has been searching for many years…in a local prison. The theme of fatherhood and what the lack of it has done to many young men in the favelas echoes throughout every corner of the film, and also links it with City of God. Because many of the drug dealers, who Ace and Wallace are trying hard not to become, also grew up without father figures. Says Morelli, “I think this is one of the reasons drug dealing is so strong, because the drug dealer becomes a father figure to the children. The kids look up to that powerful guy who is holding a gun, flashing brand name sneakers and gold chains.”

City of Men is the feature film culmination of a larger story of Ace and Wallace which was developed during four seasons of the popular Brazilian television series of the same name. Morelli worked as a director for much of the run of the series and has known his young leads, who also had small roles in City of God playing different characters, since before they were even teenagers. Both Douglas Silva and Darla Cunha hail from the favelas themselves and were part of the favela-based theater group, We From the Hill, which provides theater training for young people from these neighborhoods. We From the Hill was a big source of actors for both City of Men and City of God, and Morelli continued to use the improv-heavy style of working with the actors that was utilized previously on both the television series and the Fernando Meirelles film. Elaborates Morelli, “The screenplay was just a guide. I never gave the actors the screenplay. I told them what the scene was about and I asked them to create their own lines and then I changed the scenes accordingly. It’s like writing with the actors.”