Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo in a scene from 'Blindness'
At last month’s Toronto International Film Festival, The Epoch Times sat down with the screenwriter/actor Don McKellar, director Fernando Meirelles, and actor Danny Glover.
Discussing his interest in adapting Mr. Saramago’s book to film, screenwriter Don McKellar (The Red Violin) explained “it sort of excited me on the thematic level but also the book…its amazing. It sort of blew me away, just, how far it went...it was so shocking and yet so undeniably true. I just couldn’t argue with this depiction of humanity and this portrait of the world as being so fragile. Civilization is such a fragile shell that can just crack and then we'd be straight back to barbarism...The responsibility we have is to preserve human dignity even under extreme circumstances. I think that is what the story is really about.”
Director Fernando Meirelles (City of God) had a similar reaction to the book. “I read the book and I was really, really amazed by the story and immediately I wanted to do it.”
Mr. Meirelles went on to describe how Blindness is different from other films about epidemics because this film is ultimately about human nature. “This film is quite different because it’s really not about the disease or somebody who is trying to save the world, or finding the cure or being a hero. It’s about how we would react. It’s about who we are, and how we see others. I think the disease here is just an excuse for us to see the behavior of those people. This is a journey of losing and regaining humanity. There is this group of people, and they’re capable of affection because they learned from what they had suffered. They’re able to re-create this little society, this little family and restore their humanity.”
Danny Glover in a scene from 'Blindness'
In preparing to play a blind character, Mr. Glover described the value of a workshop he attended. “It helped me in my thinking about challenges, but it also helped me physically feel the impact of these challenges through the body.”
One of the challenges for the cast and crew was communication according to Mr. Meirelles. “We were speaking five languages during the shooting, because the wardrobe department and the make-up department, they’re from Quebec [French province of Canada]. And we, of course, had people from Toronto who were English; Portuguese from Brazil; we had the Spanish crew from Uruguay and Argentina; and we had Japanese. Five languages at the same time (laugh). But it worked really, really well. It was really a great experience. Everybody became friends. It was a friendly environment. From the beginning I thought I should have a multi-ethnical cast, have some Asians, black actors, white, Latinos, a mix which really represents mankind. This is not in the book. In the book, the characters don’t have names, don’t have stories. Saramago doesn’t describe them.”
Frequently films adaptations of novels turn out quite different from the author’s original vision. Despite the challenges, Mr. Saramago was quite pleased with the result of the filmmakers’ efforts in their adaptation of Blindness.
Mr. McKellar discussed the author’s reaction when he first saw the film. “He loved it! We showed it to him in Lisbon. He (Mr. Saramago) is an intimidating guy—a bit scary. It would look really bad if he said he didn’t like the film—which I think he would have had no problem saying. There was this long, long silence at the end… and then we realized he was crying. Fernando (Meirelles, the director) leaned in and gave him a kiss and he (Mr. Saramago) said that he had the same feeling when the movie finished as when he finished the book. So that was a big, big relief for me. As the writer, I would have been crushed if he didn't like it.
