Collaborating across global spaces

Australian filmmaker Robert Hutchinson is working with author Rana Dasgupta for a movie version of one of the latter's stories.

It was more than a year ago that Robert Hutchinson read Rana Dasgupta's Tokyo Cancelled for the first time. Hutchinson, who works as creative director with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), received the book from a mutual friend and was instantly struck by the vividness of its imagery and the possibilities it presented for filmisation.

"I contacted Rana immediately," he says; the two men have been in touch over email for the better part of a year, during which time ABC picked up the licensing rights to the book.

Then, last week, they met for the first time "" Hutchinson making his first trip to India to discuss the specifics of the adaptation. Of the 13 stories that make up the book, the one they've homed in on is "The Billionaire's Sleep", an extraordinary modern fairy tale about an insomniac Delhi-based businessman and his two children: a girl whose strange effect on vegetation causes her to be isolated in a tower on the city's outskirts, and a boy with a bull-shaped head, cast away at birth because of his deformity.

"It's a story that incorporates elements of western storytelling as well as Indian references "" to the Ramayana, for instance," says Hutchinson, who feels the story highlights some of the best things about Tokyo Cancelled, including its powerfully visual quality.

"One of the things that charms me about this project," says Dasgupta with characteristic understatement, "is that the fact of an Australian filmmaker coming here to shoot a story set in Delhi without knowing anything about the city is so apposite to what the book stands for."

It's easy to see what he means: Tokyo Cancelled is such a global novel, with a number of pulsating narratives set in cities across the world, and a refusal to accept conventional geographical barriers, one would think it should defy easy classification.

However, that wasn't how it turned out when the book was launched in India last year. Dasgupta found himself beleaguered by media brats seeking facile quotes, eager to pigeonhole him and to locate the "Indianness" in his writing "" despite the fact that he is a British citizen and had been in Delhi for only three years. He was understandably perplexed, and in a way this project is a vindication of his belief that his debut novel transcends hoary notions about places and identity.

That said, though "The Billionaire's Sleep" isn't overtly about Delhi, it does carry within it a sense of the energies flowing through the city: as seen in Rajiv Malhotra's hectic lifestyle, the pace of work in his factories and in the telecom centre he owns. Consequently, Hutchinson will be spending a few weeks in Delhi: "he has to get a sense of the location," says Dasgupta. The film will be short mainly here, partly in Mumbai.

Hutchinson grew up in an Auckland suburb and knew he wanted to be a filmmaker when he was in his early teens "" "but it's taken me 15 years!" The specifics of this film haven't been decided yet "" "we're looking at a short feature, maybe an hour long" "" but once it's made, he hopes to release it into the film festival circuit and travel with it.

"In a sense, what we're doing now is the interesting part," he jokes, "bouncing ideas off each other, seeing how best we can treat the story. The actual production and shooting, when financial and other matters come into play, will be relatively mundane!"