Another BIFA filmmaker who we’ve seen on DN’s pages in the past, Karan Kandhari – a nominee in this year’s The Douglas Hickox Award (Best Debut Director) category – first joined us for an interview back in 2012 with his short film about perfectly quaffed hair and finding your tribe Flight of the Pompadour. It was the second instalment in Kandhari’s A United Howl trilogy and as he explains below, an important bellwether in helping to define his cinematic voice, not only for himself but also for those who would later go on to support his feature projects. Case in point being his delightfully entertaining Bombay set debut Sister Midnight, a genre-bending comedy that premiered as part of Cannes Directors’ Fortnight about a frustrated and misanthropic newlywed who discovers certain feral impulses that land her in unlikely situations. While not fully dialogue-free as was the case with that early short, Sister Midnight does embrace minimal dialogue, which by no means makes it a ‘quiet’ film, as the richness of its off-kilter narrative is fully expressed through its meticulously composed visuals, enveloping cacophony of the city’s sounds and juxtaposition of pre-cleared tracks. A film for all the misfits who have also misplaced their instruction manuals for life, we invited Kandhari back to Directors Notes to speak to us about following his characters’ lead in the writing process, the pushback he faced trying to make the film 10 years ago and why if Radhika Apte hadn’t accepted the role that could well have been the end of the project.
[The following interview is also available to watch at the end of this article.]
I have always felt like a bit of a misfit and I love filmmakers who give a voice to these characters, is that part of who you are?
I think it’s very natural for me to gravitate towards characters who feel like misfits, like you, I felt like one most of my life. I moved around a lot, I’m from everywhere and nowhere. It’s not really conscious but the best way I can explain it is the same way a Ramones song made me feel less weird or alone, or in fact made me feel happy to be weird, I hope the film does something similar.
Bombay is clearly a huge influence on the film and you can feel the madness and chaos of it throughout. How insane was it filming in a city like that?
It was insane and it’s part of what attracted me to the city because it is this chaotic pressure cooker of many contradictory things, energy, people and life. It was also mainly mad because of the heat and how small the shack was that the couple lived in. Even though we had walls that came in and out, it was nicknamed the ‘Tandoor’ because it was tiny and very hot. We were shooting on film and it’s lit in a slightly old fashioned way with a lot of hard light so that also melted everyone’s brains on set, but we had to stick to what we wanted which was this expressionistic sort of 50s style lighting. Bombay is also home to one of the biggest film industries in the world so the crews were amazing.
That street where the young couple’s house is will live in my brain for a long time. Is that a real street?
It was based on a real street that was stuck in my head for about 20 years. We tried to look into using the real street but it was very difficult so we looked into other streets that were similar, but it was going to be difficult. We would have had to displace people from those communities and we didn’t want to do that. What we ended up doing was actually building the strip of shacks on another street in a gated community.
I love to pull out a scene that particularly struck me when speaking to directors and here in Sister Midnight their first disastrous big day out to the beach felt so pivotal. Could you tell me about that scene – what it meant, how the stylistic choices came about and its narrative place within the film?
I’m not sure I can give you an intellectual answer as to why it’s there other than the whole film is about having no manual to be an adult, to be a partner, to be a man, to be a woman, to be a husband or to be a wife. He’s got the best of intentions to finally get his shit together, not be hungover and sort out a nice Sunday for them, and then obviously he’s miscalculated the journey time and they drive all the way there for 13 hours and then have to get straight back on a bus all over again to get all the way home.
The whole film is about having no manual to be an adult, to be a partner, to be a man, to be a woman, to be a husband or to be a wife.
