A former student, SÁNDOR LAU catches up with screenwriter and academic Dr. Shuchi Kothari to talk rolling cable, vanilla orchids, and the scars of history.


DR. SHUCHI KOTHARI is a screenwriter and academic, originally from Ahmedabad, India. She did her postgraduate work at the University of Texas, Austin, where she taught screenwriting to Matthew McConaughey and gave him a C-. She has worked as a script consultant and doctor in the United States, India, and New Zealand, where she has resided since 1997. Here she is perhaps best known for A Taste of Place, the 2001 TV1 documentary she wrote and presented. Most recently, she wrote and co-produced the independently funded short film, Fleeting Beauty, which has been selected for this year's the New Zealand, Valladolid and Montreal film festivals. In Fleeting Beauty, an Indian immigrant paints her Kiwi lover's body with spices to tell him the story of the spice route and how Britain conquered India because of a five-shilling rise in the price of pepper.

Why do you write?

All of us have our compulsions I guess. Some of us have our coffee, some of us have our cigarettes. Some of us write. Whatever you say it's going to sound corny.

I write because I got too intimidated by rolling number eight cable. I'd gone to the United States in 1990 to do a Master's in directing film. I'd got into the programme. Few people got in to do an MFA. On day one of the programme we were in the studio and the instructor just threw a bunch of cable at us and said to roll it up. You know that number eight way so you don't twist it? And I just couldn't do it. I was wrapping it around me. It was just hideous. I was sitting there "Oh my God." And there was so much testosterone in the room. "If you can't control the cable, you will you control the crew?"

At the end of the day I just went to my graduate advisor and said "Can I change my major?" She said "What do you want to do? I said, "I really want to write." Then I went to the head of the writing programme. We had to send in a sample to get into the school anyway. I had never made a film. I had sent them a writing sample, on the basis of which they'd given me admission. And he asked for it and said that was fine.

Since that day I have to say I have seriously not had any desire to direct.

How did this idea for Fleeting Beauty start? What experience is it based on?

You know that I've been obsessing over food and its relationship to power for a while now. After Taste of Place, I co-wrote a feature (Apron Strings – in development) with Dianne Taylor. It was also about food and the role food played in ideas of nurture and control. That was something I'm also academically interested in. It was just playing around in my head and I happened to be in Kerala in the south of India on holiday and it was phenomenal. Having grown up with spices we've taken them totally for granted. They just exist in sachets in the supermarket. They exist in heaps in the bazaar, and then they exist in my shiny stainless steel spice box in the kitchen.

But I'd never seen them on trees. I'd never seen a nutmeg tree. I'd never seen how the mace envelops itself in a nutmeg. Cardamom, trees. Cardamom plants. I never knew that cardamom grows at the bottom. Or that vanilla is an orchid. You just don't think about it.

And when I was in that region, walking through spice plantations, I talked to a lot of local people, and they all have different stories about where these spices came from and what they do with our lives, the histories that they have.

It became very apparent to me that having grown up in the colonies, the version of history that we got of our region of our resources, of our produce, of our local wealth was always the English version. Here was this very local take on how things came to be. I came back and did some research on the history of the spice route as it particularly relates to India. And came up with some really obscure inquiry that people had done and written about but not that made it to official history.

One time I was sitting in Mai Thai, you know that restaurant on Albert St. with (former students) Jochen (FitzHerbert) and Roseanne (Liang) and a couple of people. I said I wanted to write a short film about spices and maps and territory. That's how it came about.

Tell me about the process of getting it from the script to the screen.

So far I've never been interested in producing. I've written; I've found that a liberating exercise always. This time, Sarina (Pearson, co-producer) and I decided we would produce this short. We had a vision and we decided we would do our best to render that in the most intact way. It was very interesting wearing the authorial hat at two ends of a piece as a writer and then as a producer. Because you know how it is with screenwriters. You are the weakest link in the chain. People always say nothing happens without a script, but the minute the script is there, the writer just disappears.

It's an uncommon combination, writer/producer.

