Salman Rushdie is all over the film version of his acclaimed novel “ Midnight’s Children”. He has himself done the screenplay and also serves as the film’s all-knowing narrator.
Yet he says it’s Indo-Canadian director Deepa Mehta’s film. She “absolutely” took over once the script was done, Rushdie told IANS in an interview on phone from New York, where both he and Mehta were for the special kickoff screening of the film in conjunction with the New York Indian Film Festival.
“A film can be only one person’s film and not two,” he said. But they talked often on the telephone during the shoot. He went to Mumbai to help with casting, and from Sri Lanka, where much of the shooting took place, Mehta sent him pictures every day, and he talked with the actors over Skype.
Though the book is set in India and Pakistan, they chose to shoot in Sri Lanka as the cities depicted have changed beyond recognition. In many ways, Colombo made a better Mumbai than the real city does as more of the century-old architecture has survived there, Rushdie said.
But some scenes were shot at the Dal Lake in Kashmir, Mumbai, Karachi and Agra too. “How else can you show a man cycling past the Taj Mahal if not shoot in Agra?” he asked.
The allegorical tale on the partition of India told through mysteriously intertwined lives of two babies switched at birth as India attains freedom at midnight on Aug 15, 1947 will be released in the US beginning with New York on April 26.
It will be followed by Los Angeles and Washington DC (May 3), Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Dallas, Phoenix, Seattle, and Portland (May 10), and San Francisco Bay Area, Denver, Minneapolis, and Memphis and (May 17).
Rushdie said at first he was hesitant about doing the screenplay adaptation himself as “I am a novelist and not a professional screen writer”.
But Deepa was very persuasive and convinced him to do it as she feared no one else could do it justice given its almost intimidating pedigree – having won both the Booker of Bookers and the Best of the Bookers. In the end he was glad that he did it.
Screenplay writing was a very collaborative affair. First both Mehta and Rushdie made separate lists of what to keep and what to discard from the novel with a staggering scope, from 1917 to 1974, and 62 locations from Karachi to Kashmir to Old Delhi to Bombay.
“In the end we found how identical our lists were,” said Rushdie describing Mehta as the “perfect” director to take his book to film. “It was Deepa’s passion for the book that attracted me, as well, of course, as my admiration for her work.”
The actual writing too was a “very back and forth” process. “I would write a draft and send it to her. She would comment on it and I would write back,” he said.
Turning a 446-page novel into a 130-page screenplay was “an immense challenge,” he said. But since he was looking at it after more than 30 years, he could do it more dispassionately.