Rushdie on the ‘Midnight’s Children’ Script: ‘If I Want to Hack Stuff Out, I’ll Hack Stuff Out’

Paladin and 108 Media A scene from “Midnight’s Children,” due in theaters on Friday.

Chris Young/The Canadian Press, via Associated Press Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie’s sprawling novel “Midnight’s Children,” published in 1981, tells the story of Saleem Sinai, a boy born at the stroke of midnight on Aug. 15, 1947, the very moment when India gained independence from British rule. The book’s many characters, elements of magical realism (Saleem can telepathically communicate with other children born at the same time), and vast spatial and temporal canvas have made it notoriously difficult to film. The BBC had planned an adaptation in the 1990s, and before that producers involved with Richard Attenborough’s Academy Award-winning biopic “Gandhi” had approached Mr. Rushdie about a possible movie version. The movie will finally make it to the screen on Friday, written by none other than Mr. Rushdie. During a recent interview, he talked about the experience of turning his own novel into a screenplay. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q.

Are you a film buff?

A.

I’ve been a film freak all my life. When I was a kid, a lot of the big Hollywood studios had their own dedicated movie theaters in Bombay. So we would get Hollywood first-run films very quickly. Some of these cinemas still exist, but they primarily show Indian movies.

Q.

What are some of the earliest Hollywood movies you remember seeing?

A.

I was a kid, so they were kid movies. All those MGM musicals: “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,” those things. Walter Scott adaptations â€" “Ivanhoe,” “Rob Roy.” I remember seeing films like “Cobra Woman.”

Once I was at college in England, I became aware of world art cinema. I would go to the movies six, seven times a week.

Q.

What made you want to make a movie out of “Midnight’s Children”?

A.

I had almost given up on it. There had been one or two attempts over the years, which had foundered for different reasons. It just happened as a kind of accident. [The director] Deepa [Mehta] and I were having a conversation in Toronto, and I think she would say if you asked her, she doesn’t know why she asked me about the rights to “Midnight’s Children.” For both of us, it wasn’t really a thought-out thing.

Q.

After the failed attempts, you needed someone you respected to kick-start it and say, “I’m interested in this”?

A.

I liked [Ms. Mehta’s] films. I had particularly liked “Water,” which had just come out then. I liked the way in which it combined a kind of grand scale with an intimate scale, which is something I thought a film of “Midnight’s Children” needed to do. Everyone was telling us that you can’t film this book. And we just said, “The hell with that; yes you can.” You can film anything. There have been some pretty good attempts at “War and Peace.” Joseph Strick’s film of “Ulysses” is a pretty respectable try.

I once taught a class at Emory about the best-case scenarios of movies. I think the film of “Lord of the Rings” is maybe actually even better than the book. Visconti’s film of “The Leopard” is at least the equivalent of the novel. I thought Martin Scorsese’s “Age of Innocence” is up there with Edith Wharton. For me, one of the great examples of this is Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy. The trilogy started out as a novel. And they’re some of the greatest films ever made, in particular the first one, “Pather Panchali.” If someone asked me my vote for the best film, I would say that.

Q.

When you were adapting it, how much did it feel like you were cutting something down and how much did it feel like you were writing something new?

A.

When I finished [the novel,] I was 32. Now I’m 65. It really was looking back on this project of my youth and trying to see how I would do it now. I’m the person who has no respect for “Midnight’s Children.” As far as I’m concerned, it’s just one of the books I wrote. I don’t have to be reverential toward it. If I want to hack stuff out, I’ll hack stuff out.

Q.

Given that the book’s 30 years old, are there things that you no longer want it to say?

A.

At the time the book came out, the political issues at the end of the book, which is the period of emergency rule under Indira Gandhi, were still very live issues, because she had just returned to power in India, so she was prime minister again. And obviously the book is very critical of her. Now, all these years later, that subject is much less heated. So the question is, how to create a drama which holds the audience’s interest. You can’t expect them to be viscerally engaged with the politics of that. They have to be engaged in the human drama of it. You have to look at a slightly different place for the center of the scene.

Q.

Were there screenwriters you talked to for advice?

A.

No. I know enough about movies. I’m not scared by it. In the end storytelling is storytelling. Every time you tell a story, you have to struggle with the question of form and how to tell it. And of course you tell a story differently in a film than in a book, but that’s just part of the job.

Q.

Was it particularly hard casting young children?

A.

It is hard. But the boy who plays young Saleem, Darsheel Safary, is an astonishing actor. Deepa and I had both seen him in a film that made him well-known in India. It’s called “Taare Zamen Par” [“Like Stars on Earth”]. He played a young boy who was troubled, kind of a delinquent kid. He gets sent to a special-needs school, at which he meets a teacher played by Aamir Khan, who  finds the way to help him achieve an equilibrium in his life. And Darsheel more than held his own against maybe the best actor in India. He was absolutely his equal at the age of 8 or 9.

Q.

What did it hurt you most to leave out of the movie?

A.

If I’d had another half an hour I would like to have elongated the childhood part of the film. There are characters there that I miss. And in the novel, Saleem’s mother has two sisters and two brothers. In the film, the brothers, I’m afraid, didn’t make it. I wouldn’t have minded having them, particularly the one who’s a movie director, because I would have liked to have those movies within the movie. It would have been cinematically enjoyable, but in the end it felt like a luxury.

Q.

Were you concerned about bringing the more magical elements to the film?

A.

It’s what we talked about more than anything else. Our solution was to minimize the special effects. It can’t look like a CGI movie. You have to face this issue that [Saleem] is somehow telepathically assembling these children around him. But once you’ve done that, you should make the scene as naturalistic as you can.

Q.

Did you or Deepa have any examples of movies in which you thought magical realism was done well?

A.

Yes, the one she referenced is, as it happens, one of my favorite films, Mizoguchi’s “Ugetsu.” There’s a ghost in “Ugetsu,” a woman, but she’s treated very realistically. In the scenes between the man and the phantom woman, you can’t see through her; she can’t walk through walls; people don’t shiver when they come close to her. Other than the fact that she is a ghost, she’s not treated like one. Deepa said that was a clue about how to approach it, and I agreed.

Q.

How is it to have a movie come out as opposed to a book? How wedded do you feel to it? How do the reviews affect you?

A.

In some ways it’s a little easier, because I didn’t make the movie.  I’m very well aware that a screenplay is a step on the way to a film; it’s not a film. My role has been to truthfully say that I really like the film that was made. But I can’t take the credit for it.