My students keep asking me about the process: how you go from the idea to a script. Let me try and describe the process as I experienced it on The Caregivers.
I had an idea that caregivers were interesting characters, especially in the relationships that developed between them and the people they cared for. That was the beginning point.
As I began to do research into the elderly in India, as well caregivers, I realised that I was dealing with a far larger problem- no one realised the sheer numbers of the elderly in India, nor did anyone have a clue as to what exactly was ageing- what happened to the human body as it aged. Then there was the whole range of caregiving- within the family, sometimes changing the very dynamics of the family, the external caregivers coming in, the old age homes, and the severe shortage of all these options for the majority of the elderly.
My problem as a filmmaker was also how to integrate all this into one coherent structure, a documentary that an audience could grasp.
My basic solution was three fold:
I had an idea that caregivers were interesting characters, especially in the relationships that developed between them and the people they cared for. That was the beginning point.
As I began to do research into the elderly in India, as well caregivers, I realised that I was dealing with a far larger problem- no one realised the sheer numbers of the elderly in India, nor did anyone have a clue as to what exactly was ageing- what happened to the human body as it aged. Then there was the whole range of caregiving- within the family, sometimes changing the very dynamics of the family, the external caregivers coming in, the old age homes, and the severe shortage of all these options for the majority of the elderly.
My problem as a filmmaker was also how to integrate all this into one coherent structure, a documentary that an audience could grasp.
My basic solution was three fold:
- To do not one or two but several different stories of caregiving for the elderly, showing the diversity of home based caregiving.
- To show old age homes as the final option for the elderly.
- To interview a medical doctor and a medical psychiatrist and use excerpts from those interviews as the dividers between the different stories of the elderly.
I started out with these basic structural points.
The problem was that this gave me no beginning or ending to the documentary. I needed to figure them out.
The begining came in the writing stage - I sort of knew that I needed to show the cycles of life here- from birth onto growing old. So I wrote a sequence that illustrated that.
The ending was known to me too- it had to end with death, a river, an elderly man looking at the river flowing by. I knew that this had to be the Ganga at Garhmukteshwar, a view not many non-Meerut people have ever seen.
Based on these core facts, I started looking at families and individuals.
But that's the next step. In terms of writing, this is the process I went through.
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