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<\/a>How did this come about?<\/p>\nI was giving a speech in Sweden and two young people came up afterwards and handed me a book and said, \u201cThis is our parents\u2019 story. We know your work. Might you be interested in looking into it as a possible film?\u201d And I took the book and eventually flicked through it and I [thought], \u201cOh my God, this story is mindblowing.\u201d And I was lucky enough to meet P.K. and Lotta and they are so warm, generous and open-hearted, it\u2019s hard not to fall head over heels in love with them. You want to spend all your time with them and then luckily we all had a shared vision for how their story could be shown in in filmic form.<\/p>\n
From what I understand, you had an idea of how to approach this from your previous film \u201cEvelyn,\u201d though it is definitely different. What could you build on?<\/p>\n
P.K.\u2019s story is full of magic and destiny and the kindness of strangers and love and all these amazing themes. It\u2019s a cracking adventure too, but the problem, as a documentary maker, is that there was very little archive. P.K. didn\u2019t have a documentary crew following him in the 1970s and frankly, [the lack of archival material] was terrifying. But also it was an opportunity to try and think creatively about how to do something different and my past work was where I ended up drawing inspiration from.<\/p>\n
I made [\u201cEvelyn\u201d] almost 10 years ago now, about about my family and my brother who took his own life, and in that film, we walked the length of the UK visiting places where we\u2019d spent time with my brother when he was alive and one of the most extraordinary things in the film is meeting strangers and having these really extraordinary conversations, so I wondered if that idea of meeting strangers and having conversations could inform this film if we followed parts of P.K.\u2019s original journey. Could it speak to this key emotional idea at the heart of P.K.\u2019s story about a man who didn\u2019t have self-belief and needed to learn to love himself because that P.K. spoke movingly about how strangers along the way touched him \u2014 they hugged him [for instance], things that he hadn\u2019t experienced while in India \u2014\u00a0and that taught him to believe in himself.<\/p>\n
So we set off with P.K., who is one of the most unique human beings I\u2019ve ever met, and we took two very talented actors with us on this journey \u2014 Chirag Lobo and Mina Dale, and almost everybody else in this film are real people we met along the way. And PK himself, would watch us as we shot these scenes and he\u2019d give feedback. He really helped us capture it in as emotionally authentic way as we possibly could. Sometimes I\u2019d turn around and I\u2019d see PK watching what we just filmed and he was crying and saying, \u201cwell, obviously I didn\u2019t meet this person, but what I\u2019ve just witnessed was so similar to my own experience.\u201d He found it very, very moving.<\/p>\n
Yeah, I\u2019ve always liked as a filmmaker to throw myself into into the thick of the experience. It\u2019s very difficult for me to make a film remotely or to not be on the ground for the majority of the shoot and then feel connected with the material. In this case, we try to embrace P.K.\u2019s story as much as possible. We were in the deserts, in the Himalayas, in the jungles of of Odisha. And P.K. spoke so movingly and powerfully about what he experienced, we felt we had to be there. And some people have looked at some of the footage and said, \u201cHow could you do that on a documentary budget? Is that AI?\u201d And we did this the the slow, hard way, traveling uncomfortably, freezing ourselves in the mountains or burn roasting under the peasant sun. The whole thing was a real experience making it.<\/p>\n Was there anything that happened that changed your ideas about what this was?<\/p>\n I thought originally I was going into this making just a straight-up romantic love story. And what this film actually is is a story about love, but it\u2019s not just about romantic love. It\u2019s also about learning to love yourself and it\u2019s also a story about love for our fellow human beings, so it definitely stayed as a love story, but it became this much bigger, all-encompassing story of different forms of love.<\/p>\n I could see a lot of filmmakers holding back on when Lotta would come into the picture since P.K. is on this quest to find her, but you introduce her quite early in the present day. Was it difficult deciding how to structure this?<\/p>\n It was really difficult. There\u2019s so many layers to this film \u2014\u00a0emotional layers, temporal layers \u2014\u00a0and then of course, like any good love story, it\u2019s got to be a will they\/won\u2019t they, right? That\u2019s fundamental to any love story that we want to watch, so pulling all of that together, making it coherent, fun and dramatic was really, really tough. I\u2019ve got to give massive credit to our editor Katie Bryer, who did an extraordinary job making it work. There were lots of versions of this film that didn\u2019t and if we didn\u2019t balance things right, PK comes across as too keen or Lotta doesn\u2019t look caring enough, so it took a long time, but hopefully we got there in the end.<\/p>\n I think you\u2019ve got to keep developing to stay interested. If I only made the same style of film every time, you fall out of love with the craft. It\u2019s fun experimenting and I love playing with documentary form and I think as you progress through your career and you try different different forms of documentary, you\u2019re emboldened to try new things. This film I\u2019d like to think that we\u2019ve tried something novel, but it but it very much stands on the shoulders of the work of directors like Chloe Zhao and Michael Winterbottom and the Ross Brothers, people that are either scripted filmmakers predominantly, but play with documentary elements, or the documentary directors that have played with some scripted elements. That\u2019s what that\u2019s what we\u2019ve been trying to do.<\/p>\n<\/a>As you\u2019re putting together a story in your head for yourself, what was it like visiting these places and letting the environment inform you?<\/p>\n<\/a>I feel that you did. And it\u2019s been remarkable to me that none of your films has been formally very different from one another, even with the connection this has to \u201cEvelyn.\u201d Is that formal challenge something you actually seek out?<\/p>\n