Fernando Meirelles interview

Jessica Winter hears how the Brazilian 'City of God' director tackled a Le Carré conspiracy thriller in Kenya

Oct 11 2005

'I always thought it was a great love story, about a guy who really falls in love with his wife only after she dies,' says director Fernando Meirelles of 'The Constant Gardener', his propulsive thriller and the opening-night gala choice of the London Film Festival.

With often concussive camerawork and a vivid palette, the film exudes a controlled moral outrage at a (fictional) pharmaceutical company's exploitation of a poor African country: stationed in Kenya, mild-mannered British diplomat Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes) unravels a vast conspiracy after the murder of his wife, Tessa (Rachel Weisz), who had been poised to reveal a Big Pharma scheme that used the poor and sick as unwitting experimental subjects for a potentially toxic tuberculosis drug.

'The pharmaceutical industry makes an interesting bad guy, because there are two sides to the story,' says the Brazilian director. 'They produce great medicines and our lives are obviously better because of them, but on the other hand, they use whatever methods and charge whatever they want because they're such a powerful interest.'

Though it's adapted from a John Le Carré thriller densely tangled with intrigue and double-crosses, 'The Constant Gardener' achieves a galloping momentum and raw immediacy familiar from Meirelles' international sensation, 'City of God' (co-directed with Kátia Lund), which spanned three decades of vicious drug wars and offhand slaughter in the favelas of Rio. During filming in Nairobi and the slum of Kibera, Fiennes, Weisz and a skeleton crew often manoeuvred through real crowds and street life, and engaged total strangers in the story.

'We'd have just one cameraman, the sound man, the actors and me,' Meirelles explains. 'It's a bit like a documentary. An actor in a real environment always creates a richer reality than anything you could construct.'

A crucial tool was the lightweight A-Minima Super-16 camera. 'It's only four kilos and you really don't see it; it's like a videocamera. And even when people notice it, they don't assume it's a major project. With a bigger camera or a Steadicam, everyone would have been staring at it.

'I was confident about shooting in real locations with real people because it worked in "City of God",' Meirelles continues. 'So did improvisation – in "City of God" almost all the scenes were improvised in rehearsals. Here we improvised too, especially in the scenes that established the relationship between Justin and Tessa. In a way, it didn't really matter what they were saying – it was about creating a mood, an energy between them. The difference, of course, was that the actors in "City of God" were non-professionals – we had six months of rehearsals. This time, we went to each location to rehearse, but we would only run through it three or four times, to keep it fresh.'

'The Constant Gardener' is anchored by Fiennes' perfectly calibrated turn as the grieving husband seeking the key to his wife's death. 'Ralph needs to believe what he's saying,' Meirelles says. 'He will stop in the middle of the scene and say "No, I’m too self-conscious – I'm seeing myself acting. Can we start again?" He liked to make up lines and surprise Rachel. See, this is the great thing about improvising – when you're acting from a locked script, you know that there's one key word the other actor has to say, and then it's your turn. When you improvise, you have to listen, to pay attention to what the other person is saying because you have to react. It's just like living. That's why it feels so natural.'

Though 'The Constant Gardener' is as much an incisive postmortem of a relationship as it is a politically charged procedural, Meirelles says his starting point tends to be social phenomena. 'Maids', a film he co-directed the year before 'City of God', interlaced the stories of five different maids in São Paulo – each woman an interface between the city's privileged enclaves and its invisible underclass. 'I like to learn something when I watch a film,' he says, 'even if there's no plot, the kind of film where nothing happens but you learn how they live and what they eat – in Kibera, people live in tin huts and cook with fire. Every time I start thinking about a project, I always think about telling a story about a subject or an environment much more than about a character. I probably never would have written something like "The Constant Gardener" myself; I never think about a story that follows one character from beginning to end. I think in terms of multiple plots, using characters to talk about something else, like Robert Altman does in "Nashville" and "Short Cuts". '

The director will weave together disparate narrative threads in his next feature, which he hopes to start shooting next year. 'I'm back to this project about globalisation. I'm writing seven plots, in seven languages, set in seven locations around the world – one of which is Kenya,' he says. 'Little by little the stories start to connect, and by the end, it's all one story – all the characters are linked and all their lives are affected by the others, though they don't know it.'

'The Constant Gardener' screens on October 19 and 20 at the London Film Festival and is released on November 11.

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