Cosmopolitan (2003)

Interesting facts

Cosmopolitan is a 2003 American independent film starring Roshan Seth and Carol Kane, and directed by Nisha Ganatra. The film, based on an acclaimed short story by Akhil Sharma and written by screenwriter Sabrina Dhawan, is a cross-cultural romance between a confused and lonely middle-aged Indian, who has lived in America for 20 years, and his exasperating, free-spirited blonde neighbour.

Production

According to co-producer Jason Orans, the production team "fell in love with the story and were determined to make it from the moment we found out the rights were available. However, we were writing grant proposals for over two years before any funding was promised." The team used the immigrant-adrift-in-America theme of the story to garner major funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's Diversity Initiative, and from the National As…

Most of the film was shot in New Jersey in January 2003. The film's Bollywood street dance number was shot in New York City's Jackson Heights, where colourful Indian-American signage helped make a ready-made outdoor set. Ganatra observes humorously that the outdoor dance number "kept getting pushed on the schedule because of weather, and we finally did it on the coldest day of the year with the poor actors in saris".

A few shooting locations had to be changed, and often the replacement locations turned out to be more interesting than those originally planned. A scene meant to take place in a large major bookstore could not be achieved, so it was shot in a little sweets shop attached to a restaurant the filmmakers were already shooting in.

Cosmopolitan was filmed in 24P HD. For airing on PBS, the length of the film was trimmed by nearly three minutes; the television broadcast version and the DVD release run 53 minutes.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.