John Madden and ‘The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’
Director of the new star-studded film, set in Jaipur, chats to Wanderlust about travel, how to dodge Delhi-belly and the best way to drive on Indian roads
One of the stranger sights you’ll see in the cinema this year is Maggie Smith and Judi Dench being propelled through Jaipur’s ruinous rush hour on the back of a moped. The venerable 77-year-old Dames are just two of the acclaimed thesps ‘of a certain age’ who travelled to India to become residents of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. The gentle, touching story of lost souls who choose to live out their recession-buggered pensions in titular dilapidated Jaipur hotel.
Film director John Madden – acclaimed for the likes of Shakespeare In Love, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and last year’s spy-thriller The Debt – spent four months in India preparing and then shooting his movie.
He spoke to Wanderlust’s Tom Hawker about his experiences making The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.
Jaipur isn’t your standard Indian movie location?
No, it’s not the classic tourist perspective of the country. Part of the movie’s topic is travel and the central idea of travelling is to place yourself in a completely unfamiliar environment and see what happens to you as a result. I was very careful to keep the experience of India in the film as true as it could be, the way the characters would experience it.
India is an extraordinary experience by any standard – the chaos, the teeming humanity. Jaipur is particularly fascinating; it’s an ancient city, laid out in a grid system according to a very grand design, which is now dilapidated. It’s famously the Pink City – everything’s painted in this similar colour, so it’s got a very unique atmosphere. But it’s also where old India and new India are colliding in spectacular ways.
Agriculture is still the biggest form of livelihood but at the same time you know that technological India, high-rise India, is also growing.
Everything seems to be going on at the same time in some mysterious harmony, in that people don’t seem to compete with each other as they do in the rest of the world. People in India popping their horns are saying, “I’m here,” and not so much, “Get out of the way!”
