Fernando Mereilles’ Blindness Blog

If you’ve never been on a movie set, it’s hard to get a feel of the flow and process of creating a film; the finished, cut-together product is very different from the process used to make it. Even the film industry’s fetish for behind-the-scenes featurettes as DVD extras doesn’t cut it–they’re most often back-slapping, self-promoting love fests. Even when they’re not–as in the case of good commentaries or participant interviews–they’re often overviews of various aspects of lighting, casting or costume-design, and do not depict the day-to-day mechanics of filmmaking.

That’s why Fernando Mereilles’ blog is so fascinating–it offers details you just don’t get from “making of” overviews. Mereilles (right) is the Brazilian director of City of God and The Constant Gardener, and the blog is about the production of his newest film Blindness. Starring Mark Ruffalo and Juilanne Moore, it’s an adaptation of Portuguese Nobel Laureate José Saramago’s novel about a city that’s hit by an epidemic of blindness.

The blog is in Portuguese, and if you understand that language–and even if you don’t, I guess–you can go here and read it. For the rest of us, we have to rely on the kindness of strangers. Nathaniel R. at Film Experience has English summaries of posts 1 — 10. Over at TwitchFilm, they’ve got full translations of two of the posts, here and here. Finally, Yair Raveh has a full translation of post #13 at his blog Cinemascope.

For me, the most interesting posts are those that get down-and-dirty and describe the process. In one, Mereilles discusses the shooting of a difficult scene with Moore and Ruffalo. He describes in some detail the differences in warm-up time between actors, and how it can affect the way a scene is shot and edited, something that in a million years I never would have guessed. For the scene in question, they ended up using the fourth take of Moore’s performance and the eighth one of Ruffalo’s, trusting they could edit them together relatively seamlessly.

In the Cinemascope post, Mereilles describes the editing process, and how he and editor Daniel Rezende cut forty minutes from the first edit of the film. He writes:

“I love this stage in film making. It’s a condensed, creative stage, with no interruptions or exterior pressure. And at this stage, when you succeed in diagnosing and locating where are the exact problems in the script or its’ cinematic interpretation, you can work with the editing: to change the design of certain characters, to make the acting more precise and logical than it was in the actual filming of the movie.”

He goes on to describe in detail some of the tricks used in constructing a good performance from a poor one and how a character is shaped and colored in the editing process. (This has interesting reverberations with a recent post at Scanners).

All in all, very cool stuff, and thanks to all the folks who provided English versions of it.