Another BIFA filmmaker who we’ve seen on DN’s pages in the past, Karan Kandhari – a nominee in this year’s The Douglas Hickox Award (Best Debut Director) category – first ed us for an interview back in 2012 with his short film about perfectly quaffed hair and finding your tribe Flight of the Pompadour. It was the second instalment in Kandhari’s A United Howl trilogy and as he explains below, an important bellwether in helping to define his cinematic voice, not only for himself but also for those who would later go on to his feature projects. Case in point being his delightfully entertaining Bombay set debut Sister Midnight, a genre-bending comedy that premiered as part of Cannes Directors’ Fortnight about a frustrated and misanthropic newlywed who discovers certain feral impulses that land her in unlikely situations. While not fully dialogue-free as was the case with that early short, Sister Midnight does embrace minimal dialogue, which by no means makes it a ‘quiet’ film, as the richness of its off-kilter narrative is fully expressed through its meticulously composed visuals, enveloping cacophony of the city’s sounds and juxtaposition of pre-cleared tracks. A film for all the misfits who have also misplaced their instruction manuals for life, we invited Kandhari back to Directors Notes to speak to us about following his characters’ lead in the writing process, the pushback he faced trying to make the film 10 years ago and why if Radhika Apte hadn’t accepted the role that could well have been the end of the project.

I have always felt like a bit of a misfit and I love filmmakers who give a voice to these characters, is that part of who you are?
I think it’s very natural for me to gravitate towards characters who feel like misfits, like you, I felt like one most of my life. I moved around a lot, I’m from everywhere and nowhere. It’s not really conscious but the best way I can explain it is the same way a Ramones song made me feel less weird or alone, or in fact made me feel happy to be weird, I hope the film does something similar.

Bombay is clearly a huge influence on the film and you can feel the madness and chaos of it throughout. How insane was it filming in a city like that?
It was insane and it’s part of what attracted me to the city because it is this chaotic pressure cooker of many contradictory things, energy, people and life. It was also mainly mad because of the heat and how small the shack was that the couple lived in. Even though we had walls that came in and out, it was nicknamed the ‘Tandoor’ because it was tiny and very hot. We were shooting on film and it’s lit in a slightly old fashioned way with a lot of hard light so that also melted everyone’s brains on set, but we had to stick to what we wanted which was this expressionistic sort of 50s style lighting. Bombay is also home to one of the biggest film industries in the world so the crews were amazing.

That street where the young couple’s house is will live in my brain for a long time. Is that a real street?
It was based on a real street that was stuck in my head for about 20 years. We tried to look into using the real street but it was very difficult so we looked into other streets that were similar, but it was going to be difficult. We would have had to displace people from those communities and we didn’t want to do that. What we ended up doing was actually building the strip of shacks on another street in a gated community.
Watch/read our full interview on Directors Notes now ⏯️