cinematographer césar charlone

"…pistol whipping him with no mercy.  Bigolinha, nine years old, passed-out.  Pequeno thought that he was just pretending so that he'd stop beating him, so he continued.  The, laughing, he emptied his 9 millimetre pistol into the boy's body…"

"…he quickened his pace, turned the corner and, in relief, stopped to breathe and look at his wound.  He put his cheek up against the building's corner to make sure nobody was following him and was hit by a bullet in the middle of his forehead, fired by Pequeno…"

"And, just like nothing had happened (Pequeno) continued to plan the attack, without looking at Bene…"

I copied these phrases from the book and pasted them on my hotel room door, so that I would see them everyday as I left for the site.  I wanted to keep clearly in mind what I thought was the photographic proposition of the film.  I had spoken a lot with Fernando about the direction he wanted the film to go and it became very clear that his biggest preoccupation was to be as faithful as possible to Paulo Lins' story.  The perspective from which Paulo told his story was completely unknown to us, but we had to try to reproduce it as faithfully as possible.  We knew nothing about this certain reality, only that which we heard though police reports we saw in the newspapers and which shocked us in the security and comfort of our homes.

It would have been pretty easy to unpack our cinematography baggage, full of references for the glamorization and exploitation of violence and make a "beautiful" action film full of effects and tricks.  After reading the book once more it became clear that the big challenge would be to do everything we could to draw closer to this reality, and to portray it with as little of interference as possible.

When I started working on the project, Fernando had already taken a major step in this direction by deciding to work with actors coming from this world instead of professionals.  It was an option that could work out really good, something which could give the film a "truth", but which also implicated in many other difficulties.  In the area I worked, the biggest difficulty was that I treat the film as if it were a documentary.  The "actors" were setting foot on a film site for the first time and didn't have the slightest idea about marks and lights, and in some cases (the smaller kids) they found it hard to separate fiction from reality.  They got so deep into their "game" that I would imagine Stansilavsky jumping up and down in ecstasy.  To think of doing rehearsals or marking out the scenes was out of the question.  Their emotion grew after each take, and the marks they attained to were different ones.  It is around this reality that City of God''s cinematography was thought out.

It was our luck that Fernando had been invited to film an episode for TV Globo and was able to try out his proposition.  Fernando invited me to film the short, and suggested I do it as a rehearsal for what we would later do in City of God .  And so, in the four days we filmed Palace II (Golden Gate), I tested our "format".  I tried out 8 types of camera film, 35 and 16mm, different types of lighting, different types of filming styles, more marked or with more improvisations.  Some scenes more planned out and others in sequence.  Changes in speed….  All in all we turned Palace II (Golden Gate) into a laboratory short.  And the last major experiment was technological.  To shoot using film, do all the post production in video and put it back into film, using all the benefits proportioned by electronics (to shoot in other speeds, change them while editing, change the lighting, the continuity and the framing on the telecine, use 35 and 16 indistinctly…etc., etc.).  We were still not sure that this would be the ideal process for City of God .  We believed that a small loss of technical quality was unimportant if compared to the advantages that the process furnished us in relation to our "actors".  Once a decision was made, I began to analyze the experiences I had made in the short, where I learned how to make the feature film.  There were things which worked well, others, not too good.  I took notes and started the feature film.  It was clear that it would be a film different from all those I had ever done.  If it looked anything like something I had done before, it was with the documentaries I had made in the early 80s.  A camera in hand, and try as much as you could to not interfere in the reality before me, running after it, letting it suggest the framing and even the lighting (or would that be the non-lighting?), and references which came to mind were the Italian neo-realism, and it's closest of kin, "Cinema Novo" (New Brazilian Cinema)…. far from photographic dictatorship.

A real dictatorship with the crew generously offering a filter, a counter-light, something better, and I, indefectibly refusing.  I remember the look of frustration on our trusty grip Sergaião's face, wanting, and able, to give our lighting a "hit" and me not wanting to hear anything about it….

When we started to talk about the film Fernando told me that he wanted to separate it into three distinct phases:

1. The first to be situated in the 60s, the beginning, "light" thievery.  With the naiveness of a cowboy film, more academic, more "correct", "square".  Tripod, travelling, framing. With Serginho's (Megan Studio's colouring magician) help, with whom we had already done Palace II (Golden Gate), we began the tests to discover the "feeling" of the three phases.  At the beginning we used photos I would take on location.
2. The second phase was in the 70s: hippies, lysergic, chrome, artificial, loose, freaked out….(ecktachrome).
3. The third phase: heavy metal.

