Interviews with the Director
How did the story come about? Was it scripted?
I'd wanted to make a cycle of films in Kashmir for at least a decade. But it seemed impossible, so to keep the flame burning I did other things: for years, I kept a running file of short stories, drawings, short videos -- basically a show bible -- organized around panoramic themes of contemporary daily life in Srinagar City. Certain characters would reappear in each other's stories. I kept them in various notebooks. The stories were loosely based on memories of my many times there visiting family, things I read in local papers, stories my dad would tell about his youth. I was just a magpie, really. And then when the time came to go shoot ten years later, I brought some of this material with me for inspiration. (Other stories I want to film in Kashmir, for this and for future films in the cycle, come from these short pieces.)
When I arrived, my cousin Hilal showed his friends the short stories in my bible but crossed out my name to get their objective reactions to what I -- an outsider -- had written. The reactions were positive; people were entertained and some even felt it was the work of some new local writer.
I was in Kashmir for three months before I had the story for "Zero Bridge." I wanted to write something accurate to how Kashmiri daily life had changed from my memories and received stories, but I wanted to write about matters close to my heart. Using ideas and emotions from some of the stories, I wrote a 140-page screenplay for "Zero Bridge" in two weeks.
But immediately upon finishing the screenplay, I realized it was useless. None of the first-time actors I wanted to cast would understand how to analyze a script the way a trained actor would, much less make sense of the strange screenplay format. So I threw away that screenplay and decided to make things more instinctive. Really, I didn't need the script anymore.
Instead, I wrote a 10-page scene outline that just described the important scenes, who was in them, what happened and why, what the important dialogue was, etc. That's what we rehearsed with for three months. And that now closely resembles the finished movie.
I didn’t initially anticipate being my sole crew, but the decision to record sound while shooting and directing the actors all simultaneously came really by circumstance. I realized that, in that environment, it was a better use of my time just to plunge in entirely on my own than to wait around recruiting and coordinating a crew. Besides, people shoot documentaries that way all the time, so why not a fiction feature?
Some of the inspiration to make "Zero Bridge" and to dramatize people’s daily lives came from Renoir and from Ermanno Olmi, whose films I brought with me and showed to the cast who were delighted by them. They too were inspired by the spontaneity and respectfulness in Maestro Olmi’s work. I decided to apply those same qualities to all aspects of the production while remembering to keep things as personal as possible.
And then actually getting to meet Mr. Olmi at Venice for the world premiere was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I mean there I was in Kashmir making my little no-budget movie, some broke film student with a video camera and some DVDs, and whenever I felt like praying, I'd watch one of his movies (made 40-50 years ago!) and feel better and find the strength to keep going; as if he were right there speaking right to me. And then, just a year later, we met face to face and spent a few days together in Venice! It was like magic! He also saw 'Zero Bridge' in a private screening and was very complimentary. I told him how much his films meant to me, and asked if he recognized all the scenes and moments I ripped off from his movies. He had no idea what I was talking about and just laughed and kept giving me big hugs and later I cried like a baby. I absolutely love him with all my heart. And I'll always be grateful to the festival for arranging that meeting, and to Artists Public Domain for putting up the finishing funds to screen there. He's one of those souls, like Renoir, who has remained committed to his art and to a career making movies that, whatever their genre or budget, have testified to the joy of just being alive, however tough living life itself can be. I tried to convey that with my movie, and I hope I succeeded.
What was your process for casting and rehearsing with the lead?
First, I did the traditional casting method for the role of Dilawar and his friends. My cousin Emran (who was helping me as a production assistant) and I went around the city on bicycles with a bucket of glue and a brush to plaster a stack of audition posters. I also paid the government channels to run an ad on TV, as a crawling text at the bottom of the screen. I looked at about 70 boys who showed up to audition for Dilawar. I had them do different physical activities, tell some stories from their life about when they felt most ashamed, most proud, etc. to try to see how they presented themselves, how accessible they were to their emotions, and if they could relax with somebody watching them do some intimate physical activity, like washing their face. After a month, I still hadn’t found my lead. The night before the last audition call, I was in a panic because we had to start rehearsing in three weeks.
That night, my cousin Imran and I were playing chess when I suddenly knew that he was Dilawar. I didn’t want to just come right out and ask him to do it, so I began to test him in little ways. I began inviting him into the acting workshops I was holding and examined how he did with the other (first-time) actors. He did very well, really bringing his own similar personal history to the role and enhancing what I had written. So I offered him the lead part. I handed him a 500-page notebook and told him to fill up the notebook with Dilawar’s thoughts, as if they were his own. That helped him get into character, and it kept him occupied while I continued pre-production.
I also showed him “The 400 Blows” and “Il Posto”. He got very excited about being in a film like this. All he had ever seen before were Bollywood romances and Hollywood action movies; never movies about someone just like himself, starring people who had never performed before. That’s when he began to see my point that almost anyone can act, as long as the person is correctly cast, made to feel like a collaborator, and is given simple, specific directions to keep his performance as unself-conscious and as physical as possible.
