Jonathan Nossiter, the filmmaker who created Sunday, Signs and Wonders and the epic wine documentary Mondovino (2004), has spent the last five years on his latest film, Rio Sex Comedy, a combination of political farce and documentary set in his adopted home of Brazil.
Nossiter created an unusual co-op working system on his set, in which the stars -- Charlotte Rampling, Bill Pullman, Fisher Stevens and French actress Irene Jacob -- were paid the same as the lesser actors and the 10-person crew for a long four-and-a-half month shoot.
"Four years ago, we could see that the film industry as it existed was headed for disaster and this was just one of the possible responses to that," he said. "Friends told me, you can't get a major American actor like Bill Pullman eating his breakfast off the back of a truck on a sidewalk in a favela, or a European diva like Charlotte Rampling to work in those conditions. But the first day I went to visit her I found Charlotte in a very modest room busy ironing her clothes in preparation for shooting.
"I believe if you treat actors like babies, they act like babies. You treat audiences or journalists like babies, they do the same. So you treat them like adults."
