Several years ago, Chika Kapadia, an Indian man of many talents and appetites, was diagnosed with thyroid cancer and given two months to live. He contacted his long-time friends, Mumbai-based filmmakers Shonali Bose and Nilesh Maniyar, and asked them to make a film about his final days. He planned to end his life at the facility of the nonprofit organization Dignitas in Zurich, which provides legal physician-assisted suicide, and wanted them to be there to witness his death. The film was barely finished before it premiered Oct. 4 at BIFF, where Bose and Maniyar participated in two post-screening Q&A sessions with audience members. The following conversation took place in the BIFF Guest Lounge on Oct. 5 following the second screening.

-How did the Q&As go?

Shonali Bose: What impressed us was that the audience was mostly young people. 

-Korean cinephiles are mostly young people.

SB: Right, but we didn’t think for this film that it would be young people who’d turn out, and the reaction was very profound and amazing both times. Afterwards, I said we would continue the Q&A out in the lobby. Usually in those cases, it’s an extra 5 or 6 minutes, but a line formed, and it was the same audience. We answered questions for another 45 minutes. People were coming up one by one. These young people said they were scared of dying, and not just in relation to an illness. Just the very subject of death scared them, but watching the film made them feel more comfortable with the concept. 

Nilesh Maniyar: You know, back home often studios tell you, “Can you make something for young people because those are the people watching now,” and the meaning of that is to make something fun, something adventurous, and of course that exists, but if you give this movie to a studio they’d say, “Oh, young people won’t watch this.” But today I realized just how thoughtful some young people are about life and their anxieties. People aren’t so lost that they aren’t contemplating the end. It scares them. And I didn’t think this film would do that for young people—bring peace to that thought process. 

-The audience at this particular festival is different. They come not necessarily knowing what they want to see, and once they get the lineup they look at it and think, “Oh, maybe this looks interesting,” and so their reaction is relatively pure. I think in other places, young people go to film festivals to see specific movies, and if they don’t get tickets to those movies they just go home. Here, they want to discover things.

SB: Well, if it was a random situation like that, then I was quite impressed.

-It’s the kind of a film you can’t help but react to, and I’m sure there are some people who may find the sentiment behind it objectionable, though they may not verbalize that opinion publicly. But from what you said, it sounds as if people needed to talk about this.

NM: The most common question was, “Would you do it? What would you do if you were in that position?” But as a counterpoint people also felt that it provides a direction for which you can start a conversation. And that was interesting.

-You said you were meeting a person from a Korean right-to-die organization…

SB: Yes, she’s waiting for us.

-Oh, you haven’t done the interview yet.

SB: It’s not an interview. She just wanted to meet again. I am quite intrigued by someone who is an activist for this kind of issue. How are they going to react? Are they going to feel there is a sense of justice, or are they going to think it went too far into me and my friendship with Chika. She was, like, “What we care about as activists on this issue came out in the film strong and clear.” She wants to write about it, which is great because I was quite nervous. 

NM: She had a look of relief on her face, as if she had found the right tool to help her keep the conversation going. 

-I wanted to ask about the title, because, in fact, you [Bose] are not a fly on the wall at all, even though [Kapadia] made that request in the end that you just be a fly on the wall.

SB: Right, and I told him I’m not going to honor that request. In the end I was very much in there, and I was anxious: Is he going to tell me, “Back off”? But he didn’t. In the end we interacted the same way we had thoughout most of the filming. We decided on that title because we felt it captured the conflict. 

NM: It was the dilemma of being a filmmaker and a friend [of the subject] at the same time. Whether he said it out loud or didn’t say it at all, there’s the question of how much to intrude; or even thinking: What constitutes an intrusion? Even if you are there all the time, you can’t help but feel that way as a filmmaker. How much is too much?

-That’s also the anthropologist’s dilemma. When they study a society or a culture, they have to factor their presence into their analysis, take into consideration the fact that they were observing these events as they happened and wonder how did it affect the subjects. Lots of documentarians want to be Frederic Wiseman, who perfected this kind of invisible filmmaker style, but he’s not invisible. He’s always there. Was that something you had to think about?

SB: I didn’t initially expect that to be in the film. When I was in Switzerland, I was on the phone with Nilesh [back in India] every day, and he’d say, “You need to turn the camera on yourself.” But we didn’t really know what was going to go into the film. I was just recording daily, and I think he had an instinct about that side of it.

NM: I thought, she’s going to be there and she is a friend. She’s going to feel something. And I thought that when she said something like that I wondered if this will turn out like a memoir, like a diary. Because I’ve known her for so many years, and I knew there would be a sea of emotion that will come out in this process. I was intrigued  as to what would happen, because we were recording without a script, recording everything as it happened–action and reaction. I didn’t even know if a film could come out of it.

-That’s what I wondered. Obviously, the circumstances were always in flux. You couldn’t storyboard it or even write an outline, because you couldn’t plan it.

SB: Not at all. From the beginning it was a commitment to a friend, it’s what he wanted. So I said, “OK, I’ll film what you want.” His legacy was important to him, and he was so desperate that this be filmed. And then later he became afraid when his family wouldn’t give their permission, and Dignitas said they wouldn’t allow it. [Dignitas later changed its mind, but the family didn’t] How can we get over these hurdles? At the time, the thinking was: We have to fulfill this dying man’s request, our commitment as friends. What will we even do with it? Put it on YouTube? It became the film it became because of Nilesh’s foresight to have the camera turned on me. When the film was edited and put together, I was not really part of that process at all. They found that the film doesn’t really show the conflicts and the drama when it only focused on Chika. In that case, it’s simply about a unique person and how he carried out his intentions. But we didn’t know that in the beginning. It became a coping process. Whenever Nilesh called I would say, “He doesn’t want to be on video,” and Nilesh would say, “Just shoot with the cell phone.” I was just following his instructions and hoping as a friend Chika would accept it. I was recording whatever I could, and fighting to shoot whatever I could. These decisions were difficult. You remember at one point when Chika said, “Turn the camera off!” And Nilesh still insisted, and I would say, “It’s not easy, man, he’s shouting at me.”

NM: There are two things we had to always keep in mind. He wants a film made, but at the same tim he is facing death. So there are all these emotions he’s going through. [Note: During many scenes, Kapadia is obviously in pain, though in others he seems comfortable.] 

-Did he give you any idea of what he wanted the film to be?

SB: He didn’t really think through how it would be as a film. He said, “We interview the president of Dignitas, and you shoot the end, and you record my family members,” which [the family] refused to do. He thought these interviews and the footage of the actual act of dying would make a film. 

NM: You saw how many friends visited him in Zurich during those seven days. They came to party with him. But there’s a reason he asked us to come, and that was to film him. That means he expected we would apply ourselves to whatever we shot. As an afterthought I’d say that Chika, if he hadn’t asked us and had recorded himself, then it still could have been a film. But if Chika just asked someone to follow him, it would be just a memoir, and, actually, that still would have been interesting to me. It’s not as if we