Cast Update and Blog Entry for Fernando Meirelles' Blindness

Shooting has began for BLINDNESS, the much anticipated Fernando Meirelles’ adaptation of the novel by the Nobel Prize winner Portuguese writer José Saramago. The novel is about a city that is struck by an epidemic of blindness.

The known cast is as follows: Julianne Moore as The Doctor’s Wife, Mark Ruffalo as The Doctor, Gael García Bernal, Sandra Oh, Danny Glover, Don McKellar, Maury Chakin, Yusuke Yseya, Yoshino Kimura and Alice Braga.

Fernando Meirelles has just started a blog where you can read his latest thoughts on what’s going on the set. Keep reading for a translation of his latest blog entry.

Tuesday, 4th of September 2007
About the shoot “al dente”

About cooking, I know only the basic so that I don’t embarrass myself. But I know that to prepare a good Linguini with Pesto Sauce everything has to be done at one time. Emotional scenes are just like that; one cannot rehearse too much before shooting so that the scene keeps the perfume of basil and the emotion of “al dente”.

Before those scenes we only make one “blocking”, as they call it here in Canada; we check the actors’ movements to make sure everyone is in the right place: camera, lights, the olive oil, the extras, nuts. You know. When everything is in the sink, one asks for silence, rolls the sound, puts the pasta in boiling water and the scene has to happen in those 8 to 11 minutes, depending on the type of pasta. And that is the first problem: some actors reach the right point after two or three takes, others need seven or eight and there’s even the ones that like to shoot one scene 15 or 16 times. To shoot a scene with actors with different warm up times is the same as to cook ravioli and fusilli in the same pan to be served at the same time. It was like that last Wednesday.

Julianne Moore was devastated when she found out that she would have to shoot the scene in which she comes crying heavily down the hall after she witnessed the rape of 12 women and killed two of the rapists. It’s hard to get the right tone without doing the previous scenes. But there was no other way. It was that or staying still, neither Gael Bernal nor Danny Glover had arrived. We were without anything else to shoot, so we went for it.

Julianne’s microphone was already on, I could hear through the head-phone that, in the other side of the hall, alone, she was preparing by breathing heavily. Meanwhile, we were doing our own preparations: lights, camera, and extras. Then she started crying and later crying compulsively, then an assistant came running to us and announced “Julie’s ready and she’s asking to shoot right now”. We weren’t ready but in those situations its not important if the table is not set or if the wine is not open. One has to shoot. And we did.

In the first take, she came running desperately down the hall. She screamed her lines without thinking, letting out any kind of emotion that was boiling up. She took all of us by surprise, especially Mark Ruffalo. Instinctively he went with the flow and answered with a very high tone as well. The scene came out so strong that it silenced everyone in the set. Despite the fact that my heart was beating very strong, I fought hard not to be rolled over by the passing tsunami, I run to where the actors were and asked for another take in a much softer tone. Julie didn’t even answer me. She agreed with a nod and a technical smile and returning to her first position, said only: “Let’s shoot now, please”. Emotion is a living and fading thing. One hour it is there, solid, it can even be rolled up with a fork and chewed, but in the next moment it evaporates. Julie was trying to keep herself focused to keep solid that living thing. Some of the extras reactions needed to be corrected, Guilherme came to tell me that Julie’s microphone battery had died and needed to be replaced and I wanted to talk with Mark, but only had the time to tell him not to let himself be dragged away by Julianne’s tone; and let’s got just like that. We’ll fix the sound problem later.

I knew that if I kept cooking this scene for more than 5 minutes something would be lost forever. So we shot the second take. A third and a fourth. All in quick succession, without even breathing between takes. Make-up artists, boom operator, assistants, everyone desperately trying to do their jobs after each take, but I managed to hold up the fort. And then something happened.

Julie (Can I call her that? Everyone does) had learned how to do the scene and didn’t need to be carried by emotion alone anymore. I took my foot from the accelerator a little bit, but didn’t let it cool down too much, I asked all the extras to get further away from the actors, it was faster than teaching them better reactions, I explained to Winnie, the script supervisor, that continuity wasn’t a priority in this scene, let’s not waste time with details. I just waited a little longer to allow Guilherme to trade the microphone battery while Cesar placed two more cameras so we could shoot simultaneously and avoid repeating the same thing for an hour.

I still managed to spend some time with Mark, who was not managing to think about the scene because of the chaos generated by Julie’s demand and then we shot four more takes trying to find the exact mood for the scene. Because of the break Julie lost a bit of emotion, but on the other hand Mark was slowly finding is tone. Half an hour after the first take everything was more technical, more precise, but no so alive. We stopped then and I promised the actors that if the scene was not good enough we would re-shoot. Julie begged to not be put trough the same thing again. Let’s hope not, was all I could say.

Yesterday in the editing room with Daniel, we saw that the ideal would be to use Julie’s fourth take, still warm but not so out of control and Mark’s eighth. Daniel has got to make it work by editing lines that were shot at different moments and without one of the microphones, maybe we’ll have to assume some discontinuity with the extras, but that comes with the territory. Apart from that, I think the scene is beautiful. We managed to capture what was really important.

(And you know what? If in one of these scenes someone is watching for the background of the room to look for a continuity mistake, he/she deserves to find it. A huge effort like this just so some dude can say he didn’t like the movie because the bearded man behind Julianne went missing in the second shot? Give me a break!).