Director's Note

In 2008, Trish and I wrote a script called Bodhisattva which spanned a life of a business tycoon from age 7 to 70 and depicted his rise and fall through India, USA and Brasil.

But that would be a period piece and a budget to think of.

So instead of trying to raise funds and realizing it would take time, we decided to embark upon the last part of his life to start with. We named the script Bodhisattva.

We wrote it as a separate script, a thriller, that could be made independently and would have nothing to do with the original Bodhisattva. It could also be shot entirely in one of the most cinematic cities to film in - Calcutta.

We wrote the script in October and approached our favorite actor Mr. Soumitra Chatterjee (Apu of Academy Award winner Satyajit Ray's "The World of Apu") and narrated the story to him to see if it was even worth it to try. And he inspired us with his excitement and told us to move forward.

Being raised on the spirit of American Independent Filmmaking, we have never shied away from making a film under any condition. We were going to shoot it with a DVX camera initially since we did not have the budget. But then, Mr. Amarjeet Singh and Ms. Renuji of Cine India International stepped in and offered to help us shoot the film on Cine Alta, allowing us to use their facility for editing, sound engineering etc by paying in instalments.

We were then faced with the challenge of time to complete the entire film in a month. That meant shooting, capturing, editing, dubbing, foleying everything in a month. But thanks to our guerilla background, and small but extremely hardworking crew, we pulled through the film within the time frame.

India is a country of Bollywood. So the expectation of a glamorous set, lots of light, large crew, several departments is not unfounded there. And here we are without budget, without time, shooting a feature in a foreign language - naturally it made our casting process quite challenging.

We decided to request friends and family to help us by playing different roles. But when that failed due to the inhibition and nervousness of freshmen, we had only one option left - ask the crew to step in as cast.

Between setting up shots and running production errands, the crew memorized lines and tried to become the character.

With casting almost under control, now we had one issue - the main location.

Three days before the shoot, I got really worried as we were unable to find the right location to shoot the couple's house. While we were sitting at Trisha's mom's place for another production meeting with my ADs Gairik and Rohini, we suddenly realized that their 100 year old house had 12 doors and 12 windows which not only would give us a lot of depth and foreground but a whole lot of available light.

We thought that instead of controlling the environment, it was a better option to get controlled by the environment around. So occasionally we pushed the shot in front of the doors and windows to get as much light as available to us.

It was extremely generous of Trish's mom to let us use every corner of their house for a week, keeping their life on hold.

Although Trish's mongrel and her mom's cat were very well behaved during the entire shoot, whenever they would get a chance, they would quietly sit amongst the cast and crew and usually end up being on the frame at the wrong time. But overall this would be our smoothest production ever. 

Thanks to the city of Calcutta for its extraordinary passion for art and culture, we got the film done without any hassle and on schedule.

The film shoot finished in a week and we edited the first draft in a week after which we dubbed the whole film as we didn't have budget to hire sound recordist. Dubbing was completed in ten days and we came back to the States to lay out the final film.

The film did not have room for the use of music. So the foley had to be really good to capture the ambience of the city and the house. Trish foleyed the entire sound by capturing various sound bytes from different places and voila we have a film.

I was very excited that this will be a film without any music. Except for one scene where I wanted to use a song - a song that has to be so perfect that it will elevate that moment captured.  And there was only one singer that kept coming back to my mind - Welsh opera singer Paul Carey Jones. I contacted him through email and he was excited to be a part of this film as he already knew the works of Soumitra Chatterjee from several of Satyajit Ray films. An Italian opera performance of a Welsh musician in a Bengali language movie shot in Calcutta - truly the language of cinema is Universal.

And we sailed through three months from the time of our first script draft in making our first foreign film Bodhisattva. We hope you enjoy watching the film.

- San