Approaching Midnight: Taking Midnight's Children from Book to Film (Radcliffe Institute)

Director and screenwriter Deepa Mehta discusses her recent work with Salman Rushdie to adapt his 1981 novel Midnight's Children for the screen—they collaborated closely as he wrote the screenplay—including the challenges of casting 30 principal actors in India and spending days and nights in intensive workshops inspired by the ancient Indian performing arts treatise, the Natya Shastra. Mehta shares her philosophy of filmmaking and how she walks the fine line between conventional storytelling and pure instinct. Following the lecture, she is joined by Bapsi Sidhwa, who wrote the novel on which Mehta's 1998 film Earth was based, to discuss the relationship between author and filmmaker and the evolution of story from print to film.

00:00:00 Welcome by Lizabeth Cohen, dean, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study; Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies, Department of History, Harvard University

00:08:40 Introduction by Martha Chen, lecturer in public policy, Harvard Kennedy School

00:15:37 "Approaching Midnight: Taking Midnight's Children from Book to Film" by Deepa Mehta, film director and screenwriter

1:33:43 Discussion of the relationship between author and filmmaker by Bapsi Sidhwa, author of Cracking India: A Novel (1991), which Mehta adapted into the film Earth, and Water: A Novel (2006), based on Mehta's film Water