After more than a year poring over
Jose Saramago's book "Blindness" for the upcoming movie of the
same name, Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles is embarking
on a new literary journey with William Shakespeare.
Meirelles this week started shooting the TV series "Sound
and Fury," about a Shakespearean theater group in crisis, and
his next movie will be a loose adaptation of the playwright's
comedy "Love's Labour's Lost."
"Shakespeare is a heavy drug," said Meirelles said in an
exchange of emails. "The more you read, the more you want to
read. Each line has poetry, philosophy, a deep understanding of
what we are."
The movie is based on a Brazilian adaptation of "Love's
Labour's Lost" by moviemaker Jorge Furtado, who is also writing
the script.
The film, for which shooting will start next year, is set
in New York and London, following a Brazilian boy who gets a
scholarship to study Shakespeare abroad with students from
around the world. In the book, he falls in love with an Arabian
student.
The Brazilian TV show is based on the Canadian program
"Slings and Arrows."
"It's a romantic comedy more about the actors than the
plays, but it will have beautiful passages of Shakespeare
works," said Meirelles, who burst onto the international scene
with 2002's "City of God," a four-time Oscar nominated saga of
violence in Rio de Janeiro's slums.
The 52-year old Sao Paulo native said he wanted to work
with something lighter to balance the heavy themes of movies he
has made in the last few years, including 2005's "The Constant
Gardener," about a man who tries to solve his wife's murder in
Kenya.
His latest movie is also a grim drama, the English-language
adaptation of "Blindness," about an epidemic that lays waste to
a fictional country. It opened the Cannes Film Festival this
year and is set to be released internationally in September.
Saramago, a Portuguese who was awarded the Nobel Prize for
literature in 1998, wept after seeing it with Meirelles in a
movie theater recently -- a scene posted by the director's son
on YouTube.
"To my surprise, he got emotional and said he was as happy
to see the movie as he was when he finished writing the book.
It was the best gift I could receive," Meirelles said.
"Blindness" has co-producers from Brazil, Canada and Japan,
and an international cast headed by American actress Julianne
Moore. Beyond the physical sickness, the blindness is also
psychological, explains Meirelles, a disease that could infect
countries and civilizations.
When asked if the blindness could refer to Brazil and its
political corruption, he said a better candidate was the United
States, which he called "very blind" for electing President
George W. Bush twice.
"They have elected twice the same obviously inadequate guy,
and they can't see beyond their own country," Meirelles said.
"In Brazil I feel we have more desire to look at ourselves. But
all these are generalizations, always dangerous, so I should
stop it here."
Reuters/Nielsen
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