Multimedia
Blogs
Forum
Affordable HD
Whitepapers
Newsletters
Events
Advertisers
DCP Directory
MillimeterFade to Black:
Fernando Meirelles, Director
Aug 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Jon Silberg
After the phenomenal success of his drama, City of God, director Fernando Meirelles turned down more than 100 offers to direct various projects, preferring to develop his next script on his own. But the opportunity to bring John le Carré's best-selling thriller The Constant Gardener to the screen was an assignment he couldn't pass up. Meirelles had just returned from a visit to Kenya at the time, and the story's Kenyan locations inflamed his desire to capture its terrain and people on film. Furthermore, the subject at the heart of le Carré's novel — corporate greed in the pharmaceutical industry — is a hot issue in his native Brazil, where the government is at odds with the makers of desperately needed AIDS treatments. Meirelles explains that the chance to take on such a vital issue teamed with an opportunity to film in Kenya proved enough incentive to put his own script on hold.
Photographer: Jaap Buitendijk
© 2004 Focus Features. All Rights Reserved.
The Constant Gardener stars Ralph Fiennes as a British diplomat and Rachel Weisz as his socially conscious girlfriend, who uncovers a pharmaceutical conglomerate's nefarious scheme to test market a drug on unsuspecting Kenyans. Meirelles wanted to infuse the film with the same kind of visual intensity and handheld immediacy that he and cinematographer César Charlone received so much attention for on the multiple-award-winning City of God.
Meirelles had worked with Charlone for 15 years, primarily on commercials, but the two worked out a style on City of God that they carried over to this film. “On City of God,” Meirelles explains, “we had to develop a way of shooting with nonprofessional actors that would let them be really free. So I never gave them marks or big light or anything like that, and we shot mostly 16mm handheld to give us freedom to follow them wherever they would go.
“Obviously, we had very talented professional actors on this film, but we essentially shot it the same way. Instead of having them perform for a specific camera position, I'd have them do all their rehearsals without knowing where the camera was going to be and then we would just bring in one or two cameras and shoot. We didn't care about marks or blocking, and I would never break up the scene. If I wanted another line from a different camera position, we would do the whole thing from the top to the end. I think the actors really liked working this way. They could be really free and involved in the scene without thinking about blocking and lights. Sometimes I would tell them, ‘We really just need this one line from over here,’ and they would say, ‘No! Let's do it from the top.’”
Like City of God, this film was shot almost entirely in Super 16, with 35mm being used for wide shots, and then finished as a digital intermediate at London's Framestore. The Super 16 portions were shot with an Arri SR III and two of Aaton's tiny A-Minimas. An Arri 35 BL was used for the wide shots.
The Aaton A-Minima was not only unobtrusive on set, it enabled the production to steal shots out in public. “The A-Minima was so small nobody noticed when we were walking around in public,” the director explains. “With 35mm equipment it would be impossible. Everybody would be looking into the camera and trying to charge us.”
As with City of God, Charlone designed his lighting to benefit from a great deal of manipulation during the DI phase. “He creates flat light on location to put just enough contrast in the negative to be able to work with it in post,” he says. “Most of the time his lighting is just changing bulbs. He'll use Kino Flos or even HMIs if he has to put light through a window, but he's very unobtrusive. Then, he'll spend a month in a DI suite really creating the look of the film scene by scene. His work is done in post more than on set.
“And that helps everyone. It lets the actors be really free to walk around without worrying about where their light is, and it lets César turn the camera nearly 360 degrees at any moment. We've found it's a good way to work whether or not we're working with nonprofessionals.”