How did you cast the other leads?
The week I arrived in Kashmir, my first task was to figure out what the casting pool was like. To do this, I had a ruse: I offered my filmmaker services to small businesses in need of some promotional videos. One of these companies was a 40-man mason outfit. I went to their site and shot for a whole day while the construction crew was doing its work and made a film I later called DAY OF CONCRETE. It was there that I met Ali Muhammed. He was interested in what I was doing and we became friends. I knew he had to have a part in the movie I was going to make, even though, at that time, I didn’t yet have a story chosen.
I insisted on casting exclusively first-time, non-professional performers, people who didn’t have aspirations to act for the camera. This was generally met with a lot of resistance. People in Kashmir didn’t understand why I didn’t have any dance sequences, or why there was no propaganda. What kind of movie was I really trying to make? Many people were suspicious.
After casting Ali and Imran, I still had to cast Bani. I found Bani after posting notices at several girls technical colleges – there are no drama schools – in the city. I decided to cast Taniya for the role after I had her practice several scenes with Imran. Once I saw the chemistry between them, I knew it would work.
That was enough to start shooting. During the frequent interruptions in shooting, I often ran into people who I used to fill out the bit players.
What was the experience like making a film in Kashmir?
Kashmir is an occupied territory partitioned between India and Pakistan, basically a war zone. This situation causes logistical nightmares simply because one has no control over one’s own destiny in a place where personal safety, civil rights, a fixed price economy, communications, and infrastructure are all deeply, maddeningly uncertain most of the time. A lot of time was spent waiting, planning, anticipating, dealing with endless setbacks – such as strikes, violence, protests, curfews.
There were also natural setbacks, such as snowstorms and avalanches, which, because of the poor infrastructure in the region, could bring the whole city to a halt for days on end. This happened regularly. So, there would often be little to eat because the main supplies road had been cut off, and there were no gas canisters to cook with or to keep warm in winter. A lot of shooting time was taken just driving around on a motorcycle, going from one black market to another, looking for gas to buy.
Overcoming any one of the possible obstacles was a matter of luck and physical endurance. The likelihood of overcoming many such obstacles in a single day, or the odds of myself plus three other actors overcoming any of these obstacles in the same window of time decreases the odds of getting to shoot pretty dramatically. Trying to plan something as seemingly simple as three people meeting one another at a location just to shoot a simple dialogue scene for two hours becomes a real struggle. I had to reorganize the shooting schedule constantly. There was no rest from these for 9 months.
Describe a typical shooting day.
My cousin Hilal (who acted as my assistant-director) would call the actors beforehand to let them know when and where to show up. Then, on the day of the shoot, Hilal, Imran (Dilawar) and I would pile onto our motorcycle to go to the shooting location. Once at the location, we usually had to observe the custom of sitting and having tea with the location owner. While my cousins did this I’d get the camera and microphones set up.
If I couldn’t use the shotgun mike because of too much wind noise, then I’d wire the actors for sound. If it was an indoor scene, like in the office, I would gaff tape the microphones body transmitters to the ceiling instead of to the actors waists, and then dangle the mike wires down to just above the actors heads. This way I could circumvent the lack of a boom operator. As long as I knew the shot would be framed tightly on the actor's faces, the “dumb-booms” would hear everything clearly.
Then we’d actually get the scene on its feet and shoot it. I’d make performance adjustments to Imran in English and in Kashmiri, but I could only communicate to Ali through Hilal’s translation. Frequently I would ask Imran to draw his performance from the 500-pages of character thoughts, which he wrote in Dilawar’s notebook. (Later I recorded him reading this aloud and used it as voice-over).
Monitoring both picture and sound while also directing the actors and giving notes on their performances all at the same time was hard at times. But sometimes it could be a lot of fun, because it gives the feeling of seeing and hearing exactly what you’re getting as it’s happening, just like shooting a documentary. But it is also quite draining. It was hard to shoot more than five hours a day, maybe two days a week.
While shooting, I kept the story outline folded up in my pocket. I referred to it all the time to explain the action to the actors (or to Hilal, the translator). I never storyboarded any shots, but I did decide whose point-of-view each scene was from, and what the turning point of each scene was. Then, all I had to do was just make sure that those two things were clear and convincing in the actors’ performances. Those were my only two criteria. It usually only took a few hours to get a scene done.
Once we managed to get all the actors in the right location, at the right time, on a given day, the actual shooting itself would be fairly fast. Maybe because we didn’t get to shoot as often as we wished and we became conditioned to expect another disaster to strike any moment, we realized we wouldn’t get the opportunity again (similar to shooting a documentary). The result was that it focused everyone’s energy – mine and the actors’ – so we actually wound up doing most scenes only a few times, some even just once. Occasionally, I would re-shoot on a different day a few scenes I felt could have been better or different, but the re-shoots always lacked that same intensity of knowing we had only one chance to get it right.
