The Waiting City

First published on 15 Jul 2010. Updated on 15 Jul 2010.

An Australian couple arrives at Calcutta Airport at dawn. Fiona (Radha Mitchell) is a high-flying lawyer; Ben (Joel Edgerton) is a music producer. They're in India to adopt a child, but the process stalls and they're forced to wait in the city for days - obliging them to confront relationship issues that have long lain buried.

The debut feature of Sydney director Claire McCarthy, The Waiting City is the first Australian film to be shot entirely in India. It draws upon the director's personal experiences working in Bengali orphanages with her younger sister, Helena.

"She believes I owe the whole movie to her," McCarthy laughs. "She was going through a war of attrition with my mum in her last year of high school. Mum said, ‘I cook for you, I clean for you and you're so ungrateful. You'd never survive a day in the slums of Calcutta.' My sister said, ‘yes I would.' My sister rang me and said, ‘Mum's gonna make me go to Calcutta, do you wanna come?'"

They arrived in the city in 2002, the elder McCarthy girl bringing a camera to record what they saw, together with her sister's emotional meltdown. "We travelled through the streets and saw bodies sleeping - [Helena] wasn't certain if they were alive or dead. We couldn't find a hotel. She thought she had arrived on the set of a horror film." They eventually settled in and did volunteer work with Mother Teresa's sisters. McCarthy met foreign couples who had travelled to India to collect their adoptive children.

"The adoption process is not easy," she says. "It's protracted, it's expensive, it's difficult. I do feel the emotional impact that it has on people can really galvanise their relationship or tear them apart."

McCarthy, a graduate of the AFTRS, went on to make the documentary Sisters in Calcutta. While shooting the Old Man River music video ‘Sunshine' on the banks of the Ganges, McCarthy revealed to a crew member her idea for a feature film together with her dream star - Radha Mitchell. The story found its way into the Times of India and caught the attention of Mitchell herself, who signed on after reading McCarthy's script.  
 
Casting the role of former rock star Ben was trickier. "Ben had to be a bit of a boy man - not a man's man, but to grow into that through the course of the movie. I always had an eye on Joel and the clincher was when he performed U2's ‘With or Without You' to show that he could sing."

The production utilised many of Bollywood's brightest acting and filmmaking talents but perhaps the real star of the movie is Sydney cinematographer Denson Baker. Every frame of The Waiting City is ravishing. "Denson was the year above me at film school so we worked on a few things together. We filmed [The Waiting City] for four months in India and then we decided if we could get through a shoot like that we could get through anything. He's now my husband."

But are they going to adopt an Indian child? "We're thinking about it!" Nick Dent



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