As I sit down to write this post, it is a Wednesday and Deepa Mehta and Salman Rushdie are together in Toronto at an editing suite where she will be showing the author of Midnight’s Children the latest film clip of her upcoming feature length release of the same title.
The evening before, Deepa Mehta is dressed casual in dark khakis, black sweater, and a woolen Indian shawl with discrete embroidery detail that drapes her petite frame. Her long, shiny, straight, dark hair appears as though she’d just stepped out of a hair salon and her eyes are curious and kind. Deepa Mehta is in fine form, and ever so articulate with her answers during the Q&A which would follow the short screening moderated by Charlie Keil, Associate Professor of the Institute of Cinema Studies. Though to invited guests and members of the general public, she admittingly was stressed about the imminent approval meeting with her literary friend of five years.
Natasha Arora at VIP cocktail for filmmaker Deepa Mehta, Innis College, University of Toronto, Fall 2011 Images Katie Billo
At Innis College, located at University of Toronto, I am sitting in the Town Hall, an auditorium which yearly hosts/seats upwards of 50,000 attendees of events and screenings, and it’s where the presentation with this extraordinary filmmaker took place. Students, financiers, educators, professionals, and many other South Asians enjoyed a pre-SR preview of her poetic and poignant film hosted by Janet Paterson, Principal. By the same token, Ms Paterson also used the stage to signal the launch of the Town Hall fundraising campaign to raise $3.25 million, the estimated budget to redesign this core space — the heart and soul of Innis College.
The overall sentiment gleaned by the audience seated in this large grey room desperate for a makeover after more than twenty years of wear, was one of pride and honor: to watch Deepa Mehta’s unreleased film with Deepa Mehta. How utterly cool. The eight-10-minute film clip we were privileged to watch was superbly edited, a teaser of Midnight’s Children. It held my attention from the first second and, without doubt, her film will be another stellar work of art. A daring and caring filmmaker, Deepa Mehta films are so appealing because they are at once personal and mainstream. Her cinematic stories leave you pregnant with emotions and ideas about family, feuds, discord, love, zindagi (Hindi: life), other universal themes and “change as the only constant”.
Quick facts about the making of Midnight’s Children
The idea of making a movie based on a Salman Rushdie novel was hatched more than three years ago over dinner together at the filmmaker’s Toronto home; choosing which novel to adapt into a screenplay was her decision and an obvious one for the story’s “cinematic” qualities; the first draft delivered by Salman Rushdie was (not surprisingly) a lofty 297 pages; an average film script is 120 pages; the film shoot lasted 69 days in Sri Lankan settings where temperatures reached a soaring 42 degrees Celsius every day without reprieve from the heat; there were 64 locations and 30 actors of which 17 were main actors; the storyline spanned 60 years. Plus, for added real-life drama, the Sri Lankan government created permit issues and threatened to stall film production brought on via pressures from the Iranian government over the shooting of a Salman Rushdie adapted screenplay, despite the lifting of the fatwa twenty years ago. But the issues were resolved.
The logistics of making a film with layered histories that spans six decades and where “design was very important, cinematography and costume design” required that Deepa Mehta take to the gym eight weeks before international production began. She attributes a steady gym routine acquired at the JCC (Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre) in Toronto for keeping her “fit, alert” during the filming “marathon”.
It was an energizing autumnal evening and, as I left the University campus by foot, I couldn’t help but wonder how lovely it would be to have colorful conversation over a meal with the affable and talented Deepa Mehta. She has so many more stories to tell!