Archive: 2012

Shripriya in the Mumbai Mirror

Last Sunday, the Mumbai Mirror published an interview with Shripriya by Aseem Chhabra.

The link to the Mumbai Mirror here (but behind a paywall), so it’s reproduced below.

A Magical Experience

The class was called Directing Poetry and it was a once in a lifetime opportunity for 12 graduate film students at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

“Poetry is so personal and visual, and it seemed like a great class to take on how to adapt a poem,” said Shripriya Mahesh, one of the two Indian Americans who managed to get into the class. Her classmate Shruti Ganguly also attended the course offered last year, while the two were in the third year of the program.

What made the class fascinating was that it was taught by the Oscar-nominated actor James Franco, who has also been collecting a series of degrees himself.

Franco’s plan was to make the class read Tar, a collection of poems written by Pulitzer Prize winning poet C.K. Williams. Each student was then to write a script and direct a short film based on the poem. Franco, who also played the role of the producer then planned to edit all the films into one full length feature.

This Friday, Tar – the film written and directed by Mahesh and her 11 classmates had its world premiere at the Rome Film Festival.

Mahesh picked two poems that spoke to her – Color of Time, where Williams remembers his childhood and Waking Jed, where the author observes his son who is about to wake up. “I thought it would be wonderful to connect the two ideas,” Mahesh said to me on Skype. A former executive at eBay, Mahesh finished her NYU program in May, and moved in the summer to Singapore with her husband and twin boys.

Franco invited Williams to the class and he read out all the poems selected for the film. “Just listening to him read was amazing and moving,” Mahesh said.

Then a few fortuitous things happened. As the students started to think about casting for their films, Franco offered to act as adult Williams.

And since Franco at that time was acting in Detroit in Oz: The Great and the Powerful, the shooting of the Tar segments also moved to that city. One more thing – Franco brought some of his Hollywood friends to act in the film. So Jessica Chastain drove down for a few days from a film shoot in Canada to act as young Williams’ mother. And Mila Kunis agreed to act as Williams’ wife.

All of this meant that Mahesh along with a few other classmates got to direct both Franco and Chastain. “It was very generous of the actors,” Mahesh said. “They didn’t have to do the films.”

“Directing James and Jessica was a joy,” Mahesh said. “They were very professional and collaborative. It was a very mutually respectful environment where I never felt they were stars.”

“He (Franco) switched roles very easily, “ she added. “When I was directing him, he took directions, even though he knew the script very well. But he would ask me ‘Do you want me to do it this way or another way?’ When I would call cut, he would ask how was that?”

She added that Franco nailed the performance of Williams in just a couple of takes, especially a tender moment towards the end of the film where he observes his son’s finger and ear. And while Mahesh was directing Chastain, Franco watched her and even gave helpful advice.

A lot of Mahesh’s beautifully made ten and a half minute long film has the free flowing style reminiscent of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. “When you are talking about memory and this was a year ago, that was a very relevant film. James suggested it to us as a visual reference.”

The visual style also matched through the shorts, since the films were shot by two cinematographers and the project had one production designer.

Last week Mahesh was heading to Rome for Tar’s premiere. “It was a very unique opportunity and the great thing is we went into it without expecting any of this,” she said. “I thought adapting poetry will be interesting. And then it became a magical experience when all these things fell into place.”

Photo credit: Anna Kooris

 

 

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TAR – red carpet and review

Very short two-day trip to Rome for the red carpet and the premiere.

While there were eight of the twelve directors in attendance, suffice it to say that the team that made TAR happen was a lot larger. The DPs, production designers, costumers, G&E team, line producers, sound, location managers and our amazing ADs and their teams, were all incredible. And the magicians who worked on the film in post, pulling 12 different shorts together – the editors, sound designers, composers. So much talent and dedication. My intense gratitude to each of them.

In terms of nerves, all of mine were reserved for the screening itself.

The Hollywood Reporter review can be read here.

Photo Credit/Source: Ernesto Ruscio, Venturelli/Getty Images Europe

The art of going on

A big part of life as a writer/director is handling rejection. Rejections from festivals, prizes, grants, producers, actors… I mean, anyone who can reject you will do so. Perhaps several times. And even someone who appears successful externally is getting crushed with some form of rejection.

Some rejections you can brush off and move on. Others linger. The depth of the wound and the recovery time is directly proportional to the sum of how much you deluded yourself and how much you wanted it.

This is a topic near and dear to my heart. So when Peter Bradshaw linked to this article by Rose Tremain, I read it immediately. If you are a filmmaker, you should read the whole article.

The most significant hurdle of all is finding the resources to defeat the almost inevitable 48-hour blues that follow the non-win, and the energy to return to the work in hand, unaffected by what’s just happened to a different book. Every writer I know feels more or less contented or discontented with day-to-day life according to how his or her writing is going. Many, many things will affect this, but I know that the non-win of a prize can seem to infect the ongoing work with a badness-virus and lay the author low. What’s on the page or screen – in which there had been stubborn belief, perhaps even garlanded a bit with excitement – can suddenly appear less than first-rate. Sentences crease and bend. Dialogue sounds wan. Even the ideas which inform the book can buckle at the knees.

