It’s hard to imagine a greater challenge for a filmmaker than this: concocting a convincing screen adaptation of a much-honoured novel that is set in an unspecified place and features a cast of unnamed characters, only one of whom has not been affected by an epidemic of sightlessness. Then again, Blindness director Fernando Meirelles has probably faced worse spots than that, seeing as the Brazilian filmmaker ventured into some of Rio de Janeiro’s roughest favelas to shoot City of God, his hit debut feature of 2002. Four years later, he joined forces with writer Don McKellar and producer Niv Fichman, the Toronto team who beat out other suitors (Meirelles included) for the rights to adapt José Saramago’s novel. The final product of their efforts — and the efforts of stars such as Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo and Gael Garcia Bernal — opened this year’s Cannes film festival and now goes into wide release in a recut version. Meirelles spoke with EYE WEEKLY in a pair of interviews around the time of the premiere in May.
Saramago’s story isn’t really big on specifics in terms of where, when and who. Was it crucial to figure out a way to drag Blindness into some kind of here and now?
We really tried to make the story believable. We could’ve gone toward a more theatrical thing or a more metaphorical thing but we tried to make it very naturalistic, especially at the beginning so we could drag the audience in. I don’t know if that worked but that’s what we tried. We wanted the film to make people ask, “What if that happened to me?”
Did you and Don McKellar agree on how to go about doing this?
There was never a fight in the whole process. We were lucky to have the same vision of the film because it was really smooth working together. And I didn’t let him [leave] through the whole process of shooting and editing. Every time Don thought he could say, “OK, I’m finished, thank you very much, it was great working with you,” I’d come back to him and say, “What about if we change that?” or “Can we rewrite that?” He really worked hard. I was probably very annoying!
How did you and the cinematographer Cesar Charlone develop a visual style that would convey a sense of life in a blinded world?
We tried different tricks. The first idea — which is an obvious idea but I think it works — was using the brightness to burn and destroy the image. The idea was to deconstruct the image during the film. Then we used other ways of doing that. Sometimes the framing is wrong — we cut actors off in the middle, for example. We use a lot of reflections so sometimes you have the actors cut into three parts in the same frame. We also used the sound to make things confusing. Throughout the film there’s almost no in-sync dialogue. The dialogue is happening but you’re seeing a different thing. You barely see the people who are talking — the camera is pointed somewhere else. I think that all helps to give a sense of disorientation.
Saramago insisted that the film of Blindness not take place in any identifiable country. How did that affect how you cast it?
I wanted a very multi-ethnic cast — Asian, black, white, Latino. It’s a story about mankind, not about a specific regime or place. Trying to do that with the cast was an interesting exercise — at some point we had a Japanese guy playing the Man with the Black Eye Patch so we planned to have a black person play the First Blind Man. Instead, it’s the reverse. It would always change. In the end I was very happy with the cast, especially with
Julianne — she really carries the film. That’s as it should be: it’s a story told from her point of view.
Did Saramago give you any input?
We exchanged emails and I would try to get opinions. But he was always like, “I wrote the book, you do the film.” He was a real gentleman about it. The only input he gave me was about the dog, who he calls the Dog of Tears in the book. I presented him a list of actors to play different characters but only with the dog was he specific. I read an interview with him and the journalist asked him of all the characters from all the books, which would be the one he wanted to last. He said he would choose the Dog of Tears. I never understood that — all these amazing characters but the one he likes the most is this dog!