Bird's eyeview: The long, lonely journey to making a film

Over the last few days, I have often been asked how I feel about winning the Golden Eye at Cannes. Well, when you’ve been asked profusely how you feel, then how you actually feel about it starts to change texture subtly. The brain cells feel a bit broken by what has happened, and in no small measure because in the same section at Cannes were some absolute masters. One of the films that was showing was by one of the Coen brothers (Ethan Coen’s ‘Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind’), there was Chilean director Patricio Guzmán (‘My Imaginary Country’) and Sergei Loznitsa (‘The Natural History of Destruction’) — the titanic figures in our field. We felt privileged just to be showing besides them, let alone win.

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‘All That Breathes’ essentially began with this kind of trifecta of interests that I have. For one, I was intrigued by the visceral, heavy, opaque greyness of the air, that constant grey sensorium that laminates our lives. Alongside that was a curiosity in human-animal relationship, especially birds. I was extremely interested in the figure of a hazy sky with these tiny dots — the birds — and this dreamy image of a bird falling off the sky. That is how it began and I started looking for people who have a deep and meaningful engagement with birds. That is when I chanced upon the works of Nadeem Shehzad and Mohammad Saud, two brothers who devote their lives to protect one casualty of the turbulent times: the black kites.

The minute I met them in that remarkable small, damp basement with industrial decay on one side and these beautiful and regal looking birds on the other, I immediately understood that this is an inherently cinematic place and the situation of the family was fairly surreal to me. I decided to shoot them. An hour and 37 minutes long, the film becomes a kind of free fall afterwards. There is an incredible momentum and that is how it remained for the next two-and-a-half to three years during which we kept shooting. In terms of the visual language, we were certain that we did not want to make a conventional nature talk or a wildlife talk. We eschewed the usual styles of using a tele lens to shoot a burdened sky and so on.

We brought on board German cinematographer Ben Bernard, who has shot films by the Russian master Viktor Kossakovsky. The idea was to capture the simultaneity and co-existence of non-human lives in the city, to show life writ large on its canvas. To this end, we figured this film grammar where we would be shooting long takes, without cuts. For instance, a long shot of the rats in the beginning or the turtles or the snail, where essentially the shot juxtaposes some element of the urban. Alongside that, you also stay with the animal in a kind of uncut, unfettered experience. The shots reveal something in the end.

It took us three years to make the film; globally speaking, most good non-fiction films seem to take that long. I suspect that is largely because you need a kind of arc in your character’s life and that inevitably takes a lot of time. It takes time to be comfortably embedded into the quotidian life of your character. And even if you shoot for a 100 hours (which is not much), it takes you really long — from months to often close to a year — to edit and finish the post-production process.

What works for me is my core directorial team. We are from the same college (Kirori Mal) and from the same theatre society called The Players. The five of us have worked together on my previous projects also and I am deeply interested in the stuff that they work on and more than anything, we’re all friends. I do have a kind of authorial impetus around the foundational ideas and the treatment, the tone, and, of course, I’m very stringent about everything and exercise as much control as possible about every aspect of framing, etc. However, in terms of the research and the ethnographic field work put in, it is a kind of hive mind, a beautiful group thing where the four-five us get together, think of images… We don’t work in a very hierarchical sort of a manner, making it a fertile cross-traffic of ideas. Through the course of making the film, we would see films together, read together, play cricket in the evenings, irrespective of whether there was actual work or not. This bonhomie and camaraderie made it really warm and became a kind of anchor.

Otherwise, the making of a film can be a scary and lonely journey. Through the misty haze of the film that will hopefully, eventually emerge, you are not able to see how far the finishing line is. You don’t know whether you will ever cross the finishing line. And even if you do cross it and get a good festival run, will the film find a wide audience or will it slip through the cracks, like my film ‘Cities of Sleep’ did? Will it find a good distributor? Now, in the warm afterglow of the festival success, we feel staggering amounts of relief. This has been a dream run — to win the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Documentary at Sundance and then at Cannes. But you don’t feel that while making it and it calls for a tremendous amount of courage.

Both ‘Cities of Sleep’ and ‘All That Breathes’ have Delhi as the background. If the former looked at Delhi through the lens of sleep, the latter looks at it through birds and skies. I am generally interested in cities and this film is about the notion of urban ecology which takes very seriously the city as a kind of habitat in which more than humans, animals constantly adjust, improvise and react to their urban settings. Also, the fact that an enormous percentage of the world’s population today is urbanised and the amount of land that is urbanised is also increasing exponentially, the city is crucial to understanding ecology as a driver of not just behavioural but also evolutionary changes. And I believe that when you start looking at a city through a specific prism, it starts illuminating and disaggregating itself in entirely new ways and that is a very exciting process.

— The writer won the L’Oeil d’Or (Golden Eye) for the best documentary at the 75th Cannes Film Festival recently

(As told to Sarika Sharma)