The Waiting City: Australia goes to India

Director Claire McCarthy and producer Jamie Hilton have made a film with an Australian heart and dressed up in a colourful sari, taking our cinema to a new land full of creative and business opportunities. Miguel Gonzalez reports.

The Waiting City tells the story of an Australian couple who arrive in Calcutta, India, to pick up the girl they have adopted. Unaware that local bureaucracy will force them to wait for days before they can see her for the first time, the stress of waiting, amplified by the culture shock, will test their relationship as they are forced to confront the problems they’ve been avoiding for a long time.
It is not based on a true story, but many that writer/director Claire McCarthy witnessed as she built her own relationship with India.
McCarthy’s connection with the country was born in 2002 when, along with her younger sister Helena, she decided to volunteer at Mother Theresa’s Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta. She would return to India several times to document Helena’s ongoing experience working at an orphanage in the documentary Sisters.
It was during those visits that she met a number of couples trying to adopt children, and became fascinated with their stories and how their relationships where often tested while going through the stressful experience of waiting to meet a child they had only seen in photographs. McCarthy started interviewing couples and continued that process when she returned to Australia, talking to people who had gone through different experiences of adoption in India and other countries. It became the source for The Waiting City, a project that she took to the Australian Film Commission’s IndiVision program. The development process took approximately two years.
“I workshopped the script and asked people whether they thought it was authentic or not. It’s not a guide of how to adopt a child; adoption is the catalyst but the intention was to look at love in all these different forms, to look at it under fire and explore that in film,” explained McCarthy. “Another real challenge was to come as a westerner and make a film that’s not condescending or repeating the clichés. That was a big fear of mine, to not know if Indian people would like the film or not.”
She also took the idea to a friend, producer Jamie  Hilton, who had been commissioned to shoot a music video for Sony Music artist Old Man River. They pitched the record company the idea of an Indian shoot in Varanassi, and used the experience to test their production methodologies, meet local crew and discover what it would be like to work there.
“Our first trip was for Claire to show me Calcutta, the world in which the film is set, because it was incredibly important during script development for me to be across the culture and the place. Then we went to Varanassi to shoot the video for the song “Sunshine”,” said Hilton.
“We wanted to see what it would be like shooting on real streets with real people; if a documentary kind of approach, using a skeleton crew, would actually work. We learned many lessons; some things were working, some were not,” said McCarthy.
The $3m budget was a combination of private investment and federal (AFC/Screen Australia) and state funding (Screen NSW), with support from distributor Hopscotch Films and sales agent H20.
“Spectrum Films and Deluxe/Efilm also helped us out with our editing and sound post. If we didn’t have those equity investors, we wouldn’t have been able to make it for the budget we had,” said McCarthy.

One of the investors was lead actress Radha Mitchell, who had always wanted to make a film in India. Mitchell first heard about her involvement in the project by doing a Google search on herself.
“Back when we shot the music video, one of our Indian crew asked me who I wanted to play the lead, and I said I loved Radha because she’s so radiant and she has a connection with India. He went to The Times of India and told them that an Australian director wanted to work with Radha. She found the article online, rang her agent and asked ‘What the hell is this Australian movie that I’m supposed to be doing!?’ Her agent had a copy of the script, and she decided to do it.”
“So I wished for Radha, and then she came,” recalled McCarthy.
Having Mitchell, Joel Edgerton, Isabel Lucas and British actor Samrat Chakrabarti would help the film’s international prospects, and the Indian element would make The Waiting City a unique project in the local landscape.
“We must think of ways to make Australian films international so they don’t just feel parochial, so that they tell Australian stories that are relevant and universal.
“Casting is one way, and having the movie set in an exotic location is another. We underestimate the fact that when we travel, so much happens to us, and Australians travel all the time. It’s interesting to see the stories of travelling Australians, which hopefully differentiates this from a typical independent movie,” said McCarthy.
NATURAL CALCUTTA
The intention of shooting 100 percent on location in Calcutta was to give the film a hig level of authenticity, but not to make it look like a documentary.
“You can’t purely rely on verite; you have to construct things,” admitted McCarthy. “We developed decoys, techniques to keep people from looking at the camera. We developed crowd control systems; people have a fascination with watching movies being made, and it’s a subtle dance – you can’t just cordon off streets the way you might do over here. We shot with long lenses and set up little rigs where we would shoot from far away, scenes where the actors were often integrated into real environments.”
To facilitate the shoot, McCarthy worked closely with Indian actor Tanaji Dasgupta as third assistant director, helping her communicate with actors in big sequences such as the Durga Purja festival parad.

The filmmakers were lucky that they had shot the majority of their exterior scenes by the time Mumbai was the target of terrorist attacks on November 26, 2008.