Rushdie's 'Midnight's Children' on track for the big screen

For a book that was once considered unfilmable, Sir Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children," a 650-page novel about a group of people born with special powers at the very moment of India's independence, is progressing nicely towards the big screen. 

The 61-year-old Indian-born author Sir Salman Rushdie is working with Indo-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta to turn the book, which won the Best of Bookers award in 2008 for the second time, into a big screen hit.

"I think if you follow Salim, you follow India,” filmmaker Deepa Mehta told IANS about the book's protagonist.

Mehta says, "We have a few people that we've already decided to work with -- Seema Biswas, Shabana Azmi, Nandita Das. And the rest we are looking for."

Rushdie, who was honoured with a knighthood last year, was reported to have met Amitabh Bachchan, Irrfan Khan, Shahana Goswami and Shabana-Javed Akhtar while in Mumbai in December.

According to Mehta in another IANS interview, "the book is a bit like 'The Life and the Opinions of Tristram Shandy', a humorous novel by Lawrence Sterne published in London in 1759.

"Like Tristram Shandy, "Midnight's Children" has linear narratives that go into areas which we cannot call simplistic. It's like a (movie director) Robert Altman piece that is vivid and alive. The characters come and go," she told the newswire.