City of God (2002)
- The lead role in City of God was originally offered to a massive A-list star who turned it down because they didn't understand the script.
- Despite a very rocky opening weekend, City of God went on to gross over 5x its initial budget thanks purely to incredible audience word-of-mouth.
- During the filming of City of God, the director famously rewrote the ending on the fly after seeing the incredible chemistry between the lead actors on set.
City of God is a 2002 Brazilian crime drama directed by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, based on Paulo Lins's semi-autobiographical 1997 novel about life in the Cidade de Deus, a notoriously violent housing project in Rio de Janeiro. The film spans three decades, from the 1960s through the 1980s, chronicling the escalation of gang violence through the eyes of Rocket, a young aspiring photographer who grows up surrounded by drug dealers, murderers, and corrupt police officers but uses his camera to document the madness rather than participate in it. Fernando Meirelles employed a kinetic, innovative visual style — rapid editing, freeze-frames, split screens, saturated color grading, and non-linear storytelling — that reflected the chaotic energy of the favela and drew comparisons to the early work of Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino.
The film cast actual residents of Rio's favelas in many roles, lending an authenticity that professional actors could not have replicated. City of God received four Academy Award nominations including Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay and earned $30 million worldwide, an extraordinary figure for a Portuguese-language film. The film is widely considered one of the greatest crime films ever made and the defining work of Brazilian cinema for international audiences.
