Fernando Meirelles

Started by Spike, February 07, 2004, 09:55:07 AM

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Spike

What does everyone think of the director of "City Of God"?

BTW, he previously made a film called "Domésticas".
"We're gonna celebrate St. Suck-My-Big-Fat-Fucking-Sausage'a!!!"

ono

This thread looks lonely and abandoned.

I'll fix that.

I think he's overrated.  :-D

The Silver Bullet

And the winner isn't...
Kátia Lund co-directed the explosive City of God. Why was her name left off the Oscar nomination?

by Alex Bellos
RABBIT n. pl. rab·bits or rabbit[list=1]
  • Any of various long-eared, short-tailed, burrowing mammals of the family Leporidae.
  • A hare.
    [/list:o][/size]

Pubrick

Quote from: The Silver BulletAnd the winner isn't...
Kátia Lund co-directed the explosive City of God. Why was her name left off the Oscar nomination?

by Alex Bellos
yeah check out the city of god thread.
under the paving stones.

The Silver Bullet

Well, there you go.
That's what I get for not reading every thread of every forum.
RABBIT n. pl. rab·bits or rabbit[list=1]
  • Any of various long-eared, short-tailed, burrowing mammals of the family Leporidae.
  • A hare.
    [/list:o][/size]

Pubrick

Quote from: The Silver BulletWell, there you go.
That's what I get for not reading every thread of every forum.
nah, just the relevant ones would do in this case. the most obvious being the popular current thread entitled CITY OF GOD.

i actually don't see anything that can be said in this thread that hasn't already been posted in the other one. in fact all discussion regarding meirelles has been in the other one so i would guess spike hasn't seen it either. otherwise why start this?
under the paving stones.

MacGuffin

Danny Huston Joins The Constant Gardener
Source: The Hollywood Reporter

Danny Huston (21 Grams) is in talks to star opposite Rachel Weisz and Ralph Fiennes in The Constant Gardener for City of God director Fernando Meirelles.

The Focus Features picture is a big-screen adaptation of a John Le Carre novel about an English diplomat (Fiennes) in Kenya whose wife (Weisz) is murdered after she uncovers a scandal at a pharmaceutical company. Huston would take on the role of a fellow diplomat who falls for Weisz's character.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

ElPandaRoyal

I just hope he doesn't go 100% Hollywood for this one... that would bea shame. Unless he does so just to make money for a new film as great as Cidade de Deus.
Si

cine

Quote from: ElPandaRoyalUnless he does so just to make money for a new film as great as Cidade de Deus.
Never heard of it.

Pubrick

Quote from: ElPandaRoyalUnless he does so just to make money for a new film as great as Cidade de Deus.
oh u mean work with Katia Lund again?
under the paving stones.

modage

Early word on Meirelles & Mantovani's Intolerância 2
Source: Latin AICN

According to Cinema em Cena (www.cinema.art.br), while Fernando Meirelles (Oscar nominated) is busy filming The Constant Gardener, his script partner Bráulio Mantovani (Oscar nominated) is focused in scripting Intolerância 2 (not the definitive title – this provisory title is said to be simply an amusing joke between Meirelles and Mantovani), but who knows.

Interviewed by journal Folha de São Paulo, Mantovani said that already send the 172 pages of the script to Meirelles. According to him, it's only the first treatment and will probably be reduced in a second version to stop the film being too long.

Despite the project being considerate as some sort of sequel for Intolerância or Intolerance (classic of 1916, directed by D.W. Griffith – it was about the history of mankind through times), the similarities between the two films end in the title.

The story of Intolerância 2 is unique, involving six different countries, with six characters, everyone talking is own language. It will show the routine of those persons, and illustrating the contradictions of economic globalization, with centre of attention in its good and bad aspects.

The main characters are: a poor young Brazilian elevated to medium-high life condition; a terrorist that adopts the principles of Islamic fundamentalism; a Chinese girl that sustains himself with a low job while she dreams in having a higher life condition; a couple of Kenyan runners; a north-American woman that has a job of releasing tendencies; and a Occidentalized young Arab girl.

