Island adventure

Pankaj Kapur, Naseeruddin Shah, Dimple Kapadia, Homi Kapadia, Deepika Padukone and Arjun Kapoor relax during b a break

Goa is a dream destination to shoot for film-makers, but for director Homi Adajania, shooting at Goa’s Divar Island turned out to be a nightmarish experience. Explaining the sequence that was shot there, that shows the actors lost in an abandoned place and end up spending the night on the island, Adajania says that the particular scene required an open and abandoned space and Divar with its open paddy fields and wooded hills made for the perfect backdrop. But the beautiful island is connected to Old Goa and other nearby towns by ferry, and there is a constant flow of people at the scenic location.
“It would not have been fair to lock the place and stop the ferries because of the shooting. So we had to devise ways to deal with the noise (as we were shooting in sync sound) and people in the background as we needed an open and deserted area of at least five km around,” said the director who would start shooting at 5.30 am to capture the wide expanse without any disruptions. Later, as the flow of people would start, the crew kept a check on the ferry timings.
“They would sound us about a ferry’s arrival and I would quickly use the 10 minutes or so I had to can at least part of the scene,” said Adajania as he recalled those tough seven days.
However, it was the last day of the schedule, when he had to shoot a scene with Pankaj Kapur and Dimple Kapadia, one with Naseeruddin Shah and a longish romantic one with Deepika Padukone and Arjun Kapoor, that stressed him out. Generally three to four pages (one page is a minute of footage in the film) of a film are canned in a day, but he had to can 10 pages on the last day!
“Somehow I managed to do it, but I don’t think I will be able to perform a feat like this again in my lifetime. The romantic scene with Deepika and Arjun had to be shot in four hours flat, and there was no way we could extend the time because Deepika had to leave the next day for her Happy New Year shoot and would not have been able to give me dates for another month! Everyone, including the actors knew that, and it was everyone’s determination and focus which made it happen, as no one wanted to come back to the island to shoot.
So, around everything that was happening, the arrival of ferries, the disembarking and embarking of passengers, the actors managed to give the right pitch and tone. But frankly it was nothing less than a nightmare for me,” admits the director.
Finding Fanny is produced by Dinesh Vijan’s Maddock Films and is presented by Fox Star Studios. It is slated to release on September 12.