From the Daily Telegrams
Havelock chosen for a Hollywood film localeProject promises tremendous boost in isles tourism
Port Blair, Jan 24
A big budget Hollywood production ‘On the Road Productions’ will soon shoot some parts of its new movie in the these Islands, especially in Havelock island. In order to finalise the locations, a seven member team led by none other than the Oscar film winning Director of the movie – Peter Weir ( Dead Poets Society; The Truman Show ) is scheduled to arrive here on Jan 27, 2006.
The movie is based on the prize winning book ‘Shantaram’ by George David Roberts. The lead role is being played by Oscar-winning actor Johnny Depp (Pirates of the Carribean), who is also producing the movie along with another famous Oscar-winning Hollywood actor, Russel Crowe (The Gladiator), informed Shri Samit Sawhny of Barefoot Airtoors Pvt. Ltd here which is arranging the tour. Actress Emma Watson will also star in this movie.
The project promises to benefit Andaman Islands – both in terms of potential employment and revenue as well as worldwide publicity which will benefit the tourism sector.
Known for making moody, complex dramas that often focus on the emotional struggles of men caught up in social change and/or upheaval, Australian director Peter Weir is regarded as one of the most solid directors in both his native country and in Hollywood. His many accomplishments include making vehicles that promoted such stars as Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson, Robin Williams, and Jim Carrey into the realm of "serious" acting, something that further established Weir as one of the foremost interpreters of the inner lives of men.
‘Shantaram’ is the fictionalized account of the real life adventures of author Gregory David Roberts. The narrator is a man called Lin, escaped from an Australian jail and arriving in Bombay, India with a fake New Zealand passport. He immediately meets a taxi driver named Prabhaker who gives him tours of the city and a hut in the local slum. Lin starts a free clinic for the people in the slum, and to provide for his own income, he sells drugs to tourists. This gets him the attention of the local gangsters, and he's increasingly pulled into their world of crime, from counterfeiting to gun running to passport schemes. Lin falls in love, nearly dies in an Indian prison, and survives a continuing series of adventures. More than just an account of drugs and crime, Shantaram is the story of a man who, even in a life of violence, genuinely loves those in his life and the city that became his home, Bombay.
Found by Emma at Bombay Times
25 January 2006Straight Answers
NICOLE DASTUR
Gregory David Roberts, Author on scripting a movie based on his book.
'It's impossible to recreate a city like Mumbai'
You're scripting a movie, based on your book Shantaram. Does scripting or writing give you greater creative satisfaction?
I've scripted only the first draft for the film, based, of course, on the book. It was a creative process making my life into a novel, and then, translating 900-odd words into a 90-minute film, was another creative process.
But looking back at my life, and putting it all into words and images was enlightening.
Shantaram was a success as a novel. Will the movie click?
I think the film will be even more interesting than the book since it's essentially the story of my life.
And not even a moment of my life was boring, I was constantly on the run, escaping from prison, interacting with the underworld. In fact, my life was so pictorial, it was intended to be made into a film!
Most of the film will be shot in Mumbai...
Yes, since the story is semi autobiographical, and since most of the later part of my life was spent in Mumbai, 90 per cent of the film will be shot here.
It's impossible to recreate a city like Mumbai, there's only one Mumbai.
Officials from a foreign studio house are in the city scouting for locations...
Yes, shooting for the film begins in November, but the recc‚ (searching for suitable shooting locations) process has already begun.
The places mentioned in the book Colaba Causeway, Ballard Pier, Kala Ghoda, Sassoon Dock, Haji Ali will be part of the film.
We'll also be shooting in North India, to substitute for Afghanistan. Some scenes will be shot in Australia and USA.
Johnny Depp will be portraying your character...
I couldn't think of anybody better than Depp to play the part of Shantaram.
At last - Found and transcribed by Pam
Nov. 30, 2005
Daily VarietyWeir To Steer Depp Pic
by Michael FlemingPeter Weir will direct "Shantaram," the Warner Bros. adaptation of the Gregory David Roberts novel that will star Johnny Depp.
