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Elite Squad: The Enemy Within

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

Story : ELITE SQUAD: THE ENEMY WITHIN (TROPA DE ELITE 2) takes place in one of the most dangerous places on Earth: the sprawling slum that surrounds Rio de Janeiro. As the head of Rio’s Special Police Operations Battalion (BOPE), Captain Nascimento (Wagner Moura) is accused of a massacre when a BOPE mission to quell a jail riot ends in the violent death of a gang leader. But the citizens of Rio, tired of the crime and drugs that plague their city, embrace him as a hero--and with elections around the corner, he finds himself promoted. Nascimento uses his powerful new position to bring the gangs to their knees, but quickly discovers that he’s only making things easier for the dirty cops and corrupt politicians that are truly running the game.

November 11, 2011 (Limited 11/11)

Runtime:1 hr. 56 min.

 

Interview with Director Jose Padilha

 

(Q): The original "RoboCop."

(Jose Padilha) : Witness the original "RoboCop." It's not a big budget movie, the original "RoboCop," but it's a Hollywood movie, it's a studio film, and it's totally its own thing. It's not out of a formula; it's never been done before. Exactly. That's what "RoboCop," the next thing has to be. And if it's going to be something it's going to be that, I mean at least with me.

(Q) : You take on such a huge project, this "Elite Squad." That's a major deal considering what is going on realistically in that country.

(Jose Padilha) : I think what is going on realistically in Brazil is pretty much what you see in "Elite Squad" too. Of course there are other things going on, there are a lot of things going on in Brazil. But I didn't start with "Elite Squad: The Enemy Within." I started with "Bus 174," which is a small documentary about a street kid that is mistreated by the state over and over again. He was thrown in a school for juvenile delinquents that was basically a torture camp.

Like many other street kids that's how the state treated Sandro until the day he snapped and became very violent on a bus. And so what I was saying with that movie was why do we have so many violent criminals? Because we mistreat the street kids, we don't have proper schools and so on. Then I did another movie which was sort of like in a dialog with "Bus 174" saying guess what, we do the same thing with the policemen. We mistreat the policemen, we pay them very low wages, we give them very poor training, we select them very badly.

(Q) : That was the…

(Jose Padilha) : "Elite Squad."

(Q) : Oh yeah, but there's a documentary before "Elite Squad."

(Jose Padilha) : Not that I've done. I've done "Bus 174" and then "Elite Squad."

(Q) : You did "Garapa" right?

(Jose Padilha): But I'm only talking about that subject matter. But you're right; I did three other documentaries before. But focusing on this, urban violence, which "Garapa," you're right, has something to do with it. But focusing on this, in "Elite Squad" I show how the state mismanages the police and by doing so creates violent and corrupt policemen. No wonder we have so much violence in Rio, because the criminals and the police the state creates meet them in the streets and shoot each other. Then I decided to make "Elite Squad: The Enemy Within," which is sort of like aimed at answering a question, which is why does the state behave this way?

And once you put the question in that level then you're no longer doing a cop movie. You're doing a movie in which the characters are in between the police and the politicians. That's where Nascimento is. He's working with the criminals, the policemen, but at the same time he has to deal with the governor and everything. And so that one, you're right, is a huge subject matter, but I didn't start there. I got there in stages, and meanwhile I shot other films. Like he said, "Garapa" is a movie about hunger in Brazil.

(Q) : The really, really poor poor. Oh my god.

(Jose Padilha) : It's a difficult movie and a difficult situation. But a lot of things are happening in Brazil. Some of them have to do with urban violence, other things don’t.

(Q) : But there's an upside to Brazil now.

(Jose Padilha) : A lot of money is going into Brazil. As countries like this mismanage their financial system in such a bad way the money goes to places where they think it's safer. There aren't a lot of derivatives in Brazil. There's a limit on leverage in the Brazilian financial system, which you guys don't have. Also we're going to have the Olympics.

