How ‘Blindness’ director Meirelles is a movie poster

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When Fernando Meirelles began filming ‘Blindness’ many months ago, he did what any savvy auteur would do these days.

Hire a top-notch director of photography? (Well, yes, he did that.) Bone up on a few back issues of Cahiers du Cinéma? Invite Harvey Weinstein to a set visit?

Nah. He started a blog, reports Reed Johnson.

Over the months that followed, Web surfers and cinephiles got an unusually candid look at how Meirelles and his production team made a film out of José Saramago’s novel about an unnamed city stricken with a plague of sightlessness. The Miramax release, starring Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Danny Glover, Alice Braga and Gael García Bernal, will open Sept. 19.

Meirelles, a native of this South American metropolis of 10 million, where parts of the movie were shot, said that, among other objectives, he hoped his blog would encourage budding filmmakers to follow their personal muses.

‘[When] I’m writing the blog, I always think about film students,’ he said during shooting last fall.

Read more about Fernando Meirelles and ‘Blindness’ here.