Deepa Mehta's Water Goes From Being Banned to Oscar Nomination

Mehta: I made Water because its central theme is extremely relevant to me and - I think - in our world today. And that is the conflict between our conscience and our faith. To use the widows who I was exposed to in ashrams, seemed an appropriate vehicle to explore that theme.

Do homes like the one you show in the film still exist?

Yes they do. They’re pretty much the way it’s been depicted in the film. The houses are run by childhood trusts or temple trusts or by the Indian government. The good thing is that a lot of grassroots work has been done with widows to alleviate their problems, which are soci-economic, by women activists.

Widows have traditionally been cast off because their families don’t want to bear the financial burden of feeding her or share property.

That’s true. Sadly, when you think of all oppression in the world it’s always economic reasons, and it’s the same thing with widows.

You started filming Water in 2000 in India but it was shut down. Tell us about that.

Before you make a film in India you have to give the government the script and they go through it with a fine-toothed comb to ensure there’s nothing detrimental or derogatory or offensive to India before they give you permission to film. The BJP government – a Hindu fundamentalist government of that day - gave us permission. Deepa

So 6 weeks after pre-production when mobs started attacking our set in the name of Hinduism it was a real shock. The government which was another arm of the mobs that were attacking us had said it was fine. We were shut down after 2 days of filming.

How do argue with the mob?

You can’t argue with a mob. There’s not one person to have a dialogue with. There’s no room for reasoning. We tried but it was an impossibility.

Do you see us as a society getting more fundamentalist with less room for dialogue and tolerance? Instead of films provoking dialogue now we provoke riots with films, books, cartoons.

Sadly it really reflects our times. All over the world different religions are being misinterpreted for personal benefit. It’s about power and economics and it isn’t really about the religion, whether its Hinduism, Christianity or Islamic.

So you ended up re-creating the sets for Water in Sri Lanka. Why?

We were invited to 4 other provinces in India but I was in such a state by what had happened – death threats on set, effigies being burnt, money lost for the producers - I was angry and to impose that anger on a script which doesn’t need it, would be doing a disservice to the film. It took 4 years for my anger to dissipate.

It wasn’t about Water or about me, it was what was happening in the world. People were flexing their muscles and trying to portray themselves as the protectors in the name of Hinduism.

When you shifted the production years later, you needed a new cast and the young girl in the film didn’t speak Hindi and you don’t speak Sinhalese. How did that work?

I love working with child actors because they‘re so uncomplicated. I was warned that you make sure they really want to do it and they are intelligent. We had an interpreter and she learnt her script phonetically. It was marvelous.

She’d never acted before, never even done theatre. She’s just fabulous. I had put posters up in schools and she told her mother she wanted to do it. And when I met her I knew immediately that she was the character. It worked out really well.

Water is the third of a trilogy, the others being Fire and Earth. How do these films set in different times of Indian history connect?

Fire is about the politics of sexuality and Earth is about the politics of war and Water is about the politics of religion and how they all effect women. That’s what connects them.

Which do you think is the most potent force?

Religion. That’s what I learnt in the four years and looking at the climate of the world today.

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