The difficult directorial process that led to the birth and success of the action film Monkey Man.
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| Image Credit: Universal Pictures |
Dev Patel's directorial debut Monkey Man was a huge success following its premiere at SXSW, with many praising the action film as a spectacle comparable to John Wick and The Raid.
But as the film continues to receive rave reviews ahead of its theatrical release on April 5, Dev Patel wants fans to know that the journey to completing it was grueling. In a recent Ask Me Anything session on Reddit, Patel shared details about the complex set in Indonesia and how the COVID-19 pandemic threatened to derail the entire project. But there were many problems behind the filming of the film.
Monkey Man, Dev Patel talks about the ordeal that led to the creation of the film
“I begged our financier not to shut us down a few weeks before principal photography began,” Patel wrote. “We were supposed to shoot in India, then COVID hit. I lost my initial cinematographer and production director and the film was pretty much dead, then we changed course and went to a small island in Indonesia where we could create a bubble in an empty hotel for the entire crew of almost 500 people. It's been a grueling nine months of absolute joy and total chaos.”
He went on to explain that international travel restrictions and an increasingly tight budget have forced him to work with fewer resources than expected. The limitations led Patel to create his own improvised technology and assign crew members acting roles.
“All the locations we had prepared for months — we lost them at the last minute — so we had to adapt at the last minute,” he wrote. “The borders also closed, so I couldn't get a lot of the secondary characters. In the end, I had to have every tailor, lighting technician, accountant, etc. act in front of the camera. Speaking of cameras, most of our equipment broke and we couldn't get new stuff in so we literally shot with my cell phone, with GoPros — when a winch broke we ended up creating this camera structure made of rope I called a 'pendulum cam', which swings over a large crowd of people and then breaks away and the operators run through the crowd as it films.”
While Patel expressed relief that the finished product is so beautiful, he hasn't forgotten how brutal the process was.
“The most challenging thing he's ever done in my life,” he said of the film. “Every day we faced absolute catastrophes.”
Source: Indie Wire
