Space Crunch

Ananth Mahadevan briefing a scene to Konkona Sen Sharma

When film-maker Ananth Narayan Mahadevan embarked on to make a biopic on Odisha’s freedom fighter Gaur Hari Das who fought for 30 years in free India to get a freedom fighter’s certificate, little did he know that the major challenge would be to find an apartment to shoot some indoor sequences. Since the film is a biopic of a living person, he did not want to put up any set. And the irony was that despite Mumbai being the centre of cinema, shooting on locations in the city is perhaps the most impractical and the most prohibitive thing. Though Das lives in a modest middle-class dwelling in suburban Mumbai, shooting at his place was not possible because of space constrain as the scenes required the participation of all the actors Vinay Pathak, Konkona Sen Sharma, Tannishtha Chatterjee and Ranvir Shorey.
“To show a 500 square foot house, you have to shoot in a 2000 square foot place because you have to accommodate the shooting equipment and camera. But getting an apartment has its set of problems, when it comes to things like getting permission from housing societies. That’s when I hunted down an under-construction building in Malad in suburban Mumbai and leased the entire floor where we actually set up Das’ house. It was a good idea because we could see the road through the windows, the highway outside and the traffic going by. It was spectacular and appeared like we were right in the heart of the city,” explained Mahadevan, adding that while most film-makers today shoot in studios in Mumbai even though the script demands an apartment, yesteryear makers like Basu Chatterjee and Hrishikesh Mukherjee shot home scenes in their writers’ apartments. Mumbai is the center of film-making but film-makers prefer to shoot in other countries because of the permission hassles and costs involved.