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On February 11, Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature, hosted an online chat with filmmaker and arts faculty member Ramin Bahrani (CC’96) about his recent Netflix adaptation of The white tiger, the novel by Aravind Adiga, winner of the Man Booker Prize (CC’97).
Bahrani and Adiga have been close friends since their undergraduate studies at Columbia, and Bahrani wanted to adapt and lead. The white tiger for over 15 years. Set in India with an all-Indian cast, the film tells the epic tale of Balram, a poor Indian driver trapped in a rigged system, who uses his wit and cunning to break free from bondage to his wealthy masters and become a man. free, a “white tiger.”
Dabashi, Bahrani’s former teacher and longtime friend, opened the event with a preview of Bahrani’s cinematic work. As a screenwriter, director and / or producer, Bahrani has worked on seven films to date: Man push trolley (2005), Chop Shop (2007), Goodbye Solo (2008), Plastic bag (2009), At all costs (2013), 99 homes (2015), Fahrenheit 451 (2018), and The white tiger (2021). He is currently working on a Netflix adaptation of Adiga’s novel. Amnesty.
Friends discussed how Bahrani maintains the integrity of a character-driven story, especially one as rich and complex as The white tiger, in its translation on the screen.
The evolution of the characters
Dabashi noted the trajectory of character relationships in Bahrani’s films – of the lonely Pakistani man in Man push trolley to the father-son relationship in At all costs and now, in his most successful film to date, the master-slave relationship The white tiger. Bahrani mentioned that in his film 99 homes, two characters serve as a character broken in half, one going to extremes in a push and pull amidst moral complexity, a thread that also emerges in The white tiger.
“A lot of us feel when you’re trying to survive or achieve something in a morally very complex world, that in order to be successful at anything, to get anywhere, you may have to make compromised decisions,” said Bahrani. “Part of it is pure greed, and other times it’s just wanting to survive, which I think we now understand in different ways because of COVID, with more and more people at a roaming paycheck, or illness away from total financial ruin. “
Getting the story to the screen
Bahrani was determined to preserve protagonist Balram’s unique voice in the film version. He wrote voiceovers in the screenplay and chose then-unknown actor Adarsh Gourav in the role. In his commitment to playing the character of Balram, Gourav worked in a tea shop for the US equivalent of a nickel a day and showed Bahrani 12 different walks he could adopt for the role.
Bahrani wanted to make sure that the film also adequately represented the Indian culture of the novel. The entire team was from India, save for a few members, including Italian cinematographer Paolo Carnera, whose deliberate lighting choices reflect Balram’s mental and financial fluctuations throughout the film.
Bahrani also visited every place in India described in the novel. At one point he stumbled upon an escalator and, remembering that his own father was mesmerized by the first escalator he saw after leaving his village, Bahrani incorporated the image into the film to represent the change. radical in the circumstances of Balram.
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