|
|
|
The ‘unfilmable’ book on the big screen
The novelist has been
working for two years with director Deepa Mehta on a script of a film
version of the book that originally made his reputation. The Harold
Greenberg Fund, set up by the Canadian media firm Astral in honour of
one of Canada’s leading film directors, recently announced it was
giving an award for "polishing and packaging" the script. Deepa
Mehta, an Indian-born Canadian, who has known Rushdie for many years,
is best known for her trilogy Fire, Earth and Water,
which she directed between 1996 and 2005. She and her husband, David
Hamilton, run up the film company Hamilton Mehta, in Toronto. He will
produce the film, which she will direct. The book’s protagonist,
Saleem, is born in Bombay at midnight on 15 August 1947, the moment
when India became independent, who discovers that all Indian children
born in that first hour have magical powers. But until now no one has attempted to film this or
any other Rushdie novel. This is partly because the genre in which he
writes, magical realism, does not easily translate into cinema. Many
of the best-known magic realist novels, such as One Hundred Years
of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and The Master and
Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, have proved too intimidating for
commercial cinema. In an interview, Rushdie had said, "Now that
we have a screenplay we like, I would say that, yes, Midnight’s
Children is eminently filmable. I have been a film buff all my
life and believe that the finest cinema is fully the equal of the best
novels." In Rushdie’s case, there is the added problem that he
had to go into hiding for 10 years, and any public association with
him was potentially dangerous. His ordeal began following protests
that his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, published in 1988,
had insulted Islam. After riots in Britain and Kashmir, Iran’s
supreme ruler, Ayatollah Khomeini, pronounced a fatwa that was
incitement to kill Rushdie and anyone involved in publishing The
Satanic Verses. The decision to award him a knighthood, in 2007,
was applauded by the literary establishment but provoked protests
around the world. The governments of Iran and Pakistan summoned the
British ambassadors to register formal protests. Sir Salman was born
in India but moved to the UK when he was 13. Earlier this year, he and
Mehta visited Mumbai to meet some of the stars of Bollywood and begin
pulling together a cast, which will include Irrfan Khan, and Seema
Biswas. During the visit, Rushdie said one of the hardest aspects of
his years in hiding was that he was prevented from seeing India
again. By arrangement with The Independent |
After a literary career
spanning three decades, Sir Salman Rushdie will at last see one of his
novels transferred to the cinema. A Toronto-based film company has
been awarded a grant, which means that production of a screen version
of Rushdie’s 1981 novel Midnight’s Children can begin.
The novel won the Booker
Prize in 1981, then 12 years later was named the "Booker of
Bookers". In 2008, in a contest to mark Booker’s 40th
anniversary of the prize, was again singled out as the best novel ever
to win the prize.