An Epic Of India Gets A Canvas Its Own Size
Mehta knew it wouldn't be easy to condense and visualize a 500-page novel that spans three wars, charts the lives of dozens of characters and covers decades of tumultuous history. So she asked Rushdie to personally adapt and edit the novel for the screen.
"He really didn't want to write the screenplay," Mehta says. "I had to absolutely twist his arm — literally — to say he must write it, because I knew very early on that ... he could be sort of ... disrespectful, let's say, to his work [as] few other screenwriters could be."
Beyond the script, Mehta had to re-imagine Rushdie's storytelling moods for the screen. She commissioned the British-Indian composer Nitin Sawhney to write original, semiclassical Indian music for the score. She focused on the novel's language in visual terms — as sets, costumes and colors.
"For me it's always been, 'What emotional color does this script evoke?' And I felt there was really a lot of red, green and blue ... fertility, blood and darkness."
A Shared History, And A Similar Distance From Home
A dark, complex trilogy of earlier films about India — Fire in 1996, Earth in 1998 and Water in 2005 — earned Mehta international acclaim. Two of those films were also condemned and attacked by Hindu fundamentalists, who burned down sets and cinemas showing her films. Rushdie's own legacy is likewise tied forever to extremism, courtesy of the fatwa of 1989, when Muslim fundamentalists threatened his life and forced him into years of hiding. But Mehta says that in their collaboration on Midnight's Children, they didn't dwell on that shared past.
"Maybe because we've both been through it," she muses. "We never spoke about it because it's such a drag, it's such a downer. ... Why do you want to share in such misery?"
Today both writer and filmmaker live outside India, and say that distance helped them return to the novel and objectively look back at that time in history.
"Objectivity for me, or stepping out of the frame for me, has meant to me that I can look at something that is really important — like India, the place of my birth and the place where I grew up ... with a certain amount of distance," Mehta says. "So it's not being handcuffed to history as much as having the opportunity to take off the rose-colored glasses."
Midnight's Children was released in India earlier this year, and both Mehta and Rushdie went back to unveil the film. And for Rushdie, who started that journey as a young, unknown writer backpacking across India, the premiere in his hometown was especially poignant.
"There I was, this boy from Mumbai, which is after all the great movie city of India ... growing up to write a novel which took its inspiration from the spirit of that city," he says. "My being able to bring it back to the city as a film, it did feel like an act of closure. It felt like bringing a big circle back to its starting point."