Weir will develop the script with Eric Roth. WB hopes to begin production late next year.
Pic is being produced by Initial Entertainment Group's Graham King along with Depp's Infinitum Nihil banner and Plan B's Brad Pitt.
When negotiations are complete, Weir -- who last directed Russell Crowe in "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World" -- will take on a tale with the political and wartime tensions reminiscent of his early efforts like "The Year of Living Dangerously" and "Gallipoli."
Protagonist is an Australian heroin addict who escapes a maximum-security prison and reinvents himself in India as a doctor in the slums of Bombay. His attempt to find medicine for his destitute patients leads him into counterfeiting, gunrunning and smuggling.
WB execs envisioned an epic pic when they agreed to pay $2 million for worldwide rights to the novel last year.
Deal marked the first project bought for Depp to star in and produce since he berthed his Infinitum Nihil banner with King's Initial Entertainment Group.
Novel, published by St. Martin's Press, is said to be based partly on the author's own adventures.
From Digital Spy
'Forrest Gump' writer pens Depp movie
Wednesday, October 26 2005, 11:37 BST -- by Daniel SaneyEric Roth will write the adaptation of Gregory David Roberts' novel Shantaram, reports Variety.
Roberts wrote the first draft of the screenplay based on his own exploits, but now the Forrest Gump writer is taking over on the movie which is being designed as a vehicle for Johnny Depp.
Depp would play an Australian heroin addict who escapes from a maximum prison to find a new life in India. He takes on the role of a doctor before becoming a smuggler and gunrunner. Finally, he finds himself in Afghanistan where he fights against invading Russian troops.
From Yahoo News
Johnny Depp hooked on heroin taleBy Borys Kit Wed Oct 26, 2:08 AM ET
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) -
Johnny Depp is attached to star in "Shantaram," a fact-based tale about the adventures of a heroin addict on the run.The Warner Bros. project is based on the novel by Gregory David Roberts. It will be adapted by Oscar-winning writer Eric Roth ("Forrest Gump").
Set in the 1980s and loosely based on Roberts' life, the story centers on an Australian heroin addict convicted of robbery who escapes to India, where he reinvents himself as a doctor. When he gets involved in smuggling and gunrunning, his adventurous life leads him to
Afghanistan and battles with Russians.The book was acquired in October 2004 in a $2 million deal by Warners and producer Initial Entertainment Group. Depp, who will also serve as a producer, returns to theaters in December with "The Libertine," which also stars
John Malkovich and
Samantha Morton.
From IMDB
Some interesting casting news. The two female leads from "Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride" will co-star with Johnny in "Shantaram."
Helena Bonham Carter
Johnny Depp .... Lindsay
Emily WatsonThe release date is given simply as 2007
From MTV.com
09.14.2005 9:54 PM EDTMovie File: Johnny Depp, JoJo, Naomi Watts, Steve Martin, Tom Cruise
Depp starring in film about heroin addict who escapes from prison, joins Indian crime underworld.Fans have long appreciated the way Johnny Depp's career proudly straddles both sides of the line between big-budget crowd pleasers ("Pirates of the Caribbean") and edgy indie fare ("Dead Man").
For his upcoming film "Shantaram," Depp said he hopes to fully merge the two aesthetics. "I don't know that I can say I see it as a big commercial thing, that's something nobody can predict. But I see it as being quite epic," he said of the film, expected in 2007 and based on the biography of a heroin addict who escapes prison and teams up with the Indian underworld crime syndicate. "I mean, if one's hope is to sort of be true to the book, and true to [author] Gregory Roberts' intent, it's pretty sprawling. It's pretty large, it's pretty epic. It's a book that deserves to be read, and hopefully it will be a film that deserves to be seen." ...
Found by Reemi at the Hindu Online
The bad boy of fictionSONYA DUTTA CHOUDHURY
The Hindu online, Sunday August 7, 2005
Because his life has been so notorious, it can overshadow his work, says Australian novelist Gregory David Roberts.
