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Why Children of Heaven almost didn’t happen
When actor and BJP candidate Sunny Deol filed his nomination papers from the Gurdaspur Lok Sabha seat in Punjab, his brother Bobby Deol was by side. However, he has been absent from Sunny’s campaign trail, but Bobby says he still has his brother’s back.
“My brother is my life. He is everything to me and I am everything to him. In any case, we are always there for each other. I am busy with my work commitments and I cannot cancel my dates,” says Bobby, who is currently shooting for his debut web film, a Shah Rukh Khan production.
Sunny, 62, was declared the BJP candidate from Gurdaspur, days after he joined the party last month. Although his brother couldn’t canvass for Sunny, his father Dharmendra did campaign.
Bobby goes on to add, “I wish I could have given time to my brother with his campaigning. I was there in the beginning and even now I will try and do whatever I can to support him.”
So, was Sunny’s decision to join politics and contest the elections a surprise for the family? “We don’t know what direction our lives will take. No one can ever say ‘okay, I am never doing this’,” says Bobby, adding, “Sometimes, you surprise yourself with your choices. This decision (of Sunny joining politics) may be for the better or for worse... there is no way to know that. But it’s his decision and it is important that one takes such decisions from time to time.”
In 1997, when a small Iranian film, Childre of Heaven (COH) hit theatres, no one had a inkling that it will go to become a muchrevered piece of art across the globe. In fact, Majid Majidi’s gem was also nominated for the Academy Award fo
Best Foreign Language Film in 1998. But the filmmaker says that if not for a stroke of luck, the movie would have never of the day.
“Actually, I feel that a good film goes beyond time,” says Majidi, adding: “Personally, I never expected so much from it. But even after all these years, COH is still loved by people and gets screened at so many places. According to me, that’s due to the nature of the film.” But at the start, no one was ready to back the movie. So much so, that the film-maker had dumped the idea and sold off the script as well.
“Whichever company I took Children of Heaven to, they rejected it. Nobody was ready to collaborate with me on the film. I failed everywhere. They would tell me, ‘what’s this movie? What is the use of it? Two kids are looking for a shoe in the entire film. At the most, you can make it into a short film on TV’. I was very disappointed. And even I started to believe that it’s a useless story. So, I sold the story for only 1,000 dollars, to make it into a short film,”
he says.
And then, Majidi forgot about COH. “But after two years, I was making Father, the story of which I had written in the same year as COH. At that time, I told COH’s story to a friend, who got very excited and asked, ‘where is this story now? It could make for a great film’. When I told him that I sold it for 1,000 dollars, he said, ‘you get the story back. I will help you’. The person
I had sold the story had failed to pay me the money even after two years. But I was very happy about it. I went back to him. He was also very happy giving the story back as he too couldn’t do anything with it,” he says with a laugh.
But some more drama was in store. “Unfortunately, he had lost the copy of the script. I too had just one copy of it which was in handwritten format. That was also not written properly as it was just a basic draft. Those weren’t the times of computers and all. Then, I recalled that I had shared my copy with Iran TV. At that time, I had an assistant, who was working there. So, he went to the storehouse and searched for the copy for one full day. He finally found it but five pages were missing,” he says.
Now, Majidi spent “hours and hours” thinking what were there in those five pages. “It was very dif somehow completed the script. Then, I got it to my friend, who had asked me to get it back. But when he read it, he also said, ‘is this really a film story?’ So, I asked him to forget about the story and that I will give him a narration. Then I started talking about my film emotionally, and saw tears rolling down his eyes (smiles). He was like, ‘what you are telling me isn’t the story which is in the script.’ So, I told him, ‘I am telling you the real thing. I will make the film, not a piece of paper’,” he says.
Finally, Majidi and his friend started making the film “with very small budget”. But it became one of the best films in the history of Iranian cinema. “And that script — the same handwritten copy — is now in the Oscar Academy,” says Majidi, with a smile.