How did you capture and translate scenes? Or keep your equipment safe?
I went to Kashmir with my MacBook, external drives, and a one-chip Sony Handicam (which I used to capture the mini DV tapes). To protect this equipment from condensation resulting from temperature changes, or from the dust and insects, I kept all the equipment in a few layers of Ziploc bags.
Every day after a shoot, I would capture the day's tapes into the MacBook. Because Kashmir can be quite cold in the winter, and there is no central heating. I would wait for the portable gas heater to get the room temperature up to 50F before I turned on the equipment. While the tapes were being captured, I’d charge the camera batteries and plan the next day of shooting.
When the day's tapes were captured, Hilal would look at the footage in Final Cut Pro and transcribe the dialogue in English into a MS Word document, indicating the beginning of each sentence by its corresponding timecode.
Where did you get the music? How did you record the sound?
For the music of the film, I wanted to use very traditional Kashmiri folk songs that everyone in Kashmir would know. I had learned the Kashmiri folk songs from the cassettes my father used to play on the car radio when I was growing up. Years later, I found myself finally not only appreciating this music but actually being quite moved by it. I just wanted something simple, easy to remember, that could capture a variety of moods depending on where and how I wanted to use it in the film.
I met the leader of the musician group, Niyaz, during one of the audition sessions. When we started talking about music, I played some of these folk songs for him on my computer. Later, Niyaz and I met four other musicians in a friend’s small house in the middle of a quiet field – the perfect place to have a recording session, because there was no traffic, and certainly no electricity or air conditioners. (One actual technical advantage of making a film in Kashmir is that it’s easy to record great sound). I gaff-taped two ends of a rope between the two corners of the quietest room in the house, so that the rope hung across, like a laundry line. Then, I clipped all three microphones I had onto the rope, so that they faced downward, towards the corner of the room. The musicians sat close together in the corner and played, so that their acoustics flowed outward nicely and hit the sweet spot on the mikes. For a few hours, they played the same theme over and over again, in a variety of instrumentations and tempos and keys.
I recorded all the ambient sound for the film as well. On days when our shoot got cancelled (which was quite often), I would keep up creative morale by visiting the location anyway, alone, except I would bring along my microphones and mini-disc recorder, tuck my Sony headphones underneath my wool cap incognito-style, and would just make many ambient recordings at each location in the movie, from multiple angles and with multiple microphones. So, when I returned, I had a whole sound library of native, distinctly Kashmiri ambient tracks and effects to work with.
Talk about the editing process.
When I returned from Kashmir, my co-editor and I took three months sifting through all the 50 hours of video, the 20 hours of audio, and all 1500 pages of time-coded translations saved as MS Word files. Most of the material recorded for the production consisted less of extensive coverage of the same material, and more of different stories I was originally trying to tell in this one movie.
We went through all of that material a second time, and started “lining” the transcripts the way assistant editors traditionally do with a screenplay (in which they make vertical lines showing how a given scene was covered during the production). Except, we didn’t have a traditional shooting script, so we lined printed versions of the transcribed dialogue.
We also made index cards for each scene, and organized them on a wall cork board – just the whole story of the movie laid out on the wall. We rearranged the cards several times for a week or two as we tried to find scenes that would “hang together” as groups, to try to build sequences.
Based on the arrangement of the cards, we made our first assembly, which came out to 3hrs and 6 mins and which we screened around Thanksgiving 2007. In that version, there were several more supporting characters and subplots in Dilawar’s life, and every single character had an interior monologue playing as a voice-over. Eventually, we cut almost all of that material and focused the story on Dilawar’s main dilemma.
In September, I had moved back to Los Angeles to begin my last year of study at Cal Arts. My co-editor remained in San Francisco. We each had one external hard drive with exact copies of the original media. We shared Final Cut Pro project files through emails. We would alternate editing the film sequences. When one of the editors finished an editing pass on a sequence, we would email it to each other (the recipient would download it, open it, and re-link media). We would discuss the latest edit, before the other editor tackled the sequence further.
Over the course of the winter months, we went through twenty-four versions of the film, each version getting progressively shorter, tighter, denser; we finally locked picture at 96 minutes.
How did you prepare the film for its launch?
I applied and was quite honored to be invited to the 2008 IFP [Independent Feature Project] Narrative Lab, where I got to meet other filmmakers and distinguished members of the independent film world. The film got a good reaction and we received tons of support from IFP, which was just the perfect place for us to be with where we were with the film and how we needed to start thinking about positioning it to festivals. Then, shortly after the Lab, we began receiving invitations to some high-profile film festivals. I was excited, but needed help bridging the gap in order to attend and screen at a large festival. IFP really came through again in a big way. Through the generous efforts of [IFP Executive Director] Michelle Byrd, I was quite blessed to be put in touch with Hunter Gray, Paul Mezey, and Tyler Brodie of Artists Public Domain.
