Hitting the ground running
The past two weeks since I landed in Mumbai have been a blur. Everything has happened at twice the pace I expected it to. On Day 2, our India producer, Kanchan Kalra, took me to meet with Honey Trehan, the well-known casting director. I was asked to narrate the film to Honey and his casting team, which I did. A film narration in India is an interesting experience because the writer or director is asked to basically narrate the entire film, scene by scene, to his audience. One ends up acting out scenes and essentially performing a one-man show that lasts as long as the movie itself - in our case this was 90 minutes. When I was done, Honey was really excited about the film and despite his many ongoing projects agreed to do our casting. I've begun meeting with actors and I expect to meet many more this week.
Every time I come to India I have a bout of sickness of some kind and since things are going at warp speed, I came down with a cold and flu on my 6th day of being here. The heat, the pollution, and of course, the stress were probably to blame. I was flat on my back for about 4 days. Thankfully, I'm at my mom's house and was well taken care of. Soon as I recovered I was off on a recce to see our primary location. Kanchan had found the perfect middle-class apartment building ("housing society"). In keeping with the dogme production style of our film, the building was the one Kanchan had been born in and lived in for the first few years of her life. (See attached picture.) It was the right look and feel for what I had written in the script. We saw some flats we could use and the grounds and terrace of the building and I could see the scenes from the script in front of me. We still have to iron out permissions but it's quite exciting.
We've also hired my 1st Assistant Director, the script supervisor, and a production assistant and an intern.
In the next few days I hope to be able to give updates about casting and more on the crew we're putting together.
The Building
a possible location