(Q) : And you have Lula, which I think has offered some…

(Jose Padilha) : Lula is sick now.

(Q) : Oh yeah, I heard.

(Jose Padilha): And we had a left wing government that had a commitment to paying back some of the debt that the previous governments have. Because previously, before Lula Brazilian governments were transferring money from the poor people to the rich people to the mechanism called inflation. Lula gave some of that money back but I think the poor people are still owed a lot of money. And we've got to keep that going, because I don't know, if Lula is sick I don't know if he's going to win the next election.

(Q) : How's the woman?

(Jose Padilha) : She's not Lula. But that's another issue.

(Q) : But there is a reason I ask, because what your movies do in Brazil at least is remind people of these issues. And they have an impact because unlike here where we're so media, there's a lot of media in Brazil with the TV, but a movie like yours can really almost change things.

(Jose Padilha): It can change the agenda of the debates and it can put things in a different perspective than the regular media does. And yes, it's true, in Brazil you can get a movie like "Elite Squad" 2, like "The Enemy Within," which we self-distributed from a garage in my distribution company with four people in it. You don't need a huge media machine to push the film, so that's a little different than here. I don't think in this country you can independently distribute a movie and then be the highest grossing movie ever in the US, it's impossible. IN Brazil you can do it.

(Q) : And it was seen in the favela?

(Jose Padilha) : It was seen everywhere.

(Q) : You did screenings there?

(Jose Padilha) : We did, but now we have some slums with screens. There's a program, the Rio de Janeiro government has a program that is opening theaters in the slums, which is a great thing. And guess what, they're always, always booked. Sell a lot of tickets.

(Q) : How does the system differentiate in the slum area when they both get into an aspect? When a dirty cop gets into a drug dealing issue, how do they operate in a system like that?

(Jose Padilha) : The basic story of crime in Rio de Janeiro favelas is this. You see the growth of drug trade in the slums in a movie called "City of Gods," in which a phenomenon that happened in Rio starts which is different groups of drug dealers strive to control the drug trade, fight each other on themselves, and then they control the whole slum, they are the ruler, they rule. If I tell you I'm a drug dealer and I control this and you are going to live in that house, you're going to go. There's no stake, it's everything controlled by the drug trade.

Now once that is established, the drug trade starts to get a relationship with the police, and the relationship is one of symbiosis. The police always get a cut from the drug trade traditionally. So much so that Rio de Janeiro is the only country I know in which everybody knows the address of every drug dealer and nothing happens. And why nothing happens? Because the police is getting a cut. So the traditional development of the drug trade in Brazil is different gangsters controlling different slums, and there are a thousand slums in Rio, all in cahoots with the police.

Sometimes the relationship between the drug trade and the police is a peaceful one. I let you do your business; you give me some money at the end of the day. Sometimes it's a violent one; I have to get the money from you. You do your business then I arrest you and then I say "Give me $50,000, I will let you go," and we shoot at each other a little bit but it's still a business.

(Q) : Isn't that what "Elite Squad"?

(Jose Padilha) : One is about. As time goes by some policemen started to realize that there's another model. What if we push the drug trade out of the slum, and instead of making money only out of the cuts we get from the drug trade we now make money out of every single business in the slum. We control transportation, we control gas, we control television, cable networks, we control everything, and we become like the mob in New York. Like you want to open a restaurant you've got to pay. So the police realized that this was more profitable than being in cahoots with the drug dealers.

This is what's going on right now in Rio. Slowly they start pushing the drug dealers out and occupying the slum themselves. You have to understand that the police are different from the drug trade because the police is controlled by the state. Once the policemen start to control different slums they start to control the votes on the slums. You're going to vote for governor; you better elect the guy I say because if you don't elect the guy I say, if somehow this favela doesn't vote for this guy people are going to suffer here. Or they can do it in a subtle way.

