Eat Pray Love; A Mighty Heart; The Myth, and now Kathryn Bigelow’s next. India has suddenly become a lot more accessible to top international film directors

Anahita Mukherji | TNN (THE TIMES OF INDIA; March 12, 2012)

 

Hndi film-makers scouting around for exotic locales across Europe might have been a tad surprised that a Hollywood movie showcasing the slums of Mumbai would go on to win multiple Oscar awards. And nobody who watched Mission Impossible over a decade ago would have imagined that scenes from one of its sequels would be shot in India. Not so long back, action hero Jackie Chan was in the country to promote The Myth, a portion of which was shot in Hampi.

So has the West woken up to the Indian landscape as a backdrop for Hollywood cinema? “India is certainly a flavour that the international market can bank on,” says actor Sid Makkar, who recently finished work on the Judi Dench-starrer The Great Exotic Marigold Hotel, a film based largely in India and directed by John Madden of Shakespeare in Love-fame. In addition to tapping into India’s large English-speaking market, Hollywood directors are also giving Western audiences a slice of India, much the way Hollywood has shaped the urban Indian perceptions about the US, says Makkar.

Big budget foreign films tend to pay both their actors and technicians better than the regular Indian pay-scales, he adds. The economics of shooting a film in India works well for Western film-makers, too, says trade analyst Taran Adarsh, More >