Fernando Meirelles is Brazil's current darling director, the local film industry's most recent role model for strong vision and artistic success. After his decade-defining film City of God, Meirelles' English language follow-up The Constant Gardener was received in Brazil with a breathless enthusiasm that was slightly overboard. Anyway, there's no denying the guy has talent, and the announcement that Meirelles will direct a film adaptation of Blindness by José Saramago was big news today in Brazil -- the entire front page of the Arts section of the country's most important newspaper (Folha de São Paulo) was dedicated to the issue.

Meirelles had originally wanted to adapt Blindness in 1997 for his first feature-length film but Saramago declined, saying that there wasn't much point in transforming a story about blindness into images. Now the film will be made in the English language as a Canadian-Brazilian-Japanese-English independent coproduction and will be shot in Toronto and São Paulo with a budget of US$20 million.

I've quickly translated the short interview with Meirelles that ran in the Folha today...

Folha: How were you invited to direct "Blindness"?
Fernando Meirelles: Gail [Egan, of Potboiler Productions, producer of "The Constant Gardener"] contacted me in June of last year telling me about the script for "Blindness". But she didn't tell me that it was Saramago, and I didn't realize because in Brazil it's called "Ensaio Sobre a Cegueira". When I started to read it, I called immediately and said I was interested. Niv [Fichman, Canadian producer], her, and Don [McKellar, writer] came to São Paulo in the beginning of July, stayed there a few days, and we talked a lot. The coolest part is that it's an international independent coproduction without any studio. Brazil is entering with talent and money from the incentive laws; Canada,with the project and the script; Japan with a lot of money; and the English with money and legal resources. The cool part is that the film, in English, can be called Brazilian.

Folha: When you tried to buy the rights, Saramago argued that it wouldn't make much sense to transform the novel into a film. What are your ideas for the adaptation?
Meirelles: I try not to explain what I like about the story or say what the film will be about because it takes away a lot. But there are aspects of the book that interest me, like the frailty of civilization. People lose their vision and civilization collapses. We're a bunch of animals with a skin of civilization and when you move, everything is lost. It seems like we don't really see, we're destroying the planet and nothing changes. It's a metaphor about the blindness of our times. But there are cuts. The less I try to explain, the more readings I will be able to do. It's a lesson I learned with maturity.