He met with Santha Rama Rau in Berkeley, Gloucestershire , and over ten days they talked about the novel and discussed the script. They considered it too worldly and literary, the work of a playwright, and unsuitable for a film. Most of the scenes took place indoors and in offices while Lean had in mind to film outdoor as much as possible. With India in the title of the film, he reasoned, audiences would expect to see many scenes filmed of the Indian landscape.
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But it has built in danger; it holds out such a promise. The very mention of India conjures up high expectations. It has sweep and size and is very romantic". Lean did not want to present a poor man's pre-independence India when for the same amount of money he could show the country's visual richness. During , Lean worked on the script. He spent six months in New Delhi, to have a close feeling of the country while writing. As he could not stay longer than that for tax reasons, then he moved to Zurich for three months finishing it there. Lean typed out the whole screenplay himself correcting it as he went along, following the principle that scripts are not written, but rewritten.
The director cast Australian actress Judy Davis , then 28, as the naive Miss Quested after a two-hour meeting. Lean wanted Celia Johnson , star of Brief Encounter , to play Mrs Moore, but she turned down the part and died before the film was released. The director then offered the part to Peggy Ashcroft , a stage actress who had appeared in films only sporadically. She was not enthusiastic when Lean asked her to be Mrs Moore. Although she had recently worked in India on the T.
The character required a combination of foolishness, bravery, honour and anger. After some hesitation, Lean cast Banerjee, but the director had to overcome the restrictions of British equity to employ an Indian actor. Lean got his way, and the casting made headlines in India. Peter O'Toole was Lean's first choice to play Fielding. The role eventually went to James Fox. Despite having quarrelled with Lean in the s about a proposed film about Gandhi that ultimately was scrapped, Alec Guinness agreed to portray Professor Godbole. The relationship between the two men deteriorated during filming, and when Guinness learned that much of his performance was left on the cutting room floor due to time constraints, he saw it as a personal affront.
See a Problem?
Guinness would not speak to Lean for years afterwards, only patching things up in the last years of Lean's life. Raising finance was difficult. EMI provided some initial money but Lean paid his own expenses scouting locations and writing the screenplay. Lean visited the caves during pre-production, and found them flat and unattractive; concerns about bandits were also prevalent. Instead he used the hills of Savandurga and Ramadevarabetta some tens of kilometers from Bangalore , where much of the principal film took place; small cave entrances were carved out by the production company.
The music was done by long time Lean collaborator Maurice Jarre. According to Jarre, the director told him,"Maurice, I want you to write music right from your groin for this very long scene in the cave. This isn't a story of India, it's a story of a woman. I want you to write music that evokes awakening sexuality. Jarre wrote 45minutes of music in two and a half weeks. He said, "David talks to me in images. A film artist never asks for an oboe to cover up a bad scene; a film artist doesn't think of music as medicine for a sick movie.
David talks to me as he would talk to an actor. Lean's final film became a critics' favourite in , opening to tremendous praise worldwide. Though vast in physical scale and set against a tumultuous Indian background, it is also intimate, funny and moving in the manner of a film maker completely in control of his material.
Though [Lean] has made A Passage to India both less mysterious and more cryptic than the book, the film remains a wonderfully provocative tale, full of vivid characters, all played to near perfection. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times observed that "Forster's novel is one of the literary landmarks of this century, and now David Lean has made it into one of the greatest screen adaptations I have ever seen.
Three more from EM Forster
His actors here are encouraged to give sound, thoughtful, unflashy performances. Variety called the film "impeccably faithful, beautifully played and occasionally languorous" and added, "Lean has succeeded to a great degree in the tricky task of capturing Forster's finely edged tone of rational bemusement and irony. Time Out London thought the film was "a curiously modest affair, abandoning the tub-thumping epic style of Lean's late years.
While adhering to perhaps 80 per cent of the book's incident, Lean veers very wide of the mark over E. Forster's hatred of the British presence in India, and comes down much more heavily on the side of the British. But he has assembled his strongest cast in years. And once again Lean indulges his taste for scenery, demonstrating an ability with sheer scale which has virtually eluded British cinema throughout its history.
Not for literary purists, but if you like your entertainment well tailored, then feel the quality and the width. Channel 4 said, "Lean was always preoccupied with landscapes and obsessed with the perfect shot — but here his canvas is way smaller than in Lawrence of Arabia , for instance. Still, while the storytelling is rather toothless, A Passage to India is certainly well worth watching for fans of the director's epic style.
The film is recognized by American Film Institute in these lists:. It was in anamorphic widescreen format with audio tracks and subtitles in English, French, and Spanish.
A Passage to India | Books | The Guardian
In addition to Reflections of David Lean from the release, bonus features included commentary with producer Richard B. A Profile of an Author , covering some of the main themes of the original book; An Epic Takes Shape , in which cast and crew members discuss the evolution of the film; An Indian Affair , detailing the primary production period; Only Connect: A Vision of India , detailing the final days of shooting at Shepperton Studios and the post-production period; Casting a Classic , in which casting director Priscilla John discusses the challenges of bringing characters from the book to life; and David Lean: Shooting with the Master , a profile of the director.
With a restored print and new digital mastering. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. A Passage to India Original theatrical poster.
The 100 best novels: No 48 – A Passage to India by EM Forster (1924)
Turton Sandra Hotz as Stella H. Peggy Ashcroft Best Original Score: Maurice Jarre Nominations Best Picture: David Lean Best Art Direction: Hugh Scaife Best Cinematography: Ernest Day Best Costume Design: Judy Moorcroft Best Film Editing: I n , EM Forster , looking back in old age, wrote that the late-empire world of A Passage to India "no longer exists, either politically or socially".
Today, approaching years after its composition, the novel is probably as "dated" as ever. Yet — because Forster's concern is the forging of a relationship between a British schoolteacher and a Muslim doctor, reflecting the larger tragedy of imperialism — A Passage to India stands as a strangely timeless achievement, one of the great novels of the 20th century.
The part of A Passage to India that most readers remember, of course, is the tortuous romantic drama of the Marabar caves. The idea is that Adela will meet and marry Mrs Moore's son Ronny, an eligible but bigoted British civil servant, the city's magistrate. But Miss Quested, as her name implies, has other ideas. Rejecting the prejudice and insularity of the British community, she sets out to investigate the "real" India, assisted in her search by Dr Aziz, a young Muslim doctor who naively wants to promote an entente between the master race and its colonial subjects.
Each, in turn, is encouraged by the head of a local government college. There, in a classic episode of Forsterian "muddle", something happens between Aziz and Adela that disgraces the doctor, and inflames the furious hostility of the British sahibs. In the crisis, Aziz, already disdained as "spoilt westernised", is imprisoned.
My Passage to India
Eventually, after a trial, Adela withdraws her charges and Aziz, radicalised and angry, moves to the native state of Forster's imagination. There, in the closing part of the novel, he is visited by Fielding, the British schoolteacher who had been his great confidant and friend. The Aziz-Fielding relationship tormented Forster. In a passage that caused him great creative agony, he wrestled with the complexity of an east-west understanding.
It was an experience he never forgot, and it was into his fictional caves of "Marabar" that he sent Mrs Moore and her young companion, Adela, in the central and all-important section of his masterpiece, Part II, Caves. On his return from India, he began to write an Indian novel, but abandoned it to write Maurice , a novel of homosexual desire that would not be published until after his death. He did not return to his "Indian" manuscript until , having recently accepted a post as private secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas.