Man of the World

Photo by Anne Fishbein

At any given moment in time, a few movie directors in the world manage to develop a style that is uniquely their own, but which succeeds with audiences far and wide, and in turn has a constructive impact on other filmmakers. Such directors are what keep cinema alive: Godard in the ’60s; Fassbinder in the ’70s; Kieslowski in the ’80s; Almodóvar, Lars von Trier and Wong Kar-wai in the ’90s; and, most recently, the Brazilian Fernando Meirelles. In his two films to achieve worldwide distribution, Meirelles has revisited established film genres, packing them with unique new content while respecting their traditional significance. City of God, which was nominated for four Academy Awards (including best director), took the form of a socially conscious, documentary-style street drama and saturated it in the aesthetics of MTV’s rapid-fire editing. His new film, The Constant Gardener, takes on the conspiracy thriller — perfected three decades ago by directors like John Frankenhimer and Costa-Gavras — and ingeniously grafts onto it a vivid, erotic love story and agonizing, askance glances at the catastrophe of African poverty.

In The Constant Gardener, as in City of God, Meirelles and his team (including the brilliant editor Claire Simpson and cinematographer Cesar Charlone) shoot and edit with a jagged, feverish intoxication that paradoxically deepens their humane political agenda. And both films possess a sensuous, kinetic charge that sets colors off inside the viewer’s head — your dazed efforts to manage the physical beauty, the speed and excitement of the imagery, upsets any rote response to the political horrors that are simultaneously being exposed. Which only makes the exposure of those horrors all the more affecting.

It’s films like The Wild Bunch and The Godfather to which I’d compare Meirelles’ work, and in this key respect: an honestly tragic sociopolitical vision reaching us through a sensibility that is also alive to aesthetic value for its own sake. This definitely isn’t the by-the-numbers activist cinema that we’re used to — that spinach we swallow dutifully in order to receive its politically correct nutritional value. Whatever moral and ideological concerns propelled Meirelles into making these projects, the savage gaiety of their imagery and zest for fresh modes of storytelling demonstrate that his first and deepest obligation is to the film medium itself. The urge to “make a statement” isn’t allowed to trump these films’ responsibilities as works of art. This intricate juggling act of style and substance has compelled some to question Meirelles’ seriousness, but to me, it only confirms it. You come out of the films of Fernando Meirelles feeling as if you are seeing with new eyes.

L.A. WEEKLY: Let’s start with John le Carré. He’s been a major figure in contemporary fiction for nearly 50 years. Were you always interested in his books?

FERNANDO MEIRELLES: I had never read his books. First, I read the script, then I read the novel, and then I said, “Yes, I want to do the film.” Now, I’m planning to read his other books.

One of the things about this film and City of God that make them different from more orthodox, purely liberal social-injustice stories is that there’s a real element of tragedy in your vision of things, where you don’t come up with easy solutions to the problems.

Actually, I just do films about things that interest me. I never see myself as a political director or an activist or anything like that. I try not to preach to the audience and not to judge. I try to be — I’m not sure if this is the right word in English — amoral.

Well, amoral implies a certain indifference to morality. I think what you mean is nonjudgmental.

Yes. In City of God, we show boys killing each other, but I’m not judging them. That’s their life, that’s how it is. In this film, actually, I had originally inserted a kind of short documentary on drug companies — in the middle of the film, Tessa (Rachel Weisz) would go to her computer and would watch a lot of information about real companies and people from Oxfam and Medecins Sans Frontiers. But after watching the whole thing, I decided to take it out. It was like my voice preaching, and it’s better to just expose something and let the audience think about it.

One of the striking things about City of God, and we see it again in The Constant Gardener, is that the social and political and moral action is contrasted by a personal element in the main character’s life. In City of God, it’s the boy’s urge to get laid, which inserts itself into this grim panorama of war and death — it’s a very insistent part of that story. Here, there’s a tremendous insistence on an autonomous love story that has an arc quite separate from the destiny of Africa.

But that’s how life is, isn’t it? Sometimes you’re dealing with big social problems, you’re an activist, but you also get a hard-on for your partner. This is something that I like in this script, that there are a lot of gray areas. I mean, most people who see the film don’t like the character of Tessa at all in the beginning.