I consider “Marighella” to be perhaps the most important project I have ever done, both for my personal involvement and for political issues. It was very difficult to have to wait so long to see the movie on screen because of political reasons in addition to the pandemic.

Marighella is a very important film for the days we are going through. I’m sure the movie will be successful even if box office is a little affected by the pandemic.

Despite already having a huge amount of set experience, this is Wagner Moura’s first feature film as a director. All of our conversations prior to the project were fundamental to understanding what Wagner wanted.

Photos: Ariela Bueno, Fabio Bouzas and Fernanda Frazão

I consider “Marighella” to be perhaps the most important project I have ever done, both for my personal involvement and for political issues. It was very difficult to have to wait so long to see the movie on screen because of political reasons in addition to the pandemic.

Marighella is a very important film for the days we are going through. I’m sure the movie will be successful even if box office is a little affected by the pandemic.

Despite already having a huge amount of set experience, this is Wagner Moura’s first feature film as a director. All of our conversations prior to the project were fundamental to understanding what Wagner wanted.

Photos: Ariela Bueno, Fabio Bouzas and Fernanda Frazão

One of these activists told us that she decided to throw herself out of the Hospital das Clínicas window because she could no longer stand being tortured by a doctor. The movie has a similar scene. The torturers didn’t want to kill her because they still needed to extract information from her. She didn’t die because she fell on top of a car. These were emotional stories and very important for our preparation. It got under our skins. 
 
Wagner is a very visceral guy. A scene that had three pages in the script could end up as a six-minute shot. Improvisation was incorporated. In a scene, the friar says that Jesus was black. This scene was created by Pastor Henrique Vieira, who is one of the actors in the film and brought interesting aspects that we decided to include.
 
In the electric shock scene, we had to interrupt the filming because actor Jorge Paz fell and injured himself. The dramatic involvement was very strong and he said he was fine and wanted to go on, but he couldn’t, he was really hurt. The intensity level was high. We had to stop and finish on the next day. Bel Berlinck, executive producer, insisted on taking him to be examined at the hospital. We really needed someone like her, with a clear head, because we were all immersed in that atmosphere.
Gabriela Cassaro did a research of films of the time and political films, Costa Gravas, “The Battle of Algiers”, Dardenne brothers, etc. The art brought visual references of the time, which were fundamental for us to learn, and so we started to develop the visual concept of Marighella.
 
“Marighella” is a story that took place at the height of the Military Dictatorship in Brazil. We quickly understood that it would not be a movie that should have frills or pyrotechnics. We wanted viewers to believe that story and those images. Despite being lit and staged, we were looking for a very realistic path. Frederico Pinto’s art direction and the lighting should feel real.
 
We had a spectacular cast that had a very intense preparation with Fátima Toledo. Rehearsals involved a very strong delivery. I was worried when the actors arrived on set because they were already very strong. I arranged for us to bring the actors in at the last moment, as once on set, we would have to shoot.
 
Former members of the ALN (Aliança Libertadora Nacional) were invited to tell us what they had lived through. We listened, very moved, to the reports of situations experienced by them, as well as torture techniques used by the police and the military.
Wagner knew what he wanted, a documentary language in which the camera followed the actors and stayed close to them. I believe we shot 90% of the film with three prime lenses 28mm, 40mm and 65mm. The entire film was shot with a handheld camera and the only tripod sequence was a TV news situation.
 
Due to the physical demand and also to be closer to Wagner, I invited Ariel Schvartzman to share the camera operation with me, as I really like to operate a camera, but I knew I couldn’t operate for the entire film.
 
Even still shots or close-ups were shot with a hand held set up, the camera moved from one actor to another. Today I see a lot of reason in everything. I think it’s totally embedded in the concept, as the idea was to convey a constant feeling of discomfort.
 
In dialogue scenes, with no cuts, you need to know when to move from one character to another without interrupting the flow of conversation. When the two do not appear in frame at the same time, one of them will always have the voice off-screen. Sometimes you are framing an actor’s face and need to move the camera mid-sentence to show the speaker’s reaction. Instead of doing shot and reverse shot, we made the camera get on with the emotion.
 
In preparation, my assistants Diogo Ribeiro, Yuri Maranhão and Eduardo Duque Pimenta made the camera as light as possible. The camera body battery, the video link and the focus and iris motor were removed and left in a separate backpack. We filmed with ARRI ALEXA Mini (LF didn’t exist yet).
 
Luciano Foca, from O2 Pós, was the colorist, who got very involved and helped me find the texture for “Marighella”. I did tests with different lenses and simulated situations that I would face with the actors, we took this material to color correction and developed a realistic look that simulated the 60s.
 
I chose to use ARRI Ultra Prime Lenses because I wanted to make the most of natural light and not have unwanted flares, for example, when you have a framed window, as that light can invade the actors’ faces. I needed lenses that still gave me a bit of dirt but allowed me to control the highlights. 
 
We shot in the 2:1 aspect ratio, which brings this element of the documentary, of reality. I didn’t want to make a 2.35:1 cinema. It’s a period film, which would make some framing difficult if it were 2.35:1. We would run the risk of leaking current elements, especially in street scenes, where our control over the sets is less, and it would be more work for the art direction. I was also very concerned about the idea of shooting 2.35:1 handheld because the giddy feeling would be exaggerated.

Ariel Schvartzman

The main lighting concept of “Marighella” was not to make the light stand out.
 
We only filmed the point of view of our characters, never the other side, as the idea was to try to convey what they felt by being permanently watched and persecuted.
 
Following the bank robbery planning meeting, we filmed with two cameras. The location was an apartment in Santa Cecilia during the day. In the film, the place was used by activists as a device and so there were sheets of newspaper covering the window panes. Since we were going to shoot for many hours, I decided to place an 18KW HMI in the building opposite. I was afraid I couldn’t rely on natural light. Dusk came and we continued filming.
 
The film does not have a lot of designed lighting. I think I’m becoming simpler about this. I prefer to take advantage of the practical lighting that is already in the environments and my relationship with the Art Director, Frederico Pinto, was fundamental. At most, I create one more source of light according to the possibilities, but still always trying to reproduce the lighting that would naturally happen in those locations.
 
We worked with many textures on the walls and costumes. Verônica Julian, costume designer, understood that digital has no grain, that we lose texture and that the weaves of clothes work better. It was a very experienced team, which also had the makeup artist Martin Trujillo, who is a master. The skins were always shiny or sweaty.
 
Sometimes I would  acknowledge the dark, without interventions. Some places that the military used to carry out torture were abandoned houses or sheds. It was something clandestine, so it wasn’t bright. I would put in one or two lamps and simulate the light from a streetlamp coming from the street.
 
In the scene in which Marighella is murdered, it was difficult to figure out what the lighting of a street in São Paulo, in Santa Cecília, in the 1960s would be like. In real life, it must have been darkness. We had photos from the time. We reproduce street lamps with sodium-vapor lamps.  We even used gels and ARRI SkyPanels on menace arms.

CAMERA AND ACTION

 

The action sequences were very planned, we did storyboards and also rehearsals with the actors on location, where we photographed them and sometimes even recorded them.
 
The train’s initial long shot was very well designed. It was a complex overnight. Gaffer Joel Júnior had to prepare the lamps in all the cabins. We used different, more powerful lights, connected to a separate power source, which did not depend on the train engine. The weapons wagon set is a set built inside an empty one.
 
The characters go through various environments in the train, with different lights, pass the locomotive and go to the driver’s cabin, then back to the weapons compartment. At one point, the train is still moving and you see the car following along the track. We needed to create 20 light posts, which were installed by us with a distance of 10 meters between each one. It was like we were in a metropolitan area.
 
It was tough, but it was the most broken down scene in “Marighella”. First we chose the location and took a ride on the train. On another day, we did a rehearsal with the train stationary to tune in the acting. Then I came back a third time with Junior just to see the lighting. We went several times before filming, but at the time of filming we couldn’t do it too many times. I think it was five or six takes.
In the scenes in Bahia, we needed to quickly convey to the viewer that we were in the Northeast of Brazil. We created a more solar look, with a different color than São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
 
In Cachoeira, we take advantage of the city’s lights. The only thing we did was maintenance on the street lighting on the iron bridge, because some light bulbs weren’t working.
 
I really like the final sequence, the boy’s bathing in the sea, with song by Gonzaguinha. We were already over budget and wouldn’t be able to mobilize the entire team to do one more night. We decided to go on our day off . The assistants and the actor Francisco Matheus agreed. The day before this shoot, we finished filming at midnight, traveled and arrived at the beach at 3:00 in the morning. We slept until 10am and went to do this sequence. It was amazing, it was Iemanjá’s day, which gave us a beautiful sky, it was emotional.
At the Berlin Film Festival, the film was screened at the Berlinale Palast. The screening was incredible, the film touched a lot of people, we got a standing ovation. I had never seen such a large screening of a film I have shot.
 
Wagner is very brave, very serious and involved, he has a contagious energy. I am very grateful to him and Bel Berlinck, Executive Producer, for the fantastic experience of filming “Marighella”.

Mini Bio

Adrian Teijido started getting involved with photography when he was still a teenager, encouraged by his parents who worked in the audiovisual industry. After learning experiences in the processing laboratory of the Lasar Segall Museum and in the film “Pixote: A Lei do Mais Fraco” (1981), as an intern for the photographer Rodolfo Sanchez, he began his professional career in cinema and in the advertising world. He worked as a camera assistant for five years at Última Filmes with director and photographer Ronaldo Moreira. Over 40 years, he signed the cinematography of films such as “O Palhaço” (2011), “Gonzaga: De Pai pra Filho” (2012), “Elis” (2016), “Sergio” (2020) and “Medida Provisória” (2020), as well as television series such as “Filhos do Carnaval” (2006), “A Pedra do Reino” (2007), “Narcos” (2015-2019), “Irmandade” (2019) and “Dom” (2021) , among other projects. He was eight times winner of the ABC Award (Brazilian Association of Cinematography), three times winner of the Grand Prix of Brazilian Cinema and received the Kikito trophy at the Gramado Film Festival with “Um Homem Só” (2016), among other awards for cinematography. He is a member of ABC and was president of the association between 2016 and 2017. He was born in Buenos Aires in 1963 and moved with his family to Brazil at the age of four.

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