It was a marvellous life lesson, says the filmmaker. If making Journey was a revelation, marketing it is an ordeal. It is all luck and luck is just the spit of gods and goddesses. But more than distance separates the metropolis of Bombay from its more infamous California counterpart and the rest of the planet's famed film centres. When Canadian director Sturla Gunnarsson was asked to helm the screen adaptation of Rohinton Mistry's acclaimed novel Such a Long Journey, he knew shooting on location in Bombay was the only way to truly capture the feel of the book, set in the bustling city in 1971.
Nobody shoots on location in Bombay.
It's crazy, it's mad. We did, but you can't. Mistry's weighty novel, which won the Governor General Award in 1991 and was a Booker Prize nominee, was scaled down into a workable script by screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala. Screenplay in hand, Gunnarsson selected 14 department heads from Vancouver, Toronto and London, England, to travel to Bombay, where local crew were hired and shooting began - in one of the most densely populated cities on Earth. It's the noisiest city in the universe.