This way the producer made sure that the writer did not disappear. I mean the writer should disappear, but the writing shouldn't. We always knew, Sarina and I, that this was a kind of experimental piece. That it was more concept-driven, rather than character-driven. Its drama and the dramatic arc weren't as conventional or foregrounded as the dramatic arc of a character in the standard vein of dramatic writing. But we thought those were the strengths of the piece. So in a way, producing it ourselves meant capitalising on those strengths, rather than turning it into something that the script never was.

We had applied for funding to one of the Film Commission pods (tender groups which commission fully financed short films) and we were told that it was a very lyrical film but it did not fit their brief of a New Zealand film. This obviously perplexed us because what is a New Zealand film? Is there a template of a New Zealand film that we could borrow and then render your writing. But it just made us more and more certain that we wanted to do the film ourselves.

I've said this before in class. You don't cast when you're writing, because then you get limited by that person. And very likely in real life you don't get that person anyway, because casting is something the writer has least control over. You hand it over. But I'd always imagined Nandita Das (best know for her roles in Indian arthouse films Fire and Earth) in the lead role. She's not only a great actress, but someone who politically stands for what the film stands for. I don't know if you know, but Nandita's Master's is in social work, and she's an extremely active human rights campaigner in India. She's really one of the few Indian women who puts her money where her mouth is in terms of her acting and her beliefs, who's also been a celebrity actress.

My friend Riyad (Wadia, Bombay director), who passed away, he got me her home phone number in Delhi. You were there, I'll never forget that Thanksgiving dinner at Greg (Booth)'s place (in 2002), when I had to go upstairs and make the phone call, fully prepared for her to say "Get lost. How dare you call me at home!" But she was very gracious, and said she'd read the script.

When I was in India back in August, 2002, Nandita wasn't on board, nothing, I thought can we find investors, patrons, people interested in financing film, I found one of our executives. Rashmi Tank and Mr. Handa, who's an industrialist said, here's $20k, that's our contribution. You raise the rest. That was a good vote of confidence in the story. After that we got Nandita to say yes, and with $20k from India, I started approaching other Indians, and some non-Indians. Sam Neill's company has given us money. Charmaine Barnett, who's a philanthropist/art patron. But mainly it was Indians living in Auckland. I guess somewhere it tapped into that idea that if you want stories told that are about people who normally don't get represented, then they have to do them themselves.


I'm interested in what you thought the film was about, and what people who saw the film thought it was about. Did you get from them what you thought you had given to them?

We did, and that was great. We got that in the test screening but test screening's always a bit weird because you choose people, and most people you know are like you. But a lot of people who spoke to me, who spoke to Virginia (Pitts, director), as some person pointed out, yours was the only film in that bunch of six (New Zealand shorts at the New Zealand International Film Festival) which had red, gold and yellow in its palette. Every thing else was quite dark and brown.

New Zealand. There you go. This is their formula for a New Zealand film!

We were pleased when we were accepted into Valladolid, the New Zealand Film Commission helped us strike the print, which I'm so grateful for. Our 35m film was sitting on digital video format. All up the film will have cost us around $95K. Which is a more accurate description of what 35mm 10-min shorts cost, and I'm glad that the New Zealand Film Commission is increasing their amount for the pods (it's now $100,000 up from $70,000).

Were there any comments that people made about the film that really reflected your vision?

One person came up to me, I think she was the mother of someone who worked on the film, I don't know and she came up to me and said, "So many terrible events have happened in life over such trivial matters." And that was cool because, that line when he says, "So you're saying you were colonized over a five-shilling dispute," yes, it's facetious, but in a way it points to the fact that huge upheavals in history happen because of what seems to be a fairly innocuous moment.

Somebody else was saying that they liked the fact that it was a woman storyteller, that it was empowering to have a brown woman tell a story. Sometimes very small things like that can be very heartwarming because the film is trying to reverse that convention. The scars of history are traditionally written on a woman's body. One thing I was very subconscious of while I was writing this was I wanted it written on a white man's body thank you very much.