A welcome surprise
‘‘And we couldn’t postpone the shoot to wait for somebody because of the expected weather conditions in the Himalayas.’’
That’s when the director leaned on Wenham, who had once been on a film festival jury with him in Marrakesh.
‘‘We’d shared a lot of jokes. He’d seen a documentary about Australian parents who were going to India to look for their missing son, so everything connected with David.’’
Finding his Julie, was equally difficult, until he saw Trokenheim’s audition tape and her performance in 2014’s Everything We Loved.
‘‘When I paired David and Sia up, they just looked like the kind of couple I could imagine sitting down with in a pub in Auckland and them arguing,’’ Nalin deadpans.
Casting the younger roles was far less of a struggle, with Nalin impressed with our range of ‘‘amazingly talented actresses’’. In the end, he chose Chelsie Preston Crayford and Emily McKenzie for key parts in his story.
His approach in India was a little different. Keen for authenticity, Nalin worked with his casting director to find ‘‘real, local actors’’ from small theatre groups.
‘‘The mountainous places are very different to Mumbai. The landscape has a different effect on faces – all that sunbaked skin. We realised that if Indians were watching, they would know if the characters weren’t authentic.’’
But how did this globally renowned director end up making this little KiwiIndian film? Nalin says he first met producer Matthew Horrocks at the Cannes Film Festival.
‘‘He spoke to me about it and my initial reaction was that very often such Indian-set projects, when they are written by foreigners, have a lot of cliches. I said, ‘I need to see the script’. But when I read Dianne’s [Taylor, Apron Strings] script, I realised it was a quite amazing journey of a family of three who are kind of torn apart. What I liked was they travelled thousands of kilometres across the world, but couldn’t make the couple of metres among themselves to find one another.
‘‘I was really attracted to that and I knew that I had the vision and experience of going to these sorts of places and working on the streets to be able to deliver this story with authenticity.’’
To that end, pre-production in India involved three location scouts – one for logistics, one for practicalities and one with the production and costume designers.
Scheduled to screen in select New Zealand cinemas from Thursday, Beyond the Known World has also been selected to take part in the Gold Coast Film Festival across the Tasman later this month.
Nalin hopes it will eventually be shown in his native country and that viewers around the globe take away the same message.
‘‘It is a kind of spiritual, moving film. It’s about not taking distances for granted. Sometimes, with the bombardment of social media, we forget the people right in front of us and taking the little step of moving towards them. I think you have a great quality of life in New Zealand, but to me the problems are the same the world over. My hope is that parents will see this film and then go and hug their children afterwards. If that’s the case, then my mission will be complete.’’
Beyond the Known World (M) is in select cinemas from April 20.