A Conversation With: Filmmaker Richie Mehta

Larry Busacca/Getty Images Rajesh Tailang, actor, left, and Richie Mehta, director of “Siddharth” promoting their film at the Toronto International Film Festival in Canada on Sept. 9.

In the spring of 2010, the Toronto filmmaker Richie Mehta was stuck. A Disney project he had been working on for six months in India fell through. And he couldn’t book a flight back to Toronto because the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajokull had erupted, disrupting air travel. While he bided time in New Delhi, a chance conversation with an auto-rickshaw wallah unwittingly gave Mr. Mehta the inspiration for his latest film, “Siddharth.”

A meditative movie about a father’s search for his missing son, “Siddharth” is part of the Toronto International Film Festival’s lineup this year, after playing at the Venice Film Festival. A week before his film’s Toronto debut, Mr. Mehta sat down with India Ink for an interview.

As a Bollywood-themed community event unleashed its pulsating beats onto the civic square near his Mississauga home, Mr. Mehta led the way to a small garden a short stroll away from the frenzy. In that space seemingly designed for introspection, with distant strains of a Bollywood tune playing like a background score, he mulled over his relationship with India through his camera lens.

Q.

Where did the inspiration for this film come from?

A.

I was stuck in New Delhi for five weeks because of the volcano in Iceland. I was staying in East of Kailash, and wanted to meet my friend Rajesh Tailang in Khan Market. I had worked with Rajesh on my first film “Amal”; he did the translations, and was [lead actor] Rupinder Nagra’s dialect coach.

I ended up taking an auto-rickshaw, and there was this old Muslim man driving it. I got in and asked him how long it would take me to get to Khan Market. He said, “10 minutes.” Then he asked me if I am from Punjab. No, I said, my father is from Punjab. He asked me if I knew where Dongri was. I said no, what is it? Is it a neighborhood? And he said, “I don’t know but I think that’s where I lost my son.”

I asked what his son’s name was. He told me it was Rehemat Ali, but he didn’t know how to spell it. He didn’t have a photograph of his son. I asked him if he had filed a police report, but he didn’t know how. I asked when this happened, and he said a year had passed. For a year, he’d been driving his rickshaw asking passengers for help. It was all he could do because he couldn’t take a day off of work. He had a wife and another child. I asked for his phone number. He didn’t have one, and gave me his neighbor’s phone number.

We arrived at my destination, and we both went our ways. When I told Rajesh of this conversation, he told me about an incident when he went to Pakistan to do a theater show. The hotel he was staying in, instead of having Bible on the nightstand, they had a photo album of people you can order â€" men, women, children. They had a number you can call. It still hurt him as much as it hurt me to hear this. I went home that night, did a Google search and found Dongri in five seconds.

I called the guy and the number was wrong. It wasn’t even registered. And that was that.

Q.

There are so many such stories in India, if you choose to listen to them. What was it about this story that stuck with you?

A.

If you’re paying attention, speak the language, and engage with people, you bump into stories like this a lot in Delhi. What stayed with me the most with this guy was two things. He seemed to have come to some sort of terms with it. He wasn’t panicked. There was this bhagwan ki marzi (it’s God’s will) vibe from him. I feel like if something like that would have happened here to somebody, it would be understandable if they took disability leave for the rest of their life.

The other side is the economic side, which continues the work I’ve been doing in my own films. Understanding the relationship, economically, between a place like Canada and a place like India. In “Amal”, I took a laborer in India and said this is someone who does not necessarily need as much as we do to find peace and happiness. In this situation, I saw the same person but now he was in a massive, universally recognized emergency. I said, let’s illustrate how he negotiates this situation and comes out the other end resilient.

Q.

How did you translate that story into film?

A.

I was actually developing another story, a sci-fi film called “I’ll Follow You Down” (starring Gillian Anderson, Haley Joel Osment and Rufus Sewell). I’d been writing that for years, and it was a really long financing and casting process. In January 2011, I was in Los Angeles doing some casting work. I would work all day and then at night I would just sit there and do nothing. This story was just lingering [in my head]. And literally, one day I just sat down and started writing an outline of this guy. He’s an intelligent person. I didn’t want us as an audience to say he has an intellectual limitation. Rather his limitation occurred far before his birth.

Once I laid the structure of the script down, I basically filled in the dialogue based on how I might hear the characters speak. I knew that was only 50 per cent accurate, as I’d miss the nuances. That’s where Rajesh came in to do the translations. He’s so experienced at this, and has such an ear for the street lingo, that it wasn’t difficult to write. It just took a long time, as it involved talking through every word, and making sure it was the best choice.

Q.

How did you cast this film?

A.

Rajesh plays the father Mahendra Saini, a chainwallah who fixes zippers. Seema Biswas had introduced him to me for “Amal”. He’s an amazing theater actor. Tannishtha Chatterjee plays his wife. She’s a dear friend. I had told her about the project as I was writing it, and she expressed an interest in working on it. The rest of the cast all came via our casting director, Mukesh Chhabra and his associate Akash Dahiya, who did all of the children’s workshops. It was an amazing collaboration because Mukesh is well-connected to the Delhi theater community.

Joss Barratt/Sony Pictures Classics Tannishtha Chatterjee, actress, plays “Nazneen” in the 2007 film “Brick Lane” directed by Sarah Gavron.

Q.

Why do these stories draw you in?

A.

I am in India three/four times a year. This is a world I’ve spent a great deal of time observing, both through research, as well as casual encounters. I guess it’s just a matter of how insular you want to be when you’re there. Delhi is a place is where you usually leave your place and you know where you are going â€" it’s just going from point A to point B. You don’t really stroll along the way. And I do a lot of that. I will stroll. I will take indirect routes to go where I need to go. Just so I keep myself open to learning more about me and learning more about the world, really.

For this movie, Rajesh had actually found a chainwallah in his area in Delhi, and we used him as a consultant â€" on how to fix broken zippers, what tools to use, and how he lived.

I find it is easy for viewers to dismiss that world as being a different planet - it really has nothing to do with us. One of my goals is to illustrate connections between seemingly disparate societies. And if I can find a way to link this chainwallah’s life to an investment banker’s walking along Toronto’s Bay Street, I will be satisfied that I accomplished something here.

(This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.)

Aparita Bhandari is a freelance journalist based in Toronto, Canada.