When John le Carré's political thriller, "The Constant Gardener," was first published in early 2001, the 9/11 terrorist attacks were months away. So were the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

To be current, the movie version had to be updated to include those events. The film's Brazilian director, Fernando Meirelles, commissioned a nine-minute documentary about government corruption that was intended to explain the situation. It didn't make the final cut, though he says it will be on the DVD.

"It was too much like my voice, the director preaching, so I took it out," he said during a Seattle visit. Le Carré already had contributed a speech in which the activist heroine, Tessa (Rachel Weisz), calls the Iraq war "Vietnam, The Sequel." Meirelles felt his chief concern should be telling le Carré's Kenya-set story rather than preaching to a choir.

"I got the job almost by accident," said Meirelles, who earned a surprise Oscar nomination for best director last year for his Rio de Janeiro street-gang drama, "City of God." He was in London for a few days, preparing for a movie he wanted to make in Kenya, when "Constant Gardener" producer Simon Channing Williams asked him to consider the script.

"The first thing that struck me was that here was the opportunity to go to Kenya," he said. "It's a beautiful love story as well, and I liked the idea of doing something about what the pharmaceutical companies are doing. So I decided to postpone my project."

The screenplay of "The Constant Gardener," written by Jeffrey Caine, takes aim at the ties between governments and pharmaceutical companies that claim they have to charge high rates for pills because of research and development costs. Meirelles says it's one of the most profitable industries in the world.

"They count marketing costs as part of the research," he said. "If you have eight different Viagras on the market, and you want to introduce a ninth one, you have to prove that it's a bit better — and that's what really costs a lot. But while they're spending billions on Viagra, they won't spend $100 million for a malaria drug. Africa has no way to pay for a malaria pill."

Meirelles said the British documentary, "Dying For Drugs," was a major influence on his approach to the subject.

The Tessa character is based on le Carré's late friend, Yvette Pierpaoli. Several scenes are taken directly from her life, including her attempt to bribe a corrupt official by offering her body. Meirelles was dubious about this episode, but le Carré insisted it had happened — and Weisz insisted on playing it.

"She told me, 'It's just sex,' " said Meirelles. "She flew to London to let me know how interested she was in the part. She knew so much more about Tessa than I did. I saw several other actresses, but she was the one who inspired me. It would be easy to play Tessa as a caricature, but there's a humanity in this character."

Ralph Fiennes, who plays Tessa's initially ineffectual husband, Justin — the "constant gardener" of the title — was already attached to the project when Meirelles replaced Mike Newell as the film's director.

Meirelles picked Danny Huston and Bill Nighy to play corrupt diplomats who figure in the plot. (If there's a déjà-vu quality to this casting, it may be because Nighy recently played a Justin-like diplomat who meets a Tessa-like activist in the HBO movie, "The Girl in the Café.")

Working again with his longtime cinematographer, César Charlone (another "City of God" Oscar nominee), Meirelles picked Kenya to play itself. The producers had wanted to shoot the film in South Africa, but Meirelles found it "too Westernized" with its Gap and Levi's stores.

He convinced them that Kenya, with its "homemade clothes and homemade houses," was the way to go. Only a few films, including "Mountains of the Moon" and "White Mischief," have been shot there. The roads are so bad that the filmmakers had to build their own airport to provide supplies:

"That little village that's raided in the film, it's just lost in the desert," said Meirelles. "There's nothing there. We came in and turned it into a big operation, like an al-Qaida training camp in the middle of the desert."

Before and after making "The Constant Gardener," Meirelles has been involved in a television series, "City of Men," which follows the 12-year-old boys from "City of God," who are now 17, as they go on dates and try to support themselves. His debut movie, "Maids," played American film festivals a couple of years ago.

He's still planning to go back to Kenya to make that other film: "Intolerance." The title is not mere homage to D.W. Griffith's 1916 epic of the same name, which cuts back and forth between four tales of prejudice and injustice set in different ages.

"This is the sequel," said Meirelles, though all his stories will be contemporary. "Geography makes them seem separate, but eventually the connections between them will become clear."