In the deep end of fatherhood
Movie explores links between parents with kids in interracial relationships
YOU wouldn’t ordinarily associate traditional Indian culture with surfing. Well, not unless you’re ballsy writer-director, Eubulus Timothy, whose new movie Deep End, uses the water sport to unpack various social and familial complexities that come with interracial relationships and defying cultural norms.
“It took many years to get to anything solid,” says Timothy, on the process of bringing this film to life. “But it started with the concept of my sister getting married and on that night, on the way back to Cape Town, my father gets up and screams, ‘Khloe’s married’. It was a moment in history, so to speak. And that didn’t mean much to me until my daughter was born.”
Timothy’s daughter, who recently turned 19, helped him write this story. Her birth, he says, helped him understand what that moment felt like for his dad and allowed him to grasp the precious link between father and daughter.
Deep End is centred around a headstrong father, Naren Patel, (played by Mahendra Raghunath) and the journey of discovery he takes with his daughter, Sunitha Patel (played by Carishma Basday).
“I think the whole relationship of being a young woman in this world and really wanting to please your parents and make them happy, but also being a young woman in this world who wants to follow her own dreams and own ambitions, is very challenging,” says Basday on the intricacy of a modern-day fatherdaughter relationship. “The difficulty starts when it becomes clear that what she wants to do isn’t necessarily anything wrong, it’s just the fact that her parents disapprove and make it wrong and terrible.”
Basday has a close relationship with her father and says that he’s always been very supportive of everything that she’s done. She found that she really had to dig deep and draw from experiences that her friends have had with their parents in order to execute her role effectively.
Raghunath also found playing the role of a domineering challenge foreign to his reality. “Playing the father was hugely challenging for me because I’m far removed from the actual character. I’m more laid back, easy going and very chilled with my sons. The difficulty for me was to actually flip the coin and say okay, how can I become this domineering father. And also, he’s had other incidents that have shaped him. He’s experienced certain kinds of trauma that have made him hate surfing, surfers and that culture.”
Despite the challenges, the process of putting this film together is something they enjoyed.
“It was absolutely fabulous,” Timothy says. “We had an amazing time. It was crazy, really crazy. It’s an extreme sports movie so everything is mad.”
Basday interjects, “My first day on set was Eubulus bashing my head into a rock,” referring to a scene where her head hits a rock in the ocean.
“So when he says it was crazy, it was really crazy.” “We had lots of fun,” she continues, before sharing some of the challenges on set.
“Sometimes there were no waves and sometimes too many waves. It was difficult, very difficult because we had a whole crew and expensive equipment. The cameras were the type that shoot the Bond movies.”
Despite the stress of executing the job effectively, Timothy made the most of what he had.
The actors speak glowingly of working with him. “When I read the script I had already fallen in love with the story,” says Raghunath. “But he was amazing as a director. He knew exactly how to draw the kind of emotional content out of me He was fantastic.”
“Priya Lutchman, who plays Kalpana Patel (Basday’s mother), doesn’t speak much during our roundtable discussion, which makes sense when you consider that this is her acting debut. When she does speak, she expresses how she found the entire experience exhilarating.
“For me, everything was a highlight because everything was brand new.”
Timothy also gave her the opportunity to design the surfboard.
“When Eubulus gave me the opportunity, I ran with the idea and we ended up with what you see on the screen.”
It’s a gorgeous surfboard.