The art of surviving this is simply the art of keeping on. Time and hard work will heal the poor ravaged thing. In the work lies the future. In the future may lie other shortlists and other wins or non-wins. And so the whole darn desperate process begins again …

By the time I reached the end, I was tearing up with empathy ((My rejections, to be clear, are on a much smaller, less relevant scale.)). But, taking her advice, I shall get back to work instead.

TAR premieres at Rome Film Festival

In the fall of 2011, I was involved with a very unique, collaborative feature film. Twelve directors, twelve different poems from a collection, twelve short films, all coming together to make a feature, TAR.

The writer/directors from NYU Grad Film, guided by James Franco, adapted the poems from a wonderful collection called Tar, by C. K. Williams. I chose to combine two poems, “The Color of Time” and “Waking Jed“, to make my short film.

In “The Color of Time“, as C.K. Williams observes his son Jed, in the special moments just before waking, he remembers a phase of his childhood dominated by the sounds of the dark, a strange woman across the courtyard and his stern father.

In November 2011, we were in Detroit, shooting. As I said when I posted a few pictures of the city, it was an intense, stressful, magical and unforgettable experience. I had the pleasure of directing James (as C. K. Williams) and Jessica Chastain (CK’s mother). For the role of young CK, I was lucky to find and work with the wonderful and talented Zachary Unger.

And this November, TAR, starring James Franco, Mila Kunis, Jessica Chastain, Henry Hopper, Zach Braff and Bruce Campbell will premiere in competition in the Cinema XXI programme at the Rome Film Festival.

TAR SYNOPSIS
TAR is based on Pulitzer prize-winning poet C.K. Williams’ collection of the same name. Written and directed by 12 filmmakers, the film blends together adaptations of numerous poems, creating a poetic road trip through C.K. William’s life. Waltzing through time over several decades, C.K. Williams goes through a certain sense of rejuvenation as well as feelings of loss, as he experiences a series of significant past and present encounters. His constant wonder at and desire to grasp his memories makes him struggle to be fully present with his wife, but he then realizes through his journey, that he is inexplicably bound to both.

DIRECTORS’ STATEMENT
“Maybe the right words were there all along. Complicity. Wonder.”

Our project began as a collaborative experiment rooted in the idea that the language and ambitions of poetry provide a fertile source from which to create a unique cinematic experience.

Our source was Tar, C.K. Williams’s 1983 poetry collection that is a narrative of a remembered life – personal stories of brief as well as long-lasting encounters with people, places and situations. It is an extraordinary poetic achievement.

TAR, the film, consists of contributions from 12 individual directors developed in a Graduate Film class at Tisch lead by James Franco, and comes from a shared belief that a truly collaborative experiment could yield something more powerful than we each could have achieved by ourselves.

Central to the collaborative nature of the film were the actor’s improvisations, allowing little accidents to happen, letting the actors’ inventions shape the moments, and in this way helping us explore and celebrate the wonders of one man’s recollections, seen through a glass cinematically.

It is our hope, that TAR will meet an audience open to watching and experiencing this kind of improvisational and experiential cinematic jam- session.

For more details on The Color of Time, view the film page.

REPRISE in HuffPo

REPRISE was mentioned in The Huffington Post

Three films remain fresh in my memory: Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla’s Embrace about the 2008 terrorist massacre in Mumbai; Strangers with young director Kabir Chopra and young actor Zoran Saher; and Reprise, a “relationship” film featuring two women and a college-bound daughter.

And he spoke to Angela, who plays the role of Sarah:

Angela Perri, an actor in the short Reprise which dealt with an abusive relationship, told me at the after-party:

I was intrigued at first by the character, an abusive alcoholic in a same sex marriage, and then further by Shripriya Mahesh’s (the writer/director) treatment of the relationship between the two women. Even though on the surface it might seem the details would create an unfamiliar situation for me, the story — one of connection, relationship and behavior — rung a deep familiar chord.

 Thanks to Aseem and the New York Indian Film Festival for the opportunity to screen in New York!

 

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REPRISE – updates

REPRISE, my second-year film, was an Official Selection at two Academy Qualifying festivals – the Palm Springs International Shortfest and the Rhode Island International Film Festival.

It also won the Best Student Short at the deadCenter Film Festival and was an Official Selection at the oldest LGBT festival in the world, the 36th San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, which is known as Frameline.

It was also at a clutch of other festivals and I am honored by the reception. I’ve been remiss in not updating the blog, and promise to be better in future.

The NYU Showcase


My first film at NYU, IN THAT MOMENT, has been selected to be showcased on the NYU Grad Film website. You can watch the entire movie on the site.

If you are thinking of applying to Grad Film, the Showcase site lists some examples of all the films we make while we are at school. The MOS, Observational Documentary, and Adaptation from the First Year, the one key Second Year film, and then the Thesis film.

The really cool thing about the Grad Film program is that it keeps evolving – till recently, the third year was mainly devoted to writing, planning for life after grad school and doing your own projects, but due to curriculum opportunities in my year, we made a lot of films in the third year too. Everyone made at least one film and some people made as many as three. I’m sure some of these films will start showing up in the Showcase in the future.