Taking Aim at Hollywood.(Hector Babenco)(Brief Article)(Interview)

Hector Babenco is as global a filmmaker as they come. Born in Argentina and a naturalized Brazilian, he shoots in Spanish, Portuguese and English, in settings ranging from stylish Buenos Aires to the Amazon rain forest. He's won awards for pictures like "Pixote" (1981), "Ironweed" (1987) and "At Play in the Fields of the Lord" (1991). "Kiss of the Spider Woman" (1985), based on Manuel Puig's novel, was nominated for four Academy Awards. After a long battle with cancer, Babenco, now 54, is back at work. In 1998 he released the autobiographical "Foolish Heart." Now he is preparing to shoot "Carandiru," from a book by Drauzio Varella, about the notorious Brazilian prison where 111 inmates were brutally killed in a 1992 police raid. Babenco recently spoke with NEWSWEEK's Mac Margolis in So Paulo.

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 ...