They invite the governor on, the governor campaigns there, and other candidates are not allowed in, for instance. And so the militias are different from the Bope because now the militias have a political side. They can actually elect federal congressmen, state congressmen, governors, and mayors. And so that created two types of slums; slums controlled by drug trade, in which the policemen get a cut, and slums controlled completely by the police in which it's the militia. And those are different things because when the militia controls the slum usually there's no drug dealing in there. The excuse for the militia is to say "I am preventing drug trade, therefore I'm more acceptable sort of." But of course it's a lie.

(Q) : So how does BOPE get in on this?

(Jose Padilha): BOPE is another thing. Let me explain.

(Q) : Because they need them to counterbalance the militias.

(Jose Padilha): They developed BOPE because once the police, BOPE came before the militias, once the police in initial phases; this is what you see in the first movie. In initial phases of the drug trade in Rio all that happened was drug dealers in cahoots…

(Q) : Bad police.

(Jose Padilha) : Which is mostly the police. Those drug dealers are very poor, no education, and so sometimes the drug dealer goes crazy. Sometimes the drug dealer starts burning buses in the street, starts killing a lot of people. You've got to have a way of controlling those crazy guys, so they created a special unit, which is called BOPE, which originally only had 70 people in it, to control those drug dealers. Not so solve the drug trade problem, because you cannot solve a problem that has to do with a thousand slums with 70 cops.

It's just to say when you get out of control we're going to push BOPE. That's what BOPE is. Now, when the militias start to control things and the militias are policemen of course the militias try to have their own people go into BOPE. And because BOPE is also controlled by the governor politically they can go and put people inside BOPE, you see.

(Q) : Isn't it true though that now BOPE is supposed to be an independent organization?

(Jose Padilha) : It's not.

(Q) : But that was the original idea.

(Jose Padilha): Yeah, but it's not. It's never managed to. BOPE is still a part of the police.

(Q) : But I thought at one point they were trying to make it a more independent organization.

(Jose Padilha) : Well BOPE has its own chain of command and everything, but at the end of the day the boss of BOPE is the boss of Secretary of Security, which responds to the governor. So it doesn't matter; it ends up in the governor's palace, so to speak, even BOPE. The police in Rio is controlled by the governor of Rio.

(Q) : But isn't there now an effort, especially with the Olympics and the fact that Brazil is getting this sort of larger global presence that they now feel to avoid a situation like Mexico, where it's completely out of control where basically the police and the drug dealers are one in the same, that BOPE or something like BOPE was supposed to become independent?

(Jose Padilha) : It's true. It's not something that changes the structure of the police. It doesn't change BOPE.

(Q) : It's independent of the politicians.

(Jose Padilha) : No it's also related to the politicians, but it's like this. We're going to have an Olympics and we're going to have the World Cup in Rio, and we all know how violent Rio is, so we've got to make this place safe for the tourists. Which already pisses me off because I'm a Brazilian.

(Q) : They should make it safe for you.

(Jose Padilha): Yeah, let's make it safe for us, not because of the Olympics. That already pisses me off, but then again all the business in town, everybody wants to say now it's the chance to make it safe, because everybody's going to make money out of the Olympics. But it doesn't matter. Now the governor of Rio, the current governor of Rio created a program called the UPP: Unit of Pacifying Police. And the UPP is basically the regular police and BOPE, the governor goes and says "Okay, that particular slum here is close to the soccer stadium.

It's too dangerous to have drug trades here, so we're going to use all the police, 40,000 people, all the guns, everything, and we're going to announce to the drug trade we're going to take this slum over." Now of course one guy in a slum cannot fight all of the police in the state, so the drug dealers leave, and then they move in and put the police here, and now they go to another slum. And so they're doing this in all the key slums for the Olympics and for the World Cup, and they're never doing it in the militia slum, only in the drug trade slum. So what is going to happen with those slums that are now controlled by the police in 10 years? Well, if they don't change the police they're going to be militia controlled. You see what I mean?