The creative act is a mysterious thing, especially when I’m writing. It’s really where the characters lead me so I just followed him and he took me to this ridiculous place with him screwing up. Stylistically it’s similar to the rest of the film. We’re trying to film with the least amount of cuts possible and the least amount of dialogue. To me, film is an audiovisual medium. We didn’t do too much in terms of establishing shots or anything to root you to the story. It’s quite abrupt, you’re in there and that’s the way we structured most of our frames. Most of the information is there in the background, so you see the beach, you see all this going on juxtaposed with the displaced couple looking completely lost. We actually built that bus stop because it wasn’t there. I have this issue where I get very attached to geography in my head that doesn’t exist and then we have to work backwards to make that fit into reality.
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Films as you just said are fundamentally an audiovisual medium. How does your interpretation of that influence production and hold true throughout the process?
It’s interesting you mentioned that because the film took 10 years to get made mainly because people were quite scared that there’s very little dialogue and it is told in an audiovisual way. There’s zero exposition, there’s no explanation of what happens. Everything is meant to unfurl and be suggestive. I had to protect that because that’s the grammar of cinema to me. Lots of different things were done in production, even in terms of how we moved through the city because we’re not using dialogue to explain. She lives so far away from where she works because she was trying to get as far away as possible from this street she was living on and it was important that we could understand the city changing as she went through it visually. In prep I broke down each scene and the city with a sort of coding on different parts of the city so you could get an idea as she’s moving through Bombay. In terms of holding onto that ethos, I had to be very diligent and keep the crew very diligent as well because the film is really about the details and because we’re not leaning on dialogue to explain anything we had to be very controlled to keep all that in.
It took 10 years because people want everything explained. We live in the age of explanation, you go on YouTube and there are ridiculous videos explaining the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which for me is a different film every time I watch it. Trying to get a very strange film financed means people are fearful and want to make it as accessible as possible but I just had to stick to my guns and protect the grammar of what we were trying to do. This country obviously has a massive history of theatre, but film is not theatre and I still look to the silent era of film. I was reading an interesting book about Buster Keaton and the author was saying that it was almost like sound came too early just as silent films were peaking into an art form. In a strange way I’m trying to make silent films with sound.
Trying to get a very strange film financed means people are fearful and want to make it as accessible as possible but I just had to stick to my guns and protect the grammar of what we were trying to do.
Then you’ve got that huge juxtaposition that music is at the heart and soul of the film. It’s named after an Iggy pop track, you’ve got Motorhead, I read about the inclusion of some amazing Cambodian soul music. So less dialogue but more music and noise!
It’s interesting you mentioned noise because actually shaping and sculpting the noise of the city was a big thing and there’s a musicality to that as well. Juxtaposition is a good way to put it. I like putting things together that shouldn’t go together and that music should not go together with what’s going on in this film. I pre-cleared all of it because it was so important and it was all in my mind but music to me is really what I love the most. The film is named after an Iggy Pop song because I think the spirit of Iggy Pop being a misfit survivor is baked into it and I was listening to a lot of Iggy Pop when I was writing it. It’s intuitive but it has to be something that surprises me and that’s how I landed on all that music and it’s really important.
We nearly didn’t have it all because people were worried about wasting so much money on this stuff. When you’re making your debut people are so fearful and they think of anything like this as some sort of vanity element but it’s so integral to the film and for me, it’s right there from the start when I’m writing. Things can make their own logic when you put them together even if they’re not technically supposed to be together. In a sense the film is like a cultural collage. There’s no Indian music but we have this Cambodian soul from the 60s which I think is really beautiful and has a similar vocal timbre to Indian music. On a first listen it’s hard to place where it’s from because it sounds Asian but then it also sounds like somebody tried to replicate Phil Spector and put him through some strange Cambodian machine and came out as this this other beautiful musical mutant. There was a strange melancholy and a sort of derangement to the music, some of it’s very frantic and quite wild.
You’ve mentioned the film taking 10 years to get made and issues with financing, were you getting a lot of pushback?
