The Threshold

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT

The Threshold’ presented us an opportunity to examine questions of loneliness, inertia, habit and choices, but set in a largely neglected demographic- in Indian cinema, in Indian society- people in their 60s. 
 
The Threshold is about people we don’t normally notice. The people who are always at the edges of the family photograph. 
 
But we know these people. They are our aunts and uncles. They are our parents. They are our grandparents. We will become them. 
 
The screenplay was developed in collaboration with the actors. The characters onscreen aren’t versions of the actors themselves, but they came from Rajit (Kapur) and Neena (Gupta). They came from a deep, scarred place, from having seen the world a long time. There are things here that they pulled out of themselves. There are things that we invented on the spot. 
 
This is a film about the emotionally inarticulate. They talk about everything except that which they need to. We tend to forget that when it comes to the things that are important, the things that are critical to our lives, we don’t have the words. 
 
Because of the way this film was financed I was free to make the film I wanted to make and I could abandon the classical three-act structure. Our lives don’t have three acts, they don’t have structure. The important things always blindside us. So, we could use the passing of the day, use hunger and fatigue and how they affect our moods, return to an unending conversation, over and over, different things coming back to the same problems, and silence. 
 
We shot it in available light because I wanted to get rid of as much of the paraphernalia of filmmaking as possible. I don’t remember saying “Action” or “Cut”. We just wanted to let the actors have the space to tell the truth, to get out of their way, not have them hit marks. 
 
We found a way to work that was organic. Collaborative. Respectful. 
 
She doesn’t know why she wants to leave. Except she can’t bear to stay. 
 
They are everywhere, these people. They are us. They go to the cinema like everyone else, but there are no films about them. Nothing that addresses what their emotional lives are like without resorting to cheap comedies and pensioners falling for young jogging women. Or women who's whole lives are the kitchen. 
 
Can you have an existential crisis in this country (India)? On screen? Do you really need to fall in love with another man before you can walk out of the house and a marriage that makes you unhappy? 
 
We were thinking Linklater. We were thinking Mike Leigh. We were thinking Bergman in ‘Scenes from a Marriage’. 
 
Those filmmakers look at real people in real situations. Without high drama. And they have faith that the audience will go with them.