Page 59 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

46 The Apu Trilogy

years before, he had written to his English friend Norman Clare:
‘It looks as if I’ll have to rot and be exploited in Keymer’s for some
time [yet].’ He now decided to borrow around 7,000 rupees against
his life insurance policy and another 10,000 rupees from his rela-
tives and friends, to shoot enough footage to persuade a producer
to back the whole film. If no one would, he said to Chowdhury,
he would have to remain a commercial artist forever.
Ray was determined to prove the film industry’s professionals
wrong in their conviction that outdoors shooting with amateur
actors was unworkable. He and Mitra hired an old 16mm camera
and set off one weekend for Gopalnagar, the village on which
Banerji had based his fictional one. It was the rainy season and
they had to squelch through knee-deep mud to get there. They
filmed in ‘the dim light of a mango grove, in pouring rain and in
the falling light of dusk.’ Every shot came out.
But the village itself Ray considered to be insufficiently pho-
togenic. So his next problem was to find a location suitable for
the daytime scenes in the film (the night-time ones were always
intended to be shot in a studio). Besides a house of the right gen-
eral layout and decay to fit Harihar Ray’s, the story demanded a
pond nearby, a river, fields and a railway line. In the event, Ray
settled for two locations: the ruined house and pond in the vil-
lage of Boral only six miles from the centre of Calcutta, and the
fields (where Apu and Durga run together) with the railway line
about 100 miles away. The river he decided to drop. After nego-
tiations with the owner of the house, ‘a nasty old man’ bedridden
in Calcutta to whom they had to pay 50 rupees every month for
the next two and a half years, Chandragupta set to work on an
extensive conversion.
They began shooting on 27 October 1952, in the fields. Ray
felt that the scene in which Apu chases Durga through a field
of white kash (similar to pampas grass) and sees a train for the
first time would make a fine come-on for a producer. But he did
not appreciate just how tough a target he had set himself as a
director. Some of the lessons it taught him he recorded in various

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