(Q) : So do you feel that you made these films with the idea of helping to change the system, besides the fact that they were entertaining and exciting? Obviously, just like "RoboCop" was entertaining it also had an underlying political message.

(Jose Padilha) : Yeah, I think what you're saying is important if you look at the history of Brazilian filmmaking. Usually political films in Brazil were very Marxist oriented because Brazil was a right wing dictatorship, so all the intellectuals were fighting the right wing dictatorship, and very metaphorical because we had a lot of censorship. The government would actually watch the movies and cut the movies. And so all the political movies in Brazil, they would never talk to the regular audience. You have to hide the message of the film behind strange metaphors and stuff like this, that's what you see.

Now the first movie in Brazil that dealt with social issues in a very direct, precise way, and worked with the audience was "City of Gods." So "City of Gods" changed this because Fernando said "Okay, we can make a movie that talks about social issues and that's fun and that's going to have an audience." And I think that was genius, and it changed the way Brazilian filmmakers make movies about social issues, like in "Elite Squad," because now I can go and say okay, I want to make a movie about the police.

I want to criticize the way the government manages the police. If I make a very hermetic film, what's the point; nobody's going to watch it anyways. So I try to put a political agenda inside a movie that's fun to watch, like "RoboCop," so people will actually go and watch the film and understand what's going on.

(Q) : Was Wagner Moura your choice because he was such a popular star?

(Jose Padilha) : He wasn't a popular star before "Elite Squad." The movie that made Wagner is today the most popular actor in Brazil; it was "Elite Squad."

(Q) : He's not even a pretty boy.

(Jose Padilha) : I'm not going to judge that.

(Q) : He's good looking but he's not a pretty boy like what's his name.

(Jose Padilha) : That's subjective. I don't know. It has to do with taste. He's just the best actor there is, that's why I picked him. He did a great Hamlet as a play actor. He did fantastic small films. He did very well in that small role of "Carandiru." He's just a great actor. And he's now doing a big Hollywood film with Matt Damon and Jodie Foster and I know he's going to be great in that. The guy is a genius; what can I do?

(Q) : Are you going to give him a cameo in "RoboCop"?

(Jose Padilha) : "RoboCop," the characters have to be related to Detroit. He's from Bahia; he's not even from Rio.

(Q) : A man with his hands on the pulse; do you think in your lifetime or in the future things will change?

(Jose Padilha) : I think things are changing right now actually in Brazil. A lot of money is flowing into Brazil, and that already is a game changer kind of thing. But I have to say this, it's possible for a country to grow economically and not to do so in a fair way, in a democratic way. Just today I was reading in the times the history of this Chinese writer totally censored. So China is growing but it's not a democracy. So it's possible to grow without being a democracy. But I do believe that in the long run to grow for many, many years, 30 years. You have to become a democracy, you have to move towards certain values, like freedom of speech for press and so on. So I hope that Brazil continues to grow.

(Q) : And help wipe out crime and drugs.

(Jose Padilha) : It won't. There are crime and drugs here, but it makes a little balance. You could look at me now and say "Listen, the United States has grown for a long time and we now have to close Wall Street, just now, after years." And I'm going to say you're right, money doesn’t change everything in a good way, but what I mean is with money there is a better chance of education, because business needs people to be educated. So when you have a huge number of people who go to college, who have an education, who can read and so on, it's harder for them to be dominated by dictators and so on.

(Q) : Was Michael Fassbender your first choice with "RoboCop"?

(Jose Padilha) : We never started casting it. Michael Fassbender is a brilliant actor, and I was given an interview because "Elite Squad" was opening in Holland, and a Dutch journalist kept asking me "Who is going to play RoboCop? How do you like Fassbender?" "I think he's great." He cast Fassbender for me.

