"When I shot and edited these scenes, I did it in a very technical way, I worried about how to light it and so on, and I lost the sense of their brutality. Some women were really angry with the film, and I thought, 'Wow, maybe I crossed the line.' I went back not to please the audience but so they would stay involved until the end of the story. You want the audience with you."
Ironically enough, Meirelles tried to buy the rights to Saramago's novel when it first came out, before he'd made any features. "I like the idea of the fragility of society, of how primitive we are as human beings. We have a little cover of sophistication, and without it it's all about survival."
Meirelles was turned down, as were many others. "He said no to eight or nine offers, even big offers from studios," the director reports. The novelist felt that his story wasn't appropriate for images. "Cinema," Saramago told Meirelles, "destroys imagination."
Finally winning the rights to the book -- whose characters have no names and exist in no specific place and time -- was Canadian producer Niv Fichman, who flew to Saramago's home in Lanzarote, one of the Canary Islands, to persuade him. The only thing the author told Fichman and screenwriter McKellar was "don't set the story anywhere specific," and he was equally elusive when Meirelles spoke to him before directing.
"I asked him a lot of questions about the characters, and he wouldn't answer anything," the director reports. "The only thing he said was that the dog in the story, called the Dog of Tears, should be a big dog, not a small one. I read recently that when a journalist asked him which of his characters he liked the most, he said he could kill everyone except the Dog of Tears."
One change Meirelles made to the book was to do what he calls "adding gray," especially where the film's villain, played by Gael Garcia Bernal, was concerned. "In the book, he is really a mean guy, terribly evil from the beginning . . . but I thought it was more interesting to have him be not evil but more like a child with a gun."
That notion came in part from advice he got years ago from celebrated Brazilian stage director Antunes Filho. "He told me, 'When you are creating characters, try and include a scene that does the opposite of what you are trying to establish. That gives the character humanity.' I always try to take this lesson."
English, not Portuguese
