Filmmaking is full of difficult jobs. But one of the most difficult is walking into some person’s house, unannounced, that you barely know. I’ve been doing a lot of that over the last couple of weeks.

Omission has a total of 13 locations that we need permission to shoot at, and whenever someone hears the word film, they go all funny. And by funny I mean, they want to be paid! Some of our locations are nearly impossible to get: for example we need a shopping centre, and if that’s not a hard enough what would be ideal is a shopping centre which has a food court (easy), a sport store (hard), a games arcade (impossible). All of those things … In one shopping centre. I spoke to a filmmaker at the COLOURFEST festival the other night, and her team tried 29 shopping centres before they finally got the ok from one because of a personal connection.

There are many difficult locations to get for Omission, but I’ll talk about one of the hardest: an authentic Bengali apartment. This is what’s happened so far.

Omission is set in 2009. How convenient! But the cultural milieu that it is set in is still very important to the meaning and feel of the film. So we decided that we need an authentic Bengali apartment. But not just any Bengali house a newly arrived Bengali home. My parent’s arrived in Sydney in 1987. They’ve slowly built up their lives to the point where they have a nice shiny kitchen and a well kept suburban house. All their friends have done the same thing. How are we going to find an authentic apartment? My mum said ‘well, we’ll just turn up and see what they say.’ And so begins an adventure set in Hillsdale, Eastlakes, Blacktown, Lakemba, and Rockdale.

This is how it works: there are some specific suburbs where a lot of Bengalis live. My mum and I just turn up and go to someone’s house that we know. My mum knows a lot of people. And even if they don’t know my mum, they probably learnt to drive from my dad, so when we just turn up at the door without invitation, they are invariably nice. It’s been really humbling to be so graciously accepted into people’s homes and with so much love. If I wasn’t busy sketching plans of the apartment, writing down addresses and numbers, and taking a billion photos, I would shed tears.

Out of the 10-12 houses that we’ve visited no one has said we couldn’t shoot there. When people are that generous, you have a huge responsibility to treat them with respect and we try to leave as soon as we can. But it’s nearly impossible to leave a Bengali house without eating something sweet first. As we leave we get recommendations for other Bengali apartments that may be around. Then we follow up on those leads.

What are we looking for? Well, beyond the authentic look, we want something on the ground or first floor so that we can place lights outside of the windows to highlight the natural light that we’re looking for. We want an apartment that is fairly large as that let’s us move around easily and place the camera correctly etc. We can always make a big place look small but it’s much harder to make a small place look big. We also want good natural light and low noise. I also look to see how we can block (position actors and movement) key scenes in the script in the location, where we can have the camera and the lights etc.

Once I get back home I put all of this into our project management system Basecamp and then the director of photography Adam Howden has a look at the pictures and makes comments. When we have a good collection of places that could work, Adam and I make a trip out to the locations and Adam does his more thorough checks. Once we have a production designer on board, they will have their own requirements for the location.

After all of this has happened and Adam and the production designer has given it their ok, we negotiate the location. Which involves … well … more Bengali sweets.

• locations
• apartments
• preproductions

Posted 1 year ago