Fernando Meirelles interview: 'Love can save us'

In his latest film, Fernando Meirelles descends into the darkness in order to find a spark of humanity. It's all part of his therapy, he explains to STEPHEN APPLEBAUM

IT TOOK JUST TWO FEATURE FILMS to establish the Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles on the world stage. His debut, 2002's hyper-kinetic gangster epic City of God, broke new ground for Brazilian cinema and garnered four Oscar nominations, including best director. For his follow-up in 2005, he turned to an adaptation of John le Carré's The Constant Gardener. The director's first film in English, the globe-trotting political thriller also scooped four Oscar nominations, resulting in a win for Rachel Weisz.

Instead of enjoying his success, though, by the end of 2005 Meirelles was falling apart. "I was really, really depressed," he says. "I have always been a very confident, happy guy, and in 2005 my life should have been very well off; I was promoting The Constant Gardener, I got an Oscar, I got a lot of offers, everything was right in my life. But I was really down. I hit the wall."

Meirelles says he was suffering so much that he had "a moment when I said, 'I don't want to live anymore'". He was puzzled. "I have a great family, I've been married for 22 years, there was no reason... That's what was making me really sad, because my life is perfect. I'm healthy. I do my job. I'm doing well. Why? Why!?" He smiles. "I'm the wrong guy for depression; I'm everything but depressed. But at some point in my life it just happened."

The affable Brazilian took six months off to try and find some answers to his malaise. "I think I found some," he says. "I think I saw something. The problem was really with myself. I was a bit blind with myself. So that's what I learned. Anyway, this is becoming like my shrink," he laughs, trying to draw a line under the subject. "I'm learning about myself, but I'm not going to expose myself here."

Just as Meirelles was emerging from the darkness, he received an offer to direct a film adaptation of Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago's best-selling apocalyptic novel, Blindness. The timing was perfect. As it happened, he had been trying to obtain the film rights to the book long before he made City of God. At the time, though, the author was reluctant to sell them to anyone, let alone a would-be first-time film-maker (Saramago explained last year that he was wary "because it's a violent book about social degradation ... and I didn't want it to fall into the wrong hands.") By 2006, though, two Canadians, producer Niv Fichman and actor/writer Don McKellar, had successfully talked Saramago round. Not only that, Meirelles's recent trials had given him a new, if possibly unwanted, connection to the book.

"I went down to learn about myself and then this film came, and I said, 'Well, it's a story of going down and regaining the humanity back," says Meirelles. "It's something to do with my experience.'"

A dark tale of civilisation in free-fall, Blindness imagines the effects on society when a mysterious infection causes people suddenly to lose their sight, plunging them into a world of milky whiteness. In an unnamed city, the sufferers are picked up by the authorities and forcibly quarantined inside a disused asylum. Wards become microcosms built on different social models, and as conditions deteriorate and people become more hungry and desperate, tensions rise and violence erupts.

As equally enigmatic as the blindness itself is the fact that one woman (played by Julianne Moore in the film) has, unbeknownst to everyone except her husband (Mark Ruffalo), inexplicably retained her vision; her ability to see will become her group's salvation.

"What attracted me (when I first read the book] is the fragility of civilisation," says Meirelles. "We think we're a very solid and complex society, but we're really one step from the abyss." Saramago's point is that even sighted people can be blind. It is a condition, Meirelles suggests, that afflicts us all to some degree, individually and collectively.

"We know we're burning the planet, that there's global warming, but we're driving our cars like it seems we don't see what we're doing. Now we're in the middle of this financial crisis that was really in front of us (all the time], and yet nobody had seen it coming. So when we don't want to see, we really don't see. That's what the film talks about."

The characters, then, begin as the seeing-blind, who, through hardship, gradually learn to really see – themselves, each other, the world – for, possibly, the first time. "When you're suffering, you think in a different way," says Meirelles. "For some reason it feels like you're more linked to everything when you're really down. So suffering is good. Maybe 20 years in therapy is the same thing, or you can have a really bad experience – you can choose."

Not everyone got what Blindness was about. Even before the film was finished, a US association of blind people wrote to Meirelles stating their disapproval of the project, and threatening to picket cinemas in America unless he allowed them to approve the screenplay, and revise it if necessary.

"They're very bossy," says the director. "We wrote back and politely said that everyone could have their own opinion, but it's our film. So, as promised, before we released the film, they told us they were going to hold demonstrations. And they did, in front of 75 cinemas, which is a big thing."

They claimed the movie portrayed blind people as "stupid" and "aggressive", says Meirelles. "But the film has nothing to do with blind people. It's about human nature."

The protesters need not have bothered. While in Brazil, Blindness, to the director's surprise, has been an even bigger hit than The Constant Gardener, in the US the film "did not work at all". But then Meirelles himself always knew from test screenings that the movie was going to be a tough sell. People who were familiar with the book understood and liked it, he claims. Whereas those who were expecting a Hollywood-style sci-fi movie like I Am Legend – albeit "the poor version" – "did not like it at all". He was not surprised, therefore, when the film received (to put it mildly) mixed reviews after opening the Cannes Film Festival in May.

Saramago, however, loved it. A short film on YouTube, shot by one of Meirelles's sons, shows the octogenarian quietly shedding a tear after watching Blindness for the first time in a small cinema in Lisbon, shortly after its baptism of fire in Cannes. "It's a very moving moment," says Meirelles. "I was so pathetically nervous next to him because I was sure he hated the film. I don't kiss people and I kissed his head. I was so moved."

Because of the film's success in other territories, Meirelles is convinced that Blindness's poor showing in the United States had less to do with the film itself than with the zeitgeist. "People are losing their jobs, losing their houses, losing their investment in their houses, it's not a good time for dark stories," he says. Indeed, Beverly Hills Chihuahua opened on the same day as Blindness and scampered straight to the number one spot. "So it's a better moment for Beverly Hills Chihuahua," he chuckles.

Meirelles promises that he will lighten up with his next film, Twentysomething, which he says will be "light, simple, (and] hopeful". First, though, he intends to take a break. I wonder what a comedy by the director of City of God, The Constant Gardener and Blindness will look like. He is good at delving into the darker corners of the human condition, but can he also look on the bright side? Is he an optimist?

"I think so," he says. "Our instincts are really primitive, but I think we can improve." Blindness is proof of this: it may feature rape, murder and moral depravity, but at the end there is hope as people begin to re-connect. "I really believe that love can save us. When you really love someone, that really can make you a better person. I'm sorry, it's so obvious," says Meirelles, reddening. "It's a cliché, but I really believe we have that in us." Bless.

• Blindness is released on 21 November.