A lot of people didn’t get it. I tried to make it 10 years ago. I had a really cool producer on board but back then neither of us had done very much and we tried to get it made and took it around. After a year the option was about to run out and she explained that it might not happen and it might have to be my second or third film, but ironically it turned out to be the first feature. It’s a miracle any time a film gets made especially something strange. I think if you’re trying to make something a little odd that breaks down a few barriers and boxes you’re going to get pushback and you have to just protect the thing and find the right people who click with it and get it. There are two execs who were very important in getting this film made, one was Natascha Wharton at the BFI and the other was David Kimbangi at Film4. I think without those two we wouldn’t have snuck it through the system. Let’s hope it doesn’t take me 10 years to make a second film!
I read that you almost weren’t going to make it before you found the right person to play Uma. What was it about Radhika Apte in that role that clicked for you?
The first thing that struck me was that she’s fearless. You can just see in the performances she’s utterly committed and will go to whatever strange place she needs to go to. Up until that point, the stuff I’d seen was a lot more dramatic and obviously the film is a comedy and the humour is the main driving force of the narrative. When I met her she was very funny in person. Literally, all it took was me seeing a couple short clips of her then I knew she had to play this part. I was very scared she was going to say no and I probably would have canned the project I think, which sounds ridiculous but I can’t think of anyone else who could have played Uma.
Sister Midnight is indeed a very funny film. You’ve screened at Cannes, LFF and elsewhere, how have those in the room reactions been? Do you sit and watch the film with audiences?
I always say I’m not going to but then I stay for the first 10 minutes and if the laughter kicks in where it needs to be or exceeds where I think it should be, I end up staying. I think if you’re doing work for which humour is so important, the moment you hear that laughter in the room, it’s kind of like a drug and the greatest validation because if the joke doesn’t land, that’s the worst thing. So I’ve ended up sitting through quite a lot of screenings even though I keep saying I’m just gonna stay for the first 10 minutes and then the laughter is so rapturous and addictive it’s the best feeling! Even Cannes was surprising how it played, people whooping at the screen and clapping. It was like a circus. It was a very strange, nervous experience. Nobody’s seen this thing and you’re just about to play it at this place with a history of very particular, scrutinizing audiences.
If you’re doing work for which humour is so important, the moment you hear that laughter in the room, it’s kind of like a drug and the greatest validation because if the joke doesn’t land, that’s the worst thing.
So let’s talk about BIFA, it’s an incredible moment for you as a filmmaker. How does it feel to be standing next to the other debut features up for the Douglas Hickox Award?
It’s kind of exciting because it’s so varied and what’s amazing about that is it’s such an array of voices. You feel a little bit nervous against the other films but just to be on the list being nominated is kind of awesome. The main thing is being in such a diverse mix of voices is really interesting and says something about where hopefully film is heading in this country.
In 2012 your short Flight of the Pompadour was featured on Directors Notes. What does it mean for you to have your early experimental playground short film work championed back then and that now coming full circle with us talking today about Sister Midnight?
That was one of the things that struck me when I did that interview with MarBelle years ago, I was like “Wow, these guys are interviewing short filmmakers, this is quite amazing!” It’s very good that you describe short films as a playground, I think they’re kind of laboratories. That’s how you learn and try to find your voice. I made a trilogy of shorts, the one you’re talking about was in the middle. They were important for me, I don’t know that all of them work but they’re not supposed to – you’re meant to learn through experiments and failures. But at least they showed some sort of a direction that my voice was taking and I think it was really important in getting other stuff set up in terms of features, cause you could look at them and hopefully understand where I was headed. Although, as deranged as those shorts were, which they are, this film exceeded them in derangement levels.
And finally, I believe that your next feature is named after another Iggy Pop song.
How’d you find that out‽ It’s called A Heart Full of Napalm, which comes from The Stooges’ lyric for Search and Destroy: “I’m a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm, I’m a runaway son of the nuclear A-bomb”. That’s one of the things I’m working on and then something else which for the moment also has an Iggy Pop song title just because I can’t seem to think beyond that but I might change it.
