Film is a powerful medium and my hope is that Earth will produce a dialogue and force people to think more deeply about the cost of such divisions. If people want to separate they should understand what it would really mean. I know that there will be some dialogue or some debate. I hope that Earth will put this into perspective. I think I have made a film that shows the futility of sectarian war, a film that is anti-war.
Earth personalises the partition.
First of all I have to be engaged personally on an emotional level with all my characters. To make epic sweeps and have politicians representing the anguish that the ordinary people went through is not for me. I wanted to tell this really large story from the standpoint of an intimate group of friends from different ethnic groups and trace out the process of partition through them. The difficulty for me was to keep a balance between the intimate and the epic, and to do that you must always give your characters the power to represent a point of view and not be scared of doing that. You have to trust your characters.