(Q) : I'll give you a big question and you have a long answer then. Making obviously the second "Elite Squad" became easier because you made the first "Elite Squad." Everybody knew you as a documentary filmmaker and suddenly you want to make this fiction film about the police that has this gritty crime genre nature. How did you get people convinced to find the money to make the first one, get that made, and then to do the second one? Obviously the first one was so successful that they wanted a second one, but then you didn't go and play it safe.

(Jose Padilha) : The thing is "Bus 174" was a smaller film, documentary, easier to fund, to finance. And in Brazil we have a tax shelter law that helps films, and the tax shelter money is not controlled by the government, it's controlled by companies that have tax to pay. So they decide. "Bus 174" was a high profile event in Brazil and somehow I managed to get financed for that movie, which was a small thing. I also sold it to BBC, RT, HBO, and that helped. And so we made that movie and it was a very successful movie. It won an Emmy, it was shortlisted for the Academy Awards and so on.

Then I decided to make a documentary about the police and I start interviewing the Elite Squad people and I realize that if I really tried to make a documentary either it was going to be talking heads only or I was going to die if I try to film what they do in the slums. So I said I can't do this as a documentary because it's going to be a talking heads film, it's not going to have any image, cinematic impact, but I have to talk about this. So I bought 10 books about how to write a screenplay. I really did. I read Sidney Sheldon, all of them, and then I said okay now I'm going to try to write a script, I've never written a script. So I wrote a script. And Harvey Weinstein found it and he said "I want to buy it. I'll give you $2 million to make this film." He gave me the money, and once I had some money I could get other money, so I financed that movie.

And then directing actors is basically looking at a performance and judging if you buy it or not. Truly, that's what directing an actor is. If you have to tell the actor what he has to do for you to buy the performance you have casted badly. The most important decision in directing actors is the casting. So you know, I got the money to do "Elite Squad" One, I went bankrupt, I got some more money from the bank and so on, and Universal jumped in because they loved "Bus 174," and I made that movie. Once "Elite Squad" One was pirated to great success, great success in the piracy market, sold 11 million pirate DVDs, which means we didn't make a lot of money but we became very popular. Then I decided I'm going to do "Elite Squad" Two and I'm going to do it myself, no studio this time. And then I went to ask for money for the sponsors and everybody wanted to give me money because of the first movie, and it was really easy to make.

(Q) : It wasn't so difficult to figure out who to cast, obviously.

(Jose Padilha): Yeah I already had the cast. It took three months to cast "Elite Squad" One. Three months trying the actors, rehearsing, replacing, and doing like that. Like I really, really work very hard on the cast. I would have cops with me and I would rehearse an actor in a scene involving a cop and I would ask a cop. So I basically used the real people to judge the acting.

(Q) : And the plot, did it write itself?

(Jose Padilha) : I wrote that plot out of interviews, like a documentary. I picked 20 cops and then I transcribed the interviews and I did like as if I was cutting a documentary, and then I wrote a plot around that.

(Q) : That’s great. That is fantastic.

(Jose Padilha) : It's easier if you don't know how to write.

(Q) : When you interviewed those people did the government try to stop you in some way?

(Jose Padilha) : The government never gave me permits when to film "Elite Squad" One. I had to track them down to go to the press and say it was censorship. Then I got sued by the police. But I made it anyways. When you are young and foolish you do those things.

(Q) : Did you go to school for film at any point?

(Jose Padilha) : No. I studied physics in Brazil and business administration. I did some political economy on London, in Oxford actually.

(Q) : And you're from Rio?

(Jose Padilha) : I'm from Rio, yeah.

(Q) : But not the favela.

(Jose Padilha) : People from the slums now they're starting to have film school in slums.

(Q) : Oh that's right, I actually did an article about the movie.

(Jose Padilha) : And so soon I hope we're going to have filmmakers from within the slum shooting their home, reality, which I think would bring something new to the table. Because right now in Brazil, like in the US, you have to have some money to go to film school. I mean to start making films.

(Q): Are you living here now?

(Jose Padilha): No, no; I live in Rio.

 

End.