When Sturla Gunnarsson was first offered the job to direct the film version of Rohinton Mistry's novel Such A Long Time,, he had reservations about the project. The Icelandic director from Canada had never been to India, and did not know any Parsis.

His only link to India did not bring him any closer to the world of Gustad Noble (the role played by Roshan Seth in Such A Long Journey) , a middle class bank clerk, living in a Parsi colony in Bombay.

"My wife is Punjabi," he says, pronouncing the word as most Punjabis do in North America and Britain. "But she is Canadian. She was born in Canada and had never been to India. Her family is from Punjab. But I didn't make the film because of this reason."

Gunnarsson was given a copy of Mistry's novel by the film's Canadian and British producers, Paul Stephens and Simon MacCorkindale, and that changed everything. Gunnarsson loved the book -- winner of the 1991 Governor General Award and Commonwealth Prize, and short-listed for a Booker. He says he could see the movie in it.

"It is such a great humanist document," the 49-year-old director says of Mistry's book. "It speaks to that which we share."

It also helped that Naseeruddin Shah (who plays the crucial, although small role of Jimmy Bilimoria - Noble's friend) said to Gunnarsson, during the director's first visit to India, four years ago: "Sturla, what makes you think that a Hindu or a Muslim in India knows more about Parsis than you do?"

"And then I said to myself that I loved the novel, because it spoke to my heart," he says. "All these characters, I know these people. I know about relationships between fathers and sons. Who hasn't had a friend who betrayed them and who hasn't felt that God has betrayed them?"

But in order to avoid making a film that might ring a false note, Gunnarsson surrounded himself with Parsis -- especially the film's screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala (Mira Nair's Salaam Bombay and Mississippi Masala), and actor Kurush Deboo (Tehmul-Lungraa, another crucial character in the book and the film), who introduced the director to orthodox Parsi traditions and the Parsi General Hospital; and of course, the writer Rohinton Mistry.

"I felt confident that if I was off base, they would have told me," Gunnarsson says.

Gunnarsson made a special effort to get to know Mistry. "He is a quiet, shy person, with a wicked sense of humor."

Although Mistry had optioned his novel to producer Stephens, he was skeptical about the film business. The fact that Gunnarsson was not the first director considered for the project had further complicated the matter.

"I made it a point to get him involved," Gunnarsson says. "I needed all his confidence and blessings to make the film a successful adaptation."

Eventually Mistry did get to pitch in towards the last draft of the script. When the shooting started, the novelist was in Bombay to mark his father's first death anniversary.

"And so he broke the coconut," Gunnarsson says.

Gunnarsson and his crew spent five months in Bombay between 1997 and 1998 -- only 40 days of which were devoted to the shooting of the film. The rest of time, Gunnarsson dedicated to pre-production, especially casting. In selecting his actors he wanted them to be as racially close as possible to the characters they played.

"You didn't have to be a Parsi to play Parsi, but you had look like a Parsi," he says.

Gunnarsson knew from the beginning that he would cast Seth as Gustad Noble. He described the veteran actor as a 'gentleman and the calm center' of the whole project, who is incapable of a false note. Filming in Bombay can be madness and Seth's mere presence, in character at all times, gave the director a lot of strength.

"Occasionally, he (Seth) wouldn't know what he was doing and a lot of actors at that time would rely on their bag of tricks," Gunnarsson said. "But he would stop and work his way backwards, to get to the core of the character."

Gunnarsson had seen Naseeruddin Shah and Om Puri (Ghulam Mohammed, Bilimoria's accomplice who gets Noble involved in film's central theme - an intricate money laundering scheme, supposedly to assist the Bangladesh liberation war) in Mrinal Sen's Genesis and Gautam Ghose's Paar. He hoped one day he would work with the two actors.

Upon meeting Gunnarsson, Shah agreed to play the small role of Bilimoria.

"Jimmy is like Kurtz in (Joseph Conrad's) Heart of Darkness," Gunnarsson says. "He is not there, but he animates the action of the whole story. So when we get to him, he has to have a real presence and hold his own with the rest of cast. And Naseer was ideal for that role."

And to the director, Puri is a "formidable actor, with honesty and dignity, solid like a rock".

The real find of the film was Kurush Deboo. Upon reading the book Gunnarsson realised that Tehmul would be hard to cast. If there was a possibility for the film to go wrong, it would be with that character.

Gunnarsson remembers an early conversation he had with Deboo. When the director asked the actor how he would play Tehmul, Deboo responded: "Without punctuation!"

Pearl Padamsee (Mrs Kutpitia) was unwell when Gunnarsson was ready to shoot the film. She first refused the project, citing reasons of health, then came on board later.

"But I refused to cast anybody else and I kept going back to her and eventually she agreed," Gunnarsson says with a sense of achievement. The stage and film actress passed away last year.

Shooting in Bombay reminded Gunnarsson of VS Naipaul's statement that India is a functioning anarchy.

"The whole thing felt like a kind of madness that was exhilarating," he says. "Your plans always go up in smoke but then something happens. It is like a land of miracles. You can't control the situation. You have to go with it. But there is lot of goodwill and ingenuity. And that was important."

One of the western crew members that Gunnarsson had brought with him to India found the shooting situation so unbearable that he locked himself in his hotel room. Eventually he went back home.

"We spent a lot of money on consultants," he laughs, referring to the bribes the production company had to make through the shoot. "A lot of levels of people had to get their piece of action. It was a delicate act to toe the line between Shiv Sena and other groups. You can see how easily things can go wrong. You saw what happened to Deepa (Mehta) in India."

Gunnarsson's ultimate test came when he showed the final cut of the film to Mistry. At the end of the screening in Canada, Mistry was quiet and did not say much to Gunnarsson.

"I was really devastated," Gunnarsson says. "Then I asked his wife Freny and she told me that Rohinton had been terrified coming into the screening. He was quiet because he was relieved!"

Design: Dominic Xavier