Contemporary concerns: Exile and alienation are his central themes.
GREGORY DAVID ROBERTS (GDR), the latest bad boy of fiction, is in Mumbai working on a sequel to Shantaram, his best-selling novel of his own story as a runaway Australian convict on the mean streets of the Mumbai metropolis.
I meet him at Leopold's Bar and Restaurant, overlooking Colaba's colourfully chaotic Causeway. Humming with the buzz of many accented conversations in foreign tongues, Leopold's is, in many ways, a centre for the story. It was here, seated on cedar chairs that surround a profusion of glass-topped tables in "Leopold's little world of light, colour and richly panelled wood" (Shantaram), that everything began. Here's where the author — escaped convict, one-time junkie and gun-runner — began his career of crime in Mumbai, a life that was the inspiration for his stunningly compelling novel of crime and punishment, and of love and friendship.
Obvious question
So how much of the book is really true, I ask him, having spent the better part of the last few days mesmerised by the dramatic details of the author-narrator's life in the Cuffe Parade slums, battling fire and flood and municipal demolition, of drugs and dope and petty crime and of squalor and torture in the Colaba police pick up. Shantaram maybe a potent mixture of fact and fiction, but GDR is not enthused by this oft-repeated question. "Nine out of 10 people ask me this question," he complains. "Because my life has been so notorious and so bad, it can overshadow my work." The book itself, all 900-plus pages of it, makes for racy reading, as the author-narrator makes his living black-marketing and money-laundering on the streets of Colaba, then moves into the Cuffe Parade slum and establishes a clinic there, only to be imprisoned in the Arthur Road Jail, emerging again to more crime and then eventually gun-running in Afghanistan. Is the horrific jail section true, I ask him, did the "aeroplane" style beating really happen? "Everything I wrote about the jail is true; it was in fact much, much worse." And the Colaba police pick up? "That part too, is true", he says. "I met some of the same cops now — they are all good decent men, trying to do their job and they have a hard life and they are incredibly brave. Give a policeman in Australia or New York a piece of bamboo, and ask them to maintain order on their beat, they'd never do it."
The conversation veers from law and order to literature and GDR is equally enthusiastic. He talks about the structure of the novel, any novel, and then that of Shantaram. It is, he points out, extraordinarily complex. Shantaram echoes the central theme of the 21st Century — that of exile, and of mass migration, especially to the cities. Mumbai, as an island city, is a symbol of that exile, and the leitmotif that recurs in images throughout. He explains and illustrates literary parallels that inform the plot and the characters, parallels that may emerge only on a detailed or a repeat reading. GDR's literary influences have been the classical writers, Herman Melville, Lawrence Durrell, Flaubert, Dante and Shakespeare and he illustrates how some of these classics reverberate in Shantaram. His is a novel that is in the tradition of Cervantes' Don Quixote la Mancha and also of Dante's Inferno, in its themes of exile and descent into hell (read prison and a life of drugs and crime), and his little guide Prabhakar is akin to Virgil as a guide to Dante's hero and Sancho Panza to Don Quixote. Besides this, he discusses other, not-so-immediately apparent complexities of the novel's structure — the symbols and the self-referencing, and the "house of mirrors", as it were, with every character and event having a mirrored version occurring somewhere else in the book.
So what now? The screenplay for the film version where Johnny Depp plays "Shantaram" is complete. GDR divides his time between the sequel to Shantaram (of which he gives a gloriously alive preview of accents and action; he's as theatrical as he is literary!), his mobile clinic project and joint endeavours with artists — there's a collection in New York inspired by Mumbai and soon there will be a book of photographs on the island city. Coffee at Leopold's is over and the all-black-clad and booted, neatly pony-tailed, six foot-plus GDR, with associate Ader, is off on his bike to the Crossword bookstore to lend support to theatre personality Mahabanoo Mody-Kotwal's reading at another book launch.