According to Mantovani, the lives of all of them become linked by the help of a big corporation, yet without a name, referred in the script only by "The Mark". This corporation supports the athletic field where the Kenyans run; promotes a video competition that calls the Brazilian attention; buys the products fabricated by the enterprise where the Chinese works; and there it goes. In the end, all the characters will reunite in the Arabs Emirates.

All points that Meirelles will stay involved with The Constant Gardener for the rest of the year, so Intolerância 2 will only begin its filming in 2005. Until then, the duo hopes to get new resources to finance the production.
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

cine

Quote from: themodernage02Despite the project being considerate as some sort of sequel for Intolerância or Intolerance (classic of 1916, directed by D.W. Griffith – it was about the history of mankind through times), the similarities between the two films end in the title.
Oh, that's unfortunate.

For those of you that don't know, there's a couple of Intolerance Xixax banners.  :wink:

MacGuffin

Comforts of homeland
Fresh from directing the mainstream "Constant Gardener," Fernando Meirelles is back in Brazil to do projects with his independent stamp. By Henry Chu, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

"HAS the academy gone mad?"

That was Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles' reaction nearly two years ago upon learning of his nomination for best director for "City of God," a kinetic, exhilarating look at violent life and death in one of this city's squalid, drug-ridden shantytowns. Shot entirely in Portuguese, on a budget that would have trouble paying for catering on a Hollywood set, the movie was a surprise critical and financial hit worldwide.
 
If a similar call comes through in a few months with news of an Oscar nod for his direction of the acclaimed John le Carré thriller "The Constant Gardener," Meirelles will be elated, this time — but not shocked.

"I'll be surprised and extremely happy, but it would make more sense, because at least it's a film in English, and there are a couple stars in it," he said. " 'The Constant Gardener' is more part of the game than 'City of God' was. It's a $25-million film versus a $2-million film."

Meirelles' career has undergone a dramatic shift since that bolt-from-the-blue Academy Award nomination, vaulting a man best known in his native country for making commercials onto Tinseltown's list of coveted directors.

Doors he never knew existed have now swung open. American producers recognize his name, even if they mispronounce it on occasion (it's may-REL-less). Scripts are pouring in.

But Meirelles, who turned 50 last month, is interrupting his rocket rise in Hollywood's sights to go back to his roots in Brazil, where he has two smaller-scale projects in the works. Both are meditations, he says, on the nature of happiness and the meaning of life.

The only thing he'll say about one of them is that it will be a low-budget film in Portuguese. The other, "Intolerance," will be a takeoff on, or a sequel of sorts to, D.W. Griffith's silent-film classic of the same name. Like its predecessor, Meirelles' movie will weave together stories from locales around the world — Kenya, China and the United Arab Emirates, to name a few.

"There are a lot of sequences in English, because in the Arab Emirates, Philippines and Kenya, they speak English as well. But it's a Brazilian project, from Brazil," Meirelles said, adding: "Of course, when I have the script ready, I'll try to get some American financing as well. But my goal is to be very independent in this project."

Independence and a search for his own distinctive style have been characteristic of Meirelles' career as a filmmaker ever since he began experimenting with a Super 8 camera he received as a gift at age 12. By high school, Meirelles, the son of a prominent doctor, was doing research on foreign movies for his campus film club. In college, he submitted a video documentary as his thesis, even though he studied architecture, a field that still affects the way he approaches his craft.

"I see things like constructions — graphically," Meirelles said in Rio, where he was in town for the Brazilian premiere of "The Constant Gardener." "When I read a script, I see the structure of the script, sometimes more than the emotions of the characters or the lines of dialogue. The structure is really what [grabs me], and I think this is a bit of my architecture experience."

Learning to shoot

MEIRELLES made his name directing television commercials — at least 700 of them at last count by his São Paulo-based O2 Films, one of the biggest production companies in Latin America.

"That's how I learned how to shoot. I see my commercial career as really my school, especially when you do commercials the way I did," he said. "I was doing four or five a month. I was shooting in different situations — in studios, underwater, on helicopters … with different POVs [points of view], hundreds of different actors. I'm really confident of my skills to tell stories and where to put the camera."

That assurance was evident in "City of God," which critics praised for its adrenaline-fueled camera work, inventive perspectives and edgy editing. Meirelles and his longtime cinematographer, César Charlone, employed some of the same techniques in "The Constant Gardener," including encouraging the actors to improvise, just as they did with the untrained youths, plucked from the shantytown, who starred in "City of God."

"They were debating all the time different ways of shooting," said actor Ralph Fiennes, who plays the lead character, the grief-stricken diplomat Justin Quayle, in "The Constant Gardener." "Because they have a kind of jiving, adventurous quality about how we can shoot, I'd pick up on it and would be saying, 'Can we do one more? I can do it like this.' So there was a sense that nothing need be too fixed."

Yet "The Constant Gardener" was a different experience for Meirelles than "City of God," and not just because, as he told one interviewer, "the wine is better [and] you travel first class."

Where his breakout feature "was mine 100%," he said, "Gardener" belonged as much to author Le Carré, producer Simon Channing Williams and the studio, Focus Features, as it did to him. While he says he still enjoyed a free hand as director, it presented a change from his favored role as the guy who calls all the shots. As he told the Brazilian newsmagazine Epoca this year: "I'm still in the stage of being obsessed with control."

Hence his return to Brazil, to work once again on homegrown projects that are his own from start to finish. Meirelles has spurned offers to move to Hollywood, which feels too far from the home outside São Paulo that he shares with his wife, Cecilia, a dancer and actress, and their two children. The house is the only structure he has ever designed and built himself.

"I like staying here. I don't depend on the studios. I don't depend on the way the system moves," said Meirelles, who for all his rising fame is down-to-earth, affable and gracious in person. "Staying in Brazil will keep me more independent."

But this is also a land whose people go with the tropical flow, where soccer players change it up beautifully on the field and samba dancers move to a multitude of rhythms. With a successful studio-backed venture in his pocket, Meirelles is interested in mixing it up. There has been talk of his taking on a blockbuster treatment of the fiery end of ancient Pompeii.

Doors have opened

THE director himself confesses to harboring some DeMille-sized aspirations. "I'd love to do at least once in my life a very big film, a film where marketing people will tell me what to do and all that. If you're prepared for that, it won't hurt as much," he said. "I'd like to do something like that as an experience.

"What I like is that because of this recognition, there are people interested in partnerships, in working with me. Three or four years ago I couldn't call a studio or an American producer and say, 'I have this project. Do you want to co-produce with me?' And now I can. I know somebody will read my idea. It's opened doors, which is a good thing, and I'm going to use these doors. I'm very interested in offering my projects to the same people who are offering me scripts."

Those projects are informed by Meirelles' Brazilian-ness, which he defines partly as a way of seeing the world from below, rather than from on top, as he feels Americans tend to do.

"In Brazil we have a very different perspective on life. When I go to the U.S., the idea of being a winner, of being a success, is very powerful. Of course, everyone in Brazil wants to be a winner, but it's not the same as in the U.S., where it's important to be first," he said. "There's the phrase in the U.S., 'You're a loser,' which in English means a lot. But here in Brazil, in Portuguese, it doesn't mean as much, like maybe you lost a footrace or something…. You see the First World, the official world, with a certain distance."

He tried to convey that in "The Constant Gardener," with its tale of official corruption and arrogance on the part of the British government and European drug companies.

Ultimately, Meirelles would like the stories he tells to be ones from and about his homeland. After the runaway success of "City of God," he stuck with the gritty subject matter and some of the actors, producing and directing episodes for the TV spinoff "City of Men," which charts the lives of the young men from the shantytown as they grow up, date and pursue their careers.

As for his own career, "My goal, my ideal world, is to do Brazilian films, even shot in Portuguese, but for an international market, like [Pedro] Almodóvar does with his films," Meirelles said. "It's amazing that after 20 or 25 years, he keeps doing Spanish films in Spanish, shot in Spain, and the whole world … sees them.

"He has the kind of career that I'd like."
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

Pubrick

Quote from: MacGuffinBut Meirelles, who turned 50 last month
i did not know that.

this changes everything.
under the paving stones.

A Matter Of Chance