Here is an interview with director Fernando Merielles about the making of 'City Of God' where he discusses how he cast the film largely with non-actors, mostly young males, who were discovered in the various favelas around Rio de Janeiro in an extensive and non-traditional casting process.
Extract:
When did you decide to use non-actors in the film?
When I decided to do the film, I wanted to do it with the same feeling as the book, this “inside” feeling. I knew I couldn’t get this feeling with professionals. And I wanted to use the expertise from the people inside the slums for the film. Whenever I gave them the script, instead of giving them the dialogue, I’d tell them what the intentions of the sequences were and let them improvise. Doing those improvisations for about ten months is how we came up with all the dialogue. If you read our fourth version of the script, the one that I decided to work with, I think like 30 percent is actually scripted. The rest they made up, that’s why it feels so natural. They were a co-author of the film to be sure and that’s why it works.
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