By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Like Ali G.: How Fernando Meirelles learned his craft
Constant Gardener director Fernando Meirelles gives a decent overview of his career to the Reporter’s Anne Thompson: “I learned to shoot doing commercials. We started out doing experimental videos. For 10 years, we did different comedy shows on TV, comedy with journalism, we pretended to be doing docs or news of the week. I was a cameraman, director and host. It was fake journalism, like Ali G. After that, we were invited to do commercials with the characters we had in our shows. We were getting married [and] having kids who wanted to eat. Then, for 10 years we were only doing commercials. I’ve done 800-900 commercials, five to six a month. After 10 years, I was bored… Did you shoot “City of God” and “The Constant Gardener” in the same way? It was just a matter of locations. We shot them the same way, mixing 35 and 16, mixing some classic sequences with some more urgent. What we learned on “City of God” was to shoot freestyle. Instead of setting up the camera and the lights and bringing the actors in so that they perform for the camera for each angle, we create a general flat light and bring in the actors who perform. I don’t give them marks or ask them to move. The camera is there like a documentary trying to get what is happening. I don’t interfere. So I never break the scene, I always run from the top to the end, and I ask the actors to not be aware of the camera. They never know when we’re doing a close-up. The camera goes to a wide shot and a close-up all in the same shot. They got used to it after a while.”
