After been in Mumbai for about two months this time (I have been here before a couple of times also), I have now had an insight in the life of actors and models in this city. It is that kind of area I am staying in. That is what people do here. I have made plenty of contacts and done a bit of modeling while here. I have also done a few auditions and had a few promising meetings hoping to get to participate in some sort of production. I came across to so many promising opportunities which brought me hope about this. I have listened to peoples epic plans about what they want to make and how they want to have me in it. But people just seemed to talk and talk at one stage. I guess you have to talk before you can take action and these things take some time to execute. Of course I realize that it takes longer than just a couple of months to get a role as an actor. But after a while here I have also realized that I don’t even really want to act. Not in the longrung. Not in this city, not right now. What appeals to me in all this is more just to be a part of a production. This since it gives such a concrete result to make a film and that is what I want to be a part of. The fact that it is such a complex artwork taking all the aspects that matters in considuration. All of a sudden everybody I met seems to have plans to start up their own youtube channel and start makeing short films. And they want to have me in there. Many opportunities at the same time. It is like I attract the people with visions, because a foreigner on film will attract audience here. To be honest it is probably not even my own idea to try acting. It is just everyone trying to talk me in to it. That’s the way it goes here and that is what people are doing around the area where I am staying. When I suddenly realized I don’t have so much time left of my visit here (for this time). I decided to just do something. I didn’t want to leave without having done anything recorded. I decided with a newly met friend that we should just quickly make a short film. Mostly to see if we could at all work together. If it goes well we can do something bigger next time. We decided it at the end of a meeting with a group of film makers called KZ – 27 Studios. The meeting was regarding another potential act for me in what seemed to be plans for a sitcom, which turned out were going to be shot later on during the spring and summer when I might not be able to participate since I might not be here then. We wanted to do something creative right now. The actress and the producer from the meeting were also up for it in the end when I said I might not be here by then. We all wanted to do something together. We ended up having done some sort of little short film a couple of days later. We were like five people, we had no money to invest and very limited resources. But we did it. And here is how it was.
In the evening I got to my friend’s house where we sat down on the floor to write something we could use as a script. We didn’t even have an idea of what kind of short film to make. It was more like we wanted to do it just for the sake of it. So we couldn’t afford wasting time on waiting for inspiration and the two of us ended up writing something pretty close to reality and made some kind of comedy out of it. We decided to make a funny short film about a foreigner who went to Mumbai to make a short film in only 12 hours. And it was night time during these 12 hours. Oh gosh what a master piece. Well that’s an exaggeration maybe, but that’s allowed sometimes. We just laughed and scribbled something down without following any standard procedure or method. A random guy from the western world who is a “film maker”, goes to Mumbai to make a short film in 12 hours. He needs to find his team in order to do this. He have to find what he needs on place when he arrives. He needs a camera man, a producer and an actress (he thinks he knows what he is doing but he is a complete idiot). So the real producer and actress from the meeting earlier that day got to play those parts. Let’s just take what we have. Why force it. One of us had to play the foreign film maker and the other one had to play the camera man. Since I am a westerner (foreigner) I had to take the lead role, because that made most sense. Then we needed someone to actually shoot the scenes. An actual camera man, not just someone acting that silly eager cameraman that were going to be on screen. So we had to take our scribbled piece of script and bring it over to someone we knew who could be our camera man. We showed him what we got and he was up for it. The next day we were on set. Set meaning that little apartment by the slums in Anad Nagar, Oshiwara, Andheri West, Mumbai were we wrote the script on the floor, which is the home of like five people. There were two rooms in the flat. So we moved all the things which is normally there over to one of the rooms when we were to shoot in the other and then switched it all over to the other room when we were to shoot in that room. The guy who was going to shoot the scenes had a pretty good camera to do it with. But we didn’t have any camera to use for props to the guy who was going to play the camera man. So we had to get around that somehow and make the story to be as if the cameraman lost his camera (because he is not an actual camera man but someone who just wants to lurer the foreginer. Which were fine (Iphone can do anything, even be props).
When the guys arrived the actress turned out to be another girl then the one from the meeting earlier. I had never seen her before but it doesn’t matter (I laught about it quite by myself). I found it funny, but at least we got an actress. The “producer” arrived late and came with his tooth brush. He started off with brushing his teeth then he called his mother to follow up with laying down on the floor to sleep for a couple of hours. That’s the kind of quality standard on a production I like. We had to cover a window in order to get the right light but we didn’t have a curtain, so we had to hang a piece of fabric on a line which we tied around a pen at the upper corner of the window. The pen we jammed into an old screw hole in the wall. There was also a scene when the actress were going to eat grapes. We took a few retakes and all of a sudden all the grapes were all eaten. I actually wanted to shoot one scene in the end with grapes also but they were gone by then. We had to make sure we got the right ligth from the right angle and the right sound. Particularly since I was going to speak hindi. My dialogs were in hindi, which is so funny. But I have to admit I was so bad at it that we had to do a voice over and dub it afterwards (but still me talking in hindi. A broken hindi by a true foreigner).
In the last scene I was dancing in the middle of a busy street with people walking everywhere. It was amazing to see how people just stoped and watched us with a smile. It was a real scene and none of the people there were prepared for it. The actress took my hand and held it as if she wanted me to hold it forever.
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