Bollywood Doesn’t Do Squalid
Steel Closet lover, Dale Hrabi of The Daily Beast, put us on to his recent interview with Slumdog Millionaire costume designer, Suttrat Larlarb. The Steel Crew has actually been following Slumdog Millionaire for quite some time now, as it has been gaining a lot of traction in the media and public relations departments lately. Many are already saying that the movie, which takes place in Mumbai and was recorded using digital camcorders, is up for Academy Award contention. The press has gotten to the point where Ici is getting put off by it, but it’s sure to be a movie worth our attention.
The interview itself is actually very intriguing. Larlarb held a position of making sure the costumes accurately depicted a third-world environment only to find out later that Bollywood does not do third-world in their films. On some level, it makes sense. If you or your country are going to be filmed on camera, you wouldn’t want to look soiled and poverty-stricken. However, for Larlarb, the costumes would not do this rags-to-riches story justice if there were no rags involved.
The biggest obstacle was her local Bollywood collaborators’ obsession with razzle-dazzle spectacle—rather unproductive when you’re recreating the shit-stained reality of beggars who have, at best, a glancing acquaintance with sequins. Bollywood doesn’t do squalid, she discovered, or even rumpled. “If I wanted someone’s sleeves rolled, “ she says, “They’d fold them up in perfect symmetry.”
This fastidiousness stemmed partly from respect, she says. In India, actors are often treated like deities on par with the corpse of Princess Diana. Not the sort of people, in other words, whose shirts you abruptly remove and stamp in the mud, something Larlarb and her team were occasionally forced to do when their conventional distressing methods—sandpapering, stretching, shredding, and laundering garments up to 50 times—failed to yield enough suitably bleak clothing.
Indian extras (up 1000 per scene) consistently ignored wardrobe guidelines and showed up in their ruffled, starched Sunday best, only to be redressed in rags or bewilderingly filth-ified. “They found the idea of looking purposely sub-par very unexpected,” says Larlarb.
[Taken from The Daily Beast]
It is crazy how often we might overlook cultural differences when filming for an international audience.
And Aishwarya Rai, I LOVE YOU!
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