Fernando Meirelles Quotes

We're supposed to capture what's in the air and give a form to it. The artist is like an antenna, always searching for new ideas and ways to express them.

But at the same time, they are very powerful and extremely profitable, because they produce these great pills. It is the second most profitable industry in the world. Just arms manufacturers -- who only kill people -- ironically are the only industry more profitable than drugs.

She impressed me because she knew even more than me about the character.

I got the job almost by accident.

She told me, 'It's just sex,' ... She flew to London to let me know how interested she was in the part. She knew so much more about Tessa than I did. I saw several other actresses, but she was the one who inspired me. It would be easy to play Tessa as a caricature, but there's a humanity in this character.

That little village that's raided in the film, it's just lost in the desert. There's nothing there. We came in and turned it into a big operation, like an al-Qaida training camp in the middle of the desert.

This is the sequel. Geography makes them seem separate, but eventually the connections between them will become clear.

He does the right thing every day and lives by a code.

When we first saw the locations we would be using, we decided to use a different visual approach to each part of the story.

When we finished filming I had a political drama, a love story and a documentary. But the love story was so strong I decided to make it the axis of the film.

We knew that we couldn't use lights and ask the boys to hit marks. Because they don't have the technique. They were not trained for that.

No country, ... is as harsh as the world.

In 'City of God,' it was more complicated, because we were shooting in areas controlled by drug dealers, so we always had people around, boys with guns, ... It was sort of threatening, not totally relaxed. Kenya was more relaxed. There was no organized crime inside the slums, and we were well received.

The film deals with pharmaceutical companies using Africans as guinea-pigs.