How was the story of The Song of Scorpions conceived?
I’m sure you remember the really awful incident in Delhi in 2012 and this young woman on a bus. That particular incident brought deep critical thinking into India. We started wondering as to just what is happening in our country, in our conscience. A year later, I was shooting Qissa (2013). However, that incident never left me. Perhaps it was the tiredness or the subject of Qissa. I kept on dreaming. My dreams were full of images that actually, in many ways, had nothing to do with the 2012 incident. But I had a feeling that there was something happening here that was very much related to that incident. These images were of a wide, immense desert, wind blowing, and I could hear a singing voice. The dreams kept on recurring until I felt I needed to put down the images. And, when I started doing that, suddenly the images became a story. The Song of Scorpions is a very different story from the 2012 incident. There are many things that will be evoked by the film that will remind us of what happened at that time. That was how the story came about — through dreams.
Why did you cast Iranian actor Golshifteh Farahani for the role of a Rajasthani woman?
Golshifteh has been exiled from her country. She lives in the constant pain of separation from her country, Iran, and her family. However, instead of allowing this pain to embitter her, she followed it to the end where it showed her that, finally, we are all more than the identity given to us by the nation in which we are born. Thrown into the larger world, we realize we belong to something even more vast, to the cosmos itself. Golshifteh has taken this insight to fearlessly open herself to the other possibilities within her. This is what makes her the exciting, multi-dimensional actress she is.
Irrfan and I met Golshifteh at an international film festival where Qissa was being screened and we spent the next two days talking non-stop about films and acting. Talking to her, I soon realised that despite the injustice of being exiled from her country, she carried no real bitterness. She saw, instead, how the experience opened so many other possibilities within herself. I saw that Golshifteh’s journey as a person and artist, in many ways, mirrors Nooran, the female protagonist’s journey in The Song of Scorpions. Nooran, too, has to journey into an exile from her home, her village and even her own body and identity. She has to learn to fight her bitterness and her primal instinct to seek vengeance and, finally, learn to celebrate herself. At the end of those two days, I knew Golshifteh was the ideal actress to play Nooran.
How was Qissa’s story conceived?
The thing with Qissa was that it comes from a very different experience. It comes from my being born and brought up in Africa. One of the reasons that I was born and brought up in Africa was that my grandfather had been affected by the Partition. He was three years old when he came to Africa. This was much before the Partition but already there was a lot happening in the small villages in what is today Pakistan. My family comes from Rawalpindi, which is part of Pakistan now. One day, there was an attack on his village. His uncle, his mother’s brother, put him in a large drum of flour used to make rotis. He was in that pot for hours and hours. Finally, when he came out, what he saw was that the whole village had been massacred. He was a child, alone, roaming around dead bodies. Finally, he was found by someone and they knew that he had an uncle in Africa, so they wrote to him. The uncle then asked my grandfather to be sent to him.
The whole story of the Partition was very much in the daily living that we were doing in Africa – the sense of separation, of loss. Later, as I started making films, I would meet relatives whom I had never met before. Amongst them, I met a very old man who told me that there was a time when I had a cousin sister, his daughter. He said that his village had also been attacked. This was during the time of Partition. As it used to happen in those days, many women and girl children threw themselves into the well of the village. This uncle of mine told me that even today, more than 70 years after independence, he still dreamt of his daughter deep there in the well, looking up through the hole at the top, waiting for her father to come and save her. What he told me had a profound impact on me. I couldn’t get the image out of my mind. My uncle could tell me the story. He could tell me about his grief. But I really wanted to know what the young girl felt when she threw herself into the well. What she felt in her father’s dream – waiting for her father to come and save her. It is from these thoughts and this image of a young girl in a well waiting for her father to come and save her, that Qissa came into being.