2.Main Content
Training
The Script Factory Masterclass with Fernando Mierelles
Fernando Meirelles' City of God
following a preview screening of CITY OF GOD
Screen on the Hill, Hampstead, London
10 November 2002
These transcripts are intended for educational purposes on our site only. To reprint them in any form, you must get permission from The Script Factory.
An extract from Fernando Mierelles' conversation with Richard Jobson
On working with non-actors to develop his script
The idea to use amateurs as well as professionals came from Paulise [the writer of the novel on which the film was based]. He was raised in [the real] City of God, like Rocket, and he spent eight years writing the book. The revealing thing about the book is that it is written from the insider's point of view and in Brazil we don't see this often. When they talk about the slums or poverty, it's usually in the newspapers or the television, or even other directors doing a film, and it's always from the middle class point of view. In this book we have the other side, and I wanted to do the film with this same feeling of seeing things from inside and have a feeling of reality, so I decided to use boys who were very close to this reality. We did two thousand interviews in a lot of the slums - we took two hundred boys to this place downtown and we worked for six months improvising, not teaching them but giving them opportunities to do some improvisation and have some ideas, and so after this six months we chose who would be each character and we rehearsed for another four months... I brought in those boys, for their contribution because they know a lot more about the film than I do. So actually, in this period of six months, they were learning to act but I was learning about my own film because they just improvised. I didnšt give them the script, we spent two years writing the script and I didnšt give the script to the boys, it was weird. Actually, we put the boys in a room, explained what the sequence was, the intentions of each character and gave them time to prepare something. They would come back, and we would do something, usually a little scene that would take five minutes. My job as the director was to say things like "this line was very good"; "try to say it again"; "do this, don't do that"; "go straight to this point", and they would do it over and over and doing this we would get the final version. That's what we see on the screen. If you read our last version of the script (we did twelve versions) and you see the film, only twenty percent of what is written in the script is on the screen. The boys are co-authors of the final script.
Richard Jobson (interviewer)
Was it always your intention to do it in that particular style, or was that something that you were maybe encouraged to do by your producer, Walter Salles? It's something he has done in the past with his long projects.
FM
No, I think I'm encouraged to do this because of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh - it's true. People have worked with non-professional actors, like Pasolini did, but I was not sure that this was going to work so well. If this did not work I had a very good script anyway, so sometimes, if in the improvisation we got nothing, we could use all the lines that were in the script. I really didn't know, it was taking a risk.
RJ
To get any script financed in any part of the world is perfectly impossible these days, so to go in with a script and say 'here it is this is the film we are going to make' and then throw it out of the window and bring in all these untrained actors and say well now we are going to write a whole new script! What did your financiers think of this?
FM
Well, he loved it's because it was me! (LAUGHTER). Actually, I tried to sell the script; we had some people interested but nobody trusted the script, everybody thought the script had too many characters and it didn't have the three acts and I sent it to some studios and actually it's not a script in the...
RJ
...traditional sense?
FM
Yeah, we took some risks in the script, like putting Rocket, our main character, out of the action. Traditionally, the main character has to make the action move but we subverted this and took him out of the action. He's talking about another story, not his own. So those guys who read the scripts at the studios who think they can identify all the things that are wrong with the script - well it had many problems for them, so I didnšt get the money. I finally financed it myself. I have a company in Brazil which does commercials. Because of this, we had some money, and I did this stupid thing which was throw all my own money at this project without knowing what was going to happen. At that point we had started rehearsing and the boys were so excited and so was I - so we just couldn't stop.
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