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Journalism of Courage
The Internet is a good bet for finding love these days, but using it to find a movie crew for your first film?
‘‘That’s a really crazy thing,’’ says Ashvin Kumar, the 32-year-old film-maker who did exactly that for his first film Road to Ladakh, which played at the ongoing International Film Festival of India (IFFI) in Goa.
It’s a story about a coked-out fashion model and a terrorist—two worlds coming together to discover misunderstandings and an unlikely connection.
The Internet did the same for Kumar and a tall strawberry-blonde cinematographer from Switzerland.
Marcus Huersch, (38), was a stranger to Kumar—and infinitely more experienced in film-making—when he came across Kumar’s advertisement for a film crew in 2002 on shootingpeople.com.
The website, designed to bring film-makers together, was about six months old at the time, and according to Huersch, not exactly brimming over with quality opportunities. But he found Kumar’s invitation to make a movie at the foothills of the Himalayas intriguing nevertheless. On the quality of the script alone, Huersch agreed just one week after initial contact to work with Kumar for no money.
Was it a risk? Big time, they say. Huersch had never before set up an entire film project via the Internet, yet it was more of a novelty than anything else for the experienced film-maker.
As for an inexperienced film-maker with a budget next to zero, Kumar (who was born in Calcutta, lives in London, and will soon move to Mumbai) says his “only recourse” was to search for people in an unconventional way. He culled his other 40-odd crew members from six different countries (the first camera assistant is Belgian, the assistant director is from the UK and the lighting crew came from India) from the Internet as well. His first meeting with most of them was in Ladakh just a day before shooting began in August, 2002.
Smoothness proved elusive as Huersch discovered during the course of shooting that Kumar was not as experienced as he had thought. “I was under the impression that he knew a lot, but no. We had quite a lot of arguments,” says Huersch. But being on a remote location in India became a powerful catalyst for simply finishing the project. “If we’d been in London, things could have easily been replaced.”
The marriage is still working. Huersch has agreed to do the cinematography for Kumar’s first feature-length film The Forest, which will begin production in March.
As for Road to Ladakh, which started out shakily along the wires of modern communication, it’s been picked up by Hollywood producer Judith James who aims to turn it into a full-fledged production with an American actress and the original leading man, Irfan Mir.
