LOS ANGELES — In the big screen adaptation of “Midnight’s Children,” Oscar-nominated director Deepa Mehta crafts a visually enchanting tale of love, magical realism, and politics.
The film is based on Salman Rushdie’s Booker Prize-winning novel of the same title. It follows the journey of two babies who are switched at birth during India’s declaration of independence from Great Britain in 1947.
The multi-layered story intertwines the children’s destinies, while ambitiously encompassing scenes of celebration, corruption, and mourning during a time of freedom and uncertainty.
Mehta talked to ARTINFO about the film, which opens in the U.S. on April 26.
“Midnight’s Children” is such a beautiful yet complicated book. What does the story and journey mean to you?
For someone who has migrated to Canada from India and has many friends who have shifted either from another country or have moved from the east coast to the west coast or whatever, it seems there’s a whole generation of movement. The thing that resonated about “Midnight’s Children” 30 years after it was done was the search of Saleem’s identity, family, and home. It was about exile and reinventing yourself and finding a family that is not necessarily of your bloodline, but inventing your family again. So the search for identity was really moving.
Talk about collaborating with Rushdie. How did that come about?
When I asked him if I could do “Midnight’s Children,” he very kindly said “absolutely.” Then we had to figure out who was going to write it. He really wanted me to write it and I really wanted him to write it. The good news is that I won. I told him that it would be far easier and right for him to do it. He could be disrespectful, for lack of a better word, to his own work. It would be difficult for another screenwriter to do it. A film is not a facsimile of a book. It would be much easier for him to say yes, of course. He got that. He’d written another play that I really liked, so I knew he could do it. He’s a total cinema buff so he seemed to me to be the perfect person.
Why was this story important for you to tell?
For different reasons. Everything has its time and place. Even though it’s been 30 years since the book was written, it’s totally relevant now because it’s about politics and not only of a young man coming of age, but also a country coming of age. That is fascinating to me. All of the films I’ve done in some way or the other are political. Politics actually on many levels dictate what happens to our lives or how we live them. So in the larger scheme when India gained its independence in 1947 at the stroke of midnight, and that’s the exact time Saleem comes to age. It’s not just freedom. You go on a journey with trepidations. It’s more triumph, large love, and large moments of sacrifice so the journey became a double journey.
There is so much depth and complexity to the book. How did you approach translating that to the big screen?
All books or adaptions have to be streamlined. Whether you’re looking at “The English Patient” or “Atonement” or big historical pictures. A film is never a facsimile of the book, otherwise you’d have another film. What I felt was very essential before we started writing at all was I told Salman we should take a couple of weeks apart so we could really think about what we want the film to look like. Or what is the narrative of the film. We wrote it down and came back in two weeks time, then we talked about it. So we did that and I had a piece of paper and he had a piece of paper and we exchanged our pieces of paper. We found, much to our surprise and relief I think, that they were more or less identical. Both of us were on the same track and we then knew we wanted to follow the journey of Saleem on a personal scheme and the journey of India on a larger scheme. What happened to Saleem actually happened to India through Saleem’s eyes.
“Midnight’s Children” has been criticized for not fully drawing out the books magical realism or political allegory. What is your response to that?
People have different responses to it. I had a question yesterday after a screening. Somebody said, “I really loved the film, but I wish there was far more magic.” Others have said there is too much magic about the children. So what do you say? Someone is always going to be critical and say there it too much magic and others will say there’s not enough. At this point I have learned to accept the book and that’s the way it is. No one is going to like everything unless you made “The Godfather.”