Day 5 - Under the bridge and far away
From day one I knew that the money shot in this movie were the under the bridge shots. That was where I wanted Karachi's City of God. Someone had remonstrated on why I wanted to shoot under Kala Pul, "The dirtiest bridge in the world". Gritty is a word I have often used to define Kala Pul as a film concept. I have used a basic revenge plot but Kala Pul goes well beyond that, in its narrative style as well as geo-political story line. Like I told a office mate, “When you see movies like and Black Dahlia, you have to create Grit in CG or shoot in . In , noir is still part of a lifestyle. We don’t need to import grit.”
This was a magic hour shoot. We were at the site before dawn and warmed up with tea. The place itself is gritty anytime of the day, at dawn it was dreary and sad, The amount of trash by the railway tracks was dismal and nobody denied the power of the imagery for these shots. I put knee and elbow pads on Qamar the boy actor, in case he got hurt running in the rock strewn path by the sinister looking railway tracks. We shot without a generator, or any lights, using the daylight stock and catching all the action from behind the bridge columns adorned with graffiti advertising herbal medicine for male prowess.
The next scene was at my Alma Mater, D.J Science college which I had substituted for Hotel Metropole, as acclaimed Director Michael Winterbottom had been evicted out of Karachi because he tried to shoot the Daniel Pearl fateful meeting with the Jehadis for his movie A Might Heart. The area is high security mainly because the road leads to the American embassy, which was part of our as our protagonist wait to be picked up for a fateful meeting with an extremist leader and sees a policeman harass motorcycle rider.
The last setup was at chowk in the heart of old Karachi. It was difficult in terms of crowd control and Ashok, who played Suleiman Brohi, was over shadowed by the eagerness of the crowd. The shots look contrived as people lined the peripheral, watching, shouting and representing themselves as the next big actor. The shoot was looming to be a failure with Zulfy telling me that the crowd was getting agitated, but with Danial’s and Markus perseverance we pushed on, shooting from rickety balconies until we got the ‘start of a beautiful friendship shot’
