Approaching midnight

From finding the perfect cast to the perfect location - how Midnight’s Children went from book to movie.

The Bollywood star, a “very celebrated Indian movie actress”, was in her stretch limo in Toronto, waiting to leave for the airport. It was the only time she could give author Salman Rushdie and film maker Deepa Mehta to discuss their project, the film version of his epic novel Midnight’s Children.

As they climbed into the limo, the actress opened with, “What’s the film about?” Mehta looked at Rushdie and barked, “Salman, narrate”. The author, winner of the Booker Prize as well as the Booker of Bookers, exploded, “WHAT?!” But he recovered enough to explain “this is what it’s about, this is the story, this is your part and this is why it’s the most important part in the film”. The narration over, the star opened the door, threw them out and went to the airport.

In one of the big “gets” for the Toronto International Film Festival this year, Rushdie and Mehta discussed the process of turning his masterpiece into a feature film and also gave the city’s audience the first glimpse of scenes from the movie. The project was announced in 2008, and Mehta has completed shooting the film. She hopes to have it ready by next spring, for an October 2012 release.

If you’re wondering what happened to the star, Rushdie dished some more about her. She invited Mehta and him to her office in Mumbai and declared, “Your script, I love it. I-love-it.” But there were a couple of “little things”, and “we should talk about it now, isn’t it?” She had discovered that, at some point, her character would have a 16-year-old son. She had never been asked to play the mother of a teenager. As Rushdie recounted, he said to her, “Look, actually, when we first meet your character, she’s seventeen years old.” And added, he says, in brackets, “Unlike you, madam”. He left unspoken there, but not in Toronto this week, “Unlike you, bitch”. When the actress said to them, “I hear my youth crying out to me, to the star that I am,” he said they realised, “we were screwed.”

* * *

So who’s the actress? Rushdie wouldn’t say — yet. Let the guessing games begin. Needless to say, she’s not in the film; but a stellar cast is: Shabana Azmi, Anupam Kher, Rahul Bose, Seema Biswas, Siddharth, Shriya Saran, Shahana Goswami, Soha Ali Khan, child actor Darsheel Safary and British actor Charles Dance, among others. Another young British actor, Satya Bhabha, plays the novel’s protagonist, Saleem Sinai. Rushdie has a presence too, one you can identify with your eyes closed: he is the narrator. He was also going to have a cameo in the film, as a fortune-teller. But he said he fired himself as he thought it would look like stunt-casting and would distract viewers from the scene.

After Mehta described her futile efforts to get Hollywood biggies like Ralph Fiennes and Liam Neeson involved in the project, Kher, who was in the audience at the discussion in Toronto, jumped up to ask why they had chased so many stars in the first place. Money, was the answer. They were hoping to attract funds with marquee names. Eventually, said Mehta and Rushdie, they ended up with actors who were perfect for their parts.

It all began over a glass of wine, right here in Toronto. The author and the film maker were talking about adapting one of his books, and when Rushdie asked which book she would want to do, Mehta replied without skipping a beat, Midnight’s Children. Done, said Rushdie. “Holy s__t,” she says she thought to herself immediately, as it dawned on her what a challenging task it would be to make a film of that 600-plus-page classic.

She told Rushdie he would have to write the screenplay. “Never,” he replied. And as he told the audience in Toronto, “And then I wrote the screenplay.” When deciding what to keep and what to cut, Rushdie said he reminded himself of a question a woman had asked him at a Q&A session at Delhi University when the book was published 30 years ago. “Your book, Mr Rushdie,” she said, “very long book, but never mind, I went through it. My question for you is the following: fundamentally, what is your point?”

The audience roared, but Rushdie said the question served a valid purpose in this process. He also believed he could be more disrespectful of the book than anyone else.

One of the things Rushdie wanted to discard was the frame narration. In the book, the literary device he used was to have Saleem retrospectively tell the story of his life to Padma in the pickle factory. But retaining it in the film would mean continually interrupting the audience’s emotional involvement with the story in order to return to Saleem and Padma.

Another significant departure from the book was the scene in which Saleem and Shiva, the two babies who were swapped at midnight, confront each other. Rushdie said he felt he didn’t have to include it in his book because readers know it all the way through. But, said Rushdie, “in a movie if you do something as huge as exchanging babies, you’ve got a Bollywood moment — it’s a big, vulgar thing to do. I felt you had to have the scene where they confront each other.” It’s the one thing he says he would change if he were writing the book now. “I might put that in, because having written it and having seen it filmed, it actually feels better than what’s in the book.”

* * *

Mehta shot the film in Sri Lanka. Cameron Bailey, who moderated the discussion and who is also the co-director of the film festival, asked Mehta if that was because of the controversies her previous films had created in India. Partly, Mehta replied. “I’m really trying not to think about it. Because if I did I would be so conscious of what’s right and what’s wrong instead of focusing on what I should do, which is to make the best possible film.”

Besides, and more importantly, she could no longer find the India of the 1920s to 1970s in the India of today. Locations in and near Colombo, with their coastal vegetation, old colonial bungalows, were a perfect stand-in for Bombay as well as East Bengal of those days.

Mehta had first read the book when it came out. Now, 30 years, and a film later, she confessed to Rushdie that it had taken her three readings to get through it at that time because “it was so dense”. Then, slowly, it started dawning on her, “I know this. I knew Saleem, I knew his parents, I knew his grandparents, I knew his history.” She called Rushdie’s book “a love letter to India”.

The crew celebrated the 30-year-anniversary of the publication of Midnight’s Children while on location. Rushdie joined the party online, via Skype. That was frequently also how he interacted with Mehta on the script. When they started shooting, she felt compelled to ask him about every single change she wanted to make, so much so that one night, dropping with exhaustion, she sent him a text message so garbled and full of grammatical errors that Rushdie thought her mobile phone had been stolen.

Eventually, he told her he trusted her to make any change without asking him first. As Rushdie said in Toronto, “I know the reason it worked is because this relationship over here works. And every writer I know who’s had a successful experience of having his book turned into a film has felt that intimacy with the director. Michael Ondaatje and Anthony Minghella. Or Hanif Kureishi and Stephen Frears.”

The few minutes of raw footage shown to the audience in Toronto made it clear that the adaptation of Midnight’s Children will be one of the most awaited films of next year. There was Rahul Bose as the Pakistani General Zulfikar, waiting to surrender after his army’s defeat in the 1971 Bangladesh war — as you hear a helicopter in the distance, the tense general sits alone in a room and takes out his handkerchief for a last shoeshine; Soha Ali Khan dancing to Aao twist karen in one scene, and singing a ghazal from behind a purdah in another; Siddharth triumphantly riding a military vehicle through the newly-liberated streets of Dhaka; and a slow, long pan of one of the killing fields of Bangladesh, lifeless bodies littering a lush green paddy field.

The production released the first publicity still for the film via Twitter this week.

Rushdie is eight weeks older than independent India. He was 28 when he started writing Midnight’s Children and 33 when it was published. The book has been hailed as one of the most powerful and influential books of our lifetime. But perhaps the most enduring appeal of Midnight’s Children is to be found in a brash remark that Rushdie recalled from a recent visit to India. A student walked up to him and said, without a trace of irony: “You know, I could have written this book. I know all about this stuff.”