/
1x
Advertisement
Proudly Canadian, obsessively Toronto. Subscribe to Toronto Life!
City News

Best of Fall 2012: Deepa Mehta’s dream project, a movie version of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

By Toronto Life
Copy link
Best of Fall 2012: Midnight’s Children

When Salman Rushdie visited Toronto on a 2008 book tour, he dropped in on his old friend Deepa Mehta, whom he’d met when she was making her Oscar-nominated film Water. Conversation in her living room turned to film adaptations, and he asked her which, if any, of his books she’d like to turn into a movie. Instinctively, she said Midnight’s Children, Rushdie’s brash, Booker-winning epic. “Nothing like it had ever appeared before in English,” she says. He sold her the option to the book for a dollar, with the understanding that he’d write the screenplay himself.

Getting Rushdie’s blessing was the easy part. Transforming his sprawling magic realist tale—about the convulsive partition of India as experienced by a telepath with an extraordinarily large nose—into an accessible two-hour film was a far more complicated under­taking. It involved 64 locations across the subcontinent and 127 speaking parts. (On the occasion of the book’s 30th anniversary, the author greeted the entire crew via Skype.) Mehta had directed a film about partition before (1998’s Earth), but the scale and density of Midnight’s Children is breath­taking; after all, it touches on every major event that took place in the 30 years after Indian independence. As the filmmaker puts it, “The story is about nothing less than the whole scope of history.”

MOVIES Midnight’s Children Directed by Deepa Mehta In theatres Oct. 26

(Image: Deepa Mehta (centre), the director of Midnight’s Children, courtesy of Hamilton Mehta Productions)

NEVER MISS A TORONTO LIFE STORY

Sign up for This City, our free newsletter about everything that matters right now in Toronto politics, sports, business, culture, society and more.

By signing up, you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy.
You may unsubscribe at any time.

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Advertisement
Advertisement

The Latest

A high-tech greenhouse in King City is sticking it to Trump’s tariffs
City News

A high-tech greenhouse in King City is sticking it to Trump’s tariffs

Inside the Latest Issue

The June issue of Toronto Life features our annual ranking of the best new restaurants. Plus, our obsessive coverage of everything that matters now in the city.