The Billionaire’s Sleep

I’m staying in Delhi with my friends Rana and Monica and their beautiful new baby Amália.

I’ve discovered iced tea.

A tree in the park where I lay down to get away from the heat but there was no escaping.

I’ve realised that I was trying to push this project in way too many directions. In the end I’m making an independent feature film. There will be a lot of promotional material attached to the film, much of it on digital platforms but the primary product is a feature film. I’ve got so many other projects on the boil that are completely suited to digital platforms by their nature that it seems foolish to try and force digital components to sit as part of the core product.

The X Media Lab has been an incredibly valuable experience. The mentors and other project teams added so much to my project. Great ideas like making The Billionaire’s Sleep an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical to a melodramatic TV series for the Hong Kong market. I’ve also had the opportunity to talk with several production companies in Bombay about investment and production opportunities. I’m going to spend the next couple days writing up all my notes and will post again shortly on where I’m taking the story.

I attended a screen writing session at FICCI-Frames yesterday. During the discussion a question was asked about how you got the audience to relate or sympathise with the villain. The speaker, Matt Costello, related the scene in Psycho where Norman Bates pushes the car containing the body into the lake but it gets stuck. For a moment the audience shares Norman’s worry, that the crime will not be hidden!

Another audience member pointed out that you don’t discover Norman is the killer to the end of the film so he isn’t yet a villain. Matt acknowledged the point but said “he is disposing of a body murdered by his ‘mother’. I think that makes him a villain.” At which point someone else in the audience says “Sir. He is doing it because of unconditional love for mother!” I was struck by how such a seminal film can function subtly across cultures. I have always read Psycho through the prism of psychoanalysis. Id, subconscious etc. but here Norman Bates was being read as acting appropriately, fulfilling his responsibility to protect his mother.

Later as I discussed my film with one of the other teams bringing a project through the X Media Lab I realised that one of the strengths of the project is the ability to bring strong dramatic Indian themes together with underlying, dark, traditions of the subconscious and psychoanalytical thought. The unconditional love of mother means many things. Probably at the same time.

I arrived in Mumbai on Friday night. It’s so strange how much easier it is to arrive in India a second time. Off the plane, straight to the pre-paid taxi counter, into my taxi, off to the hotel. It’s still a crazy full on traffic, people everywhere, something to look at constantly environment but it’s one I’m looking forward to rather than dreading.

I’m at a very nice hotel with lake views in the far north of Mumbai. Relaxing. Great pool. Have spent a day writing a presentation for today and getting documentation into order. Last night was the first networking event for X Media Lab. Met some very interesting people. I haven’t given out so many cards in such a short time before.

There is a real animation bent to FICCI-Frames and X Media Lab this time. Several animation production houses are represented at X Media Lab so I will get a good opportunity to discuss some of the animation ideas we have for the project. There’s also a real interest in co-production where the animation house puts up sweat equity in order to keep production costs down.

There’s a lot of opportunity around the digital expression for ‘The Billionaire’s Sleep’. I can see how the Imran character can extend into a storyteller on multiple devices and how the stories he tells can be taken much further than currently in the script. It will be interesting to see what I learn from the mentors and project teams participating in X Media Lab.

It’s almost been a year since I posted here. During that time the film has gone from 20 minute short to 2 hour feature. There’s a script of sorts and I’m heading to India again to attend Frames (a film and TV conference) and hopefully I will be pitching my project as part of X Media Lab while there. I’ve decided to restart the blog as a place for me to keep development diary stuff and as part of my regular writing exercise.

It really has taken a year to build up the skills, confidence and concentration to get this project up and running. The hardest part remains the writing. Basically by writing this blog entry I’m avoiding writing a new one page synopsis that I should be working on. The funny thing is suddenly everything lines up. I’ve found I can sit down and write for a few hours every morning, I have got contacts that enable me to get the project in front of people who can invest (or introduce me to those who can invest) and I feel that I can pitch the project in a way that fills those listening with confidence that I will deliver.

So. Time to deliver.

I’d read about it. Pretty interesting concept. The funny thing is that I’ve only been away for 6 weeks but I still found myself sitting at the gate in Singapore waiting for the Sydney flight thinking “where the hell did all these white people come from and why are the women flashing so much skin!” My new found predeliction for modesty had been offended.

It made me think about something the Australian Prime Minister had said. He felt that a head covering for Muslim women was OK but felt that most Australian’s would find full “head-to-toe” covering “confronting”. I can just imagine how “confronting” a lot of Australian culture would be arriving here. It’s gotten me thinking about a documentary project I’ve had kicking around in the back of my head for quite a long time that talks about shared ‘values’ but how they’re applied differently across cultures. I started writing a treatment (probably as a procrastination device to avoid working on the screenplay).

I am however very much back in Australia. Just renewed my drivers license, had some Indonesian food in Chinatown and rode my bike through Centennial Park. It is a pretty nice lifestyle, space, reasonably fresh air (particularly when the sea breeze is coming through) and quiet. It is missing something though. I keep thinking of the word community but I’m not entirely sure what I mean by that. I might have to do another post once I’ve worked it out.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the blog. There have been many things that haven’t made it into a post but I had to save something for stories. Considering I lived in the States 16 years ago and I’m still telling stories from then I think you’re all going to have to endure India in coversation with me for quite a long time.

Well. I even shed a tear leaving India. I forced the driver to play a cd called Hindi Film Nostalgia 4 all the way to the airport. I suspect he enjoyed it as much as I did. Had a delicious final dinner with my friend Arul’s parents. Prawn moily and appams. I had treated myself to the 5 star experience. Ayurvedic massage, swimming pool, bizzare demands on the staff, a driver for the day (which they made complementary!)

It was also a very humbling day as I visited a friend of my mother’s who has been running a womens refuge/hospital/training centre since 1979. It’s a 5 story building with around 500 girls living there plus another 200 staff and 500 students during the day. Seeing a class of pre-schoolers 50 in size getting their afternoon nap by resting their heads on their chairs all crowded up against each other was a bit of a wake up. Still, as the staff member who was guiding me around said “at least they’ve got clean clothes, have been fed and been paid attention to today.”

I’m in Singapore now. Taking advantage of all the free tech stuff here. Will walk round for the 3 hours till my connection to Sydney departs. Looking forward to sleeping in my own bed and making myself a coffee tomorrow morning.

Well the blog has veered towards a travellers personal experiences but I haven’t forgotten I cae here to research and write a screenplay. I’ve been plugging away at the screenplay and my ideas and thought I should probably put a few down here since that was the original idea of having a blog in the first place.

Characters:

Rajiv Malhotra is a billionaire who inherited an Indian steel empire and turned it into a trans-national concern with a focus on India’s ability to provide outsourcing services to the rest of the world. For him every moment of every day in every timezone is an opportunity to provide efficient services. His obsession with utilising every second of the day means he has never been able to sleep. This inability to sleep has also meant he is infertile and has not been able to produce an heir to his empire. His decision to have a ‘perfect son’ made for him through the use of genetic technologies is the inciting moment of the story. From that moment powers beyond his control come into play.

Sapna is his unexpected daughter, when his wife gives birth to twins, a girl and a boy, Rajiv finds he has a daughter who sleeps beautifully. That sleep is so powerful that as she approaches puberty Sapna’s fertility when she dreams brings organic objects back to life. Her bedhead grows branches and a perfect white flower. The spores in the carpet burst into life over night filling the air with floating tendrils, her clothes basket grows into a thicket of bamboo. This exhuberant fertility frightens Rajiv and he does everything within his power to have this excess of organic material removed from his sight.

Sapna is the emotional heart of the story. It is through her that her father is finally redeemed and it is her that the audience feels most strongly for. Her twin brother Imran is cast out of the Malhotra family home as he is born deformed with a head shaped like that of a cow. He grows up in a poor Shia part of Bombay, scorned and laughed at by other children for his deformities he is accepted into the illegal underworld that provides a living for many of Bombay’s residents. He is a fixer, he knows who can solve a problem. He is a trickster character, he tells stories and recites poems in tea houses through the city’s slums. He pops up wherever he is needed, travelling without bringing attention to himself. However, something is missing from his life and it is that negative space that he seeks to fillful by travelling to Delhi home of the father and sister he doesn’t know he has.

There are plenty of other characters (including one more core character) but that would be giving away too much of the story and I want you all to come and see the film. More detailed thoughts to be posted when I’m sitting in Singapore twiddling my thumbs.

Well. It’s been 5 days of sitting happily writing, reading and eating. Kerala is “god’s own” apparently. A title Aotearoa might also claim, but NZ doesn’t have enough coconut trees. Spent the first day watching a festival at the Sree Krishna Swamy temple in Ambalapuzha watching elephants parade and warriors dance. I made friends with the local drunk and a sahdu who explained what was going on. An interesting combination. The sahdu had the disconcerting habit of referring to the group of warriors as “I” and their opponents as “you”. So lines like “I will kill you now” had me thinking “oh”.

The following day was St Joseph’s Feast. So I walked down to Karumady Church and ate my share of the feast. Apparently they fed 35,000 people during the day. It was a pretty well run kitchen. The rice bowl was a metre and a half across. It was country style Keralan cuisine. If you hadn’t finished your main they just plonked your dessert on top of your rice.

I also got to paddle around in a canoe. Travelling through the myriad of canals and creeks that link the backwaters together. Watching rice being harvested, thousands of ducks being herded (a specialist art that involves lumps of mud being thrown at them until they swim in the right direction) and clothes, dishes and selves being washed.

We visited the ’snake boat’ which is raced every August. It looked just like a waka. When I got excited about this (it even sits in a wharewaka just like Aotearoa) Benny (who did most of the paddling) also got excited and asked me to send him a photo of a waka with full complement of crew.

The canoe before Benny cleaned it.

The view from the back porch.

Everyone likes to say, the south is so different from the north. At Bombay airport a young man wheels my luggage 15 meters, states “you give me money now”. 10 rupees doesn’t quite do it for him, he says “give me 10 dollars”. I say “eat me”. Our transaction is concluded.

In Cochin a group of fishermen using huge counter-levered nets (weighted with massive rocks) wave me over. The gang leader tells me that since the Tsunami none of the commercially viable fish come into the harbour so he just comes to work for the tourists. I help them haul in a catch of tiny shrimp and sprats, drink chai and eat rice cake. Then I give them some money for the privilege of my labour. It felt different.

Saw a Kathakali performance last night. I shot a video which I think will cut together into a nice 10 minutes instead of the several hours it took. It was pretty easy to follow the story. What was interesting was how long it takes to say ‘leave’. About 10 minutes of gestures and grimaces. Of course the character has to say ‘leave’ 4 or 5 times so it was a fairly short dramatic piece that somehow spiraled into several hours. What really struck me was how foolish the main male characters all seem to be. Pompous and self-righteous but foolish all the same.