Gurinder Chadha is flying down to Mumbai next week to finalise the cast of her next film tentatively entitled The Viceroy’s House.
The film will chronicle the last six months of Lord Mountbatten’s stay in India during the end of the British Raj.
Gurinder says she has unearthed an immense amount of hitherto-undisclosed facts about Mountbatten’s final days in India. “There are the so-called facts that we grew up reading about Mountbatten’s closing months in India. But there are secret documents which I’ve unearthed. These point to another truth which I’ll reveal in my film.” Add to this, the filmmaker has bought the rights of two books to make her Mountbatten film Narinder Singh’s Sarla’s The Shadow Of The Great Game and Larry Colins & Dominiue Lapierre’s Freedom At Midnight.
She says she is coming to India with a clean casting slate. There was talk of casting Colin Firth as Mountbatten, Saif Ali Khan as Jawaharlal Nehru and Naseeruddin Shan as Jinnah. But she is not willing to reveal the cast at the moment. “All I’ll say is, I want actors who fit perfectly into every part. The acting style has changed tremendously in Indian cinema since I worked with Aishwarya Rai in Bride & Prejudice 10 years ago. I see a lot of natural actors in India and I’m eager to work with them.”
Gurinder would also be doing a lot of outdoor location-hunting during her trip to India. “I’ll be shooting in and around Jodhpur and Rajasthan. I am really excited about this one because we’ve never really had a British view of the Partition of India. Interestingly, that British view would come from me, a director whose cultural allegiance to India and Britain are equally strong.”
The filmmaker says she would have to work very hard to strike a balance between her dual cultural backgrounds. “My take on Mountbatten has to reach out to both Indian and non-Indian audiences , the way Attenborough’s Gandhi did.”
