SUCOPRESS/Raquel Laguna. Brazilian filmmaker FERNANDO MEIRELLES directs Colin Farrell in SUGAR. In this interview, Meirelles talks about working with Colin and about the experience of filming in the city of Los Angeles. Starring and executive produced by Farrell, SUGAR is a contemporary, unique take on one of the most popular and significant genres in literary, motion picture, and television history: the private detective story. Academy Award-nominee Colin Farrell stars as John Sugar, an American private investigator on the heels of the mysterious disappearance of Olivia Siegel, the beloved granddaughter of legendary Hollywood producer Jonathan Siegel. As Sugar tries to determine what happened to Olivia, he will also unearth Siegel family secrets; some very recent, others long-buried. The series also stars Kirby, Amy Ryan, James Cromwell, Anna Gunn, Dennis Boutsikaris, Nate Corddry, Sydney Chandler and Alex Hernandez. SUGAR is created by Mark Protosevich. The first two episodes of the noir series premiere globally Friday, April 5 on Apple TV+.
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00:00 The main thing was Colin Farrell.
00:02 I had a chat before I joined the project.
00:04 I had a call with him.
00:07 Should be like 20 minutes.
00:08 And we spoke for an hour and a half.
00:10 And his process of working and how he develops characters
00:14 was so fascinating.
00:15 And it really did well.
00:17 It had a match.
00:18 So I said, I want to work with this guy.
00:20 And then I jumped in.
00:21 And then I had to learn about film noir to make the series.
00:25 Because of course, I had watched some films.
00:28 But I wasn't that good in film noir.
00:32 So I watched a lot of films to understand where
00:36 I was getting myself into.
00:39 First had Colin.
00:40 And then they invited me.
00:43 But in the beginning, he didn't know exactly
00:46 how he would present Sugar.
00:50 And I didn't know as well.
00:51 So we talked.
00:53 And in the first days we were shooting,
00:54 we were experimenting.
00:57 The guy was more distanced.
00:58 He had a heart.
01:00 He was passionate or not.
01:03 So little by little, shooting, we found the character.
01:08 And he's a great actor.
01:10 Because he likes to experiment.
01:12 Sometimes he does a scene.
01:13 And then he has to do it again.
01:15 And do it in a totally different way.
01:17 And then says, let me try a third way.
01:19 And this is the third very, very different way.
01:22 And that's how I say, well, that way seems right.
01:26 And we touch, not touching, feeling.
01:29 Little by little, we found Sugar.
01:32 Grew up watching films in Los Angeles.
01:34 See those palm trees in Beverly Hills and all that.
01:38 Or downtown, the beauties in downtown.
01:42 So it was a big pleasure.
01:43 I mean, I don't believe I'm here shooting the scenes
01:45 that I watched when I was a kid.
01:47 And so there was this interesting part.
01:51 At the same time, when I was shooting,
01:54 I stayed in an apartment in downtown Los Angeles.
01:57 Because we were supposed to have our studio next to downtown.
02:02 So I wanted to be close so I didn't
02:03 have to drive every day to work.
02:07 But then they moved to Paramount.
02:09 But I was already in downtown.
02:11 In downtown, there's a lot of homeless people
02:17 that lives there, like 70,000 homeless
02:22 in downtown Los Angeles.
02:24 And I would see these people every day going to the supermarket
02:28 and walking around.
02:29 So I tried to--
02:30 I used the iconic Los Angeles, but I tried
02:33 to include them in the series.
02:35 So sometimes you see those stands in the streets.
02:39 And it's an experience I had in Los Angeles.
02:42 Nobody really-- yeah, nobody really
02:45 would believe that Los Angeles is the Los Angeles
02:49 I saw in downtown.
02:50 It was really to understand the film noir,
02:54 because that's the reference.
02:55 We should make a series which should be contemporary,
03:00 but should remind people of those films.
03:03 And so I did my homework.
03:06 I watched like 20 films.
03:08 Every day I would watch a film to learn the grammar,
03:13 how they tell stories, how they act, the whole thing.
03:17 Some lines from the films were--
03:20 we've taken some lines from the scripts of the films,
03:24 and we brought to the series some scenes.
03:27 We even-- both scenes, we copied.
03:29 We just repeated the scenes and shoo it.
03:32 And this was a very, very interesting job to do,
03:36 having to learn a specific grammar, a specific way
03:39 to shoot, and then replicate, but not in the same way,
03:42 using as reference, but trying to make it contemporary.
03:45 That was a great, great experience.