MUMBAI: Do you know Salaam Bombay director Mira Nair worked on her post-production of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, which is making waves globally, from her residence in New York’s Upper West Side?
The realisatrice was supposed to be in UK to put the whole show together and deliver the final masters to the BBC, but was stranded in the US on account of the Covid 2019 pandemic. After finishing filming in India on 17 December, followed by a two week break, she jetted down to the UK to get into a “neither world”, working on the post-production. “We have been working close to 12 hours a day, sometimes through the weekends, in order to really distil it to not just the story being correct but also finding its rhythm. It takes a lot,” she told the BBC in an interview.
But then she travelled to the US and got stuck there when the country got into a lockdown. With a deadline to deliver the show for telecast in June, Nair got cracking on creating a work environment in her study in her apartment.
Mira – who has homes in New Delhi, Kampala, Uganda, apart from Manhattan - had three devices through which she, like a conductor orchestrated the edits, the musical score (this was created in Budapest), the final approval for the episodes of the six part series with colleagues in India, Australia, UK, and Los Angeles.
In fact, if we thought jugaad was being resorted to only by India’s TV, short film, TVC directors and producers, Mira resorted to her own innovation methods too. “We had superstars like Tabu, and all the wonderful actors under their bln aked in their bathrooms with their microphones - their dogs muzzled, and everyone recording in these homemade studios we created with them,” she told The Financial Times.
The series was filmed in India in 2019 with two units being involved in different locations.
A Suitable Boy stars the ever so charming and acteur naturel Ishaan Khattar (Maan Kapoor), the ever so composed and alluring Tabu(Saeeda Bai), the newfound talent the vivacious Tanya Maniktala (Lata Mehra), Ram Kapoor (Mahesh Kapoor), Shahana Goswami (Meenakshi Mehra), Rasika Duggal (Sameera Kapoor), Mikhail Sen (Amit Chatterji), Randeep Hooda (Billy Irani), Mahira Kakkar (Rupa Mehra), Vinay Pathak, Manoj Pahwa, Ranvir Shorey, Vijay Verma, Kulbhashan Kharbanda, Namit Das (Haresh Khanna), Joyeeta Dutta (Tasneem), Dhanesh Razvi (Kabir Durrani), Vivek Gomber (Arun Mehra), Gagandev Riar (Pran Kapoor) Geetanjali Agrawal (Mrs Mahesh Kapoor), Shubham Saraf (Firoz Ali Khan), Vivaan Shah (Varun Mehra), among many other sterling talented actors.
The fifth episode of the series is slated to telecast this evening on BBC One on 23 August at 9 pm UK time. A Suitable Boy comes on to Netflix worldwide – excepting the US and Canada - later this year.