We worked based on these three propositions: Tulé, Bia, everyone.

But this was all just fooling around, because the biggest challenge without a doubt was to try to find a cinematography expression: a camera and lighting which would show without any "adornments" or "feigning", without exploiting, as if Paulo Lins were operating the camera and would happen to linger on a dog eating from the garbage in the street or a child getting hit by a gunshot.  Something Fernando called "non-photography".

Back to the book: "One piece of his head on one side of the alley, one of his eyes out of it's socket, intact, as if looking at him, small bloody pieces of meat spread all around with only the lower part of his face glued to his neck.  The streets, before deserted, became crowded in an instant.  The mothers' crying alongside their dead sons.  Up in the tenement apartments it was more like party time: only one down…..Pequeno sang his praises, paid for his beers, with a big hug he told him he was one hell of a guy…"

editor daniel rezende
City of God was the first feature film I had edited, having worked up to then only with commercials, video clips and a few "minute-videos".

I've worked with Fernando Meirelles for 4 years and when he invited me to edit "City" I accepted on the spot because of the project itself and Fernando's contagious enthusiasm.  The film was well structured in his, Katia's and César's minds.  The screenplay divided into three stories led us to work as if they were 3 separate films within the same project.

The first part - Cabeleira's story, shows the beginnings of crime in City of God in the mid 60s and still a bit "naïve".  Here we opted for a more "classic" type of editing with correct cuts, the use of "racord", respecting a central axis and privileging action.

The second part - Zé Pequeno's story, takes place in the 70s, now with drugs becoming the main source of revenue, and the latest thing to do.  Here the editing becomes freer and less conceptual, "racord" is now not so important.  The liberty used in cuts causes certain estrangement in the viewer and prepares him for what is to come.

The last part - Mane Gulinha's story, takes place in the late 70s and the drug war has been declared in the area, with the film's atmosphere becoming heavy and oppressive.  Here I have complete freedom and no longer worry about "racord", continuity in time and action, central axis or any of the other "rules" used in editing, making the cuts stand out and becoming strange.  This strangeness creates sensations of suffocation and tension, it is frenetic, with no time left to breath.  A person might say something but his lips do not necessarily move, another stands up in one take and could be sitting in the next….."strangeness" is something sought after.

All in all, it involved five months of work from the first scene to the last cut.  Some of the scenes were filmed using two or three cameras at the same time, the majority of the actors weren't professionals and had not even read the script before filming started - they changed the texts and would take different positions from one take to another.  They would relive a different scene during each take.  If this causes more spontaneity on one hand, giving the film more veracity, it made things for the editor much more difficult on the other.

It is difficult to evaluate the film being so involved, but my impression is that it fulfilled it's proposition.  It is impressive, true and different from most of the recent national films being made.  It is passionate……no one is left indifferent.  I am happy with our work.

art director tulé peake
When Bel (Berlinck) gave me Paulo Lins' book City of God  to read and told me it would blow my mind, alright, I thought, but are words all that powerful?  They were.  More than blow my mind, it transformed me.  And (worse still) there was the possibility that Fernando Meirelles would call me to be the art director for the film City of God, and put up on the silver screen, for all to see, the images revealed by my intense and solitary reading.

I, of course, left for Rio full of ideas about the work that lay ahead.  I had my share of fascination for criminals and, I thought, a little knowledge about the universe we would be working in.

Once again reality caught me by surprise - it sent me walking.  Things were much more profound, bigger and darker than I had expected.  And I delved into this abyss as someone with a job - project designer, which I thought was what I was to do in the film, and turned into an intermediary between the mind blowing reality and the final result seen on film, a sort of go-between between another reality and the real world.  Making things visible for us on this side, perhaps a little less than what the vanity of an art director would like, but an experience which transformed my professional and personal life.

Right on, City of God.

original music - antonio pinto and ed côrtes
City of God is a map of social violence and exclusion of a Brazilian city and reflects the country's recent history.  But even despite this "rawness" we really enjoyed composing the music for the film.

The movie takes place in the 60s and 70s and we based our work on Samba, Funk Samba, American Funk and Disco, all popular at the time.  The score was thought out with a chronological sequence.

The main theme is a percussion beat.  Samba can be heard everywhere from the Tender Trio's grassroots theme up to the film's most terrifying moment.

We liked doing what we did.  We hope you like what you hear.

Read the interview with director Fernando Meirelles
Read the views of the co-director, producer and screenwriter
Read Points of View on the film