MARGOLIS: What is it like inside Latin America’s biggest prison? BABENCO: It’s unbearable, like something out of Dante or the Middle Ages. Imagine this place with almost 8,000 men, with 15, 16, 17 in a cell made for four. It’s insane. The inmates are like beggars. Some walk, extremely agitated, from left to right, right to left, and you wonder, where are they going? The only real activity is this frenzy to buy and sell, everything from drugs to toothpaste. When you visit, you are in a constant state of alert, because you never know what is going on.
What persuaded you to make a movie about Carandiru? I was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma in the early ’90s, after finishing “At Play in the Fields of the Lord,” and that practically stopped my work for a decade. [While I was] under treatment, I met a Brazilian doctor, Drauzio Varella, who was then at New York’s Memorial Hospital. He became my doctor and, in a way, my guide. I underwent a successful bone-marrow transplant, which they say has eradicated the disease. But I was so weak I couldn’t even open a bottle of Evian. I became impatient and angry about being stopped at the peak of my life. Then at night I would talk with my doctor on the phone, and he would tell me stories about Carandiru, where he was researching AIDS and doing voluntary medicine.
And that was the canvas for Varella’s book on the prison. Drauzio started listening to the prisoners’ stories. It was fantastic. Here was this scientist, a man of medicine and microscopes, who was doing something more than treating a disease. He was bringing me news from life. So one day I said why don’t you put this down on paper. He already had. And it was great. His style was clean, meticulous, no adjectives, like an autopsy. Four years later this became “Estaco Carandiru,” a best seller.
You came very close to dying. How did that shape your work? I’m still the same man. But I now know that certain aims you set for your life, or the system sets for you, are not necessarily the most important ones for a man. That’s the central question of “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” How do you become the best possible man? What’s important is the character’s attitudes toward people, friendship, the small acts of life.
How do you decide what to film? I always liked to read, and the first book in English was “Ironweed,” by William Kennedy. I learned English at age 40. I mean, I used to go into restaurants and tell the waiter, “I am a chicken.” I loved Kennedy’s book. So I went to his home in Albany [New York] and knocked on his door. We made a deal and wrote the screenplay together. Then I met Jack Nicholson, peeing in a bathroom in Los Angeles. I said hi, and he said, “Hi, who are you?” I said, “I’m a Brazilian, I made ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’.” “Oh, I heard about it,” he said. Later I sent him the screenplay for “Ironweed.” He called Meryl Streep. That’s how that project started. There were no middlemen. I never worked for a major studio.
Your characters are often outcasts and criminals. Is it difficult to package their stories to mass moviegoers? It is difficult… I left school at 15 to go to work. I know what it’s like with people who have no hope, no direction. But the masters, like Kurosawa, were always interested in the human condition.
Have you abandoned the idea of producing films in the United States or Europe? No, but I have run into a problem. Because I have made films in America, the Europeans think I sold my soul to Hollywood, despite the fact that they were all independently produced. The Americans think I am too European in sensibility. Besides, if you don’t have $100 million, you’re nobody in America. And the Brazilians insist on labeling me as Argentine, though I’m a naturalized Brazilian. At times I feel like a sniper taking aim on the movie industry. The world requires you to have a label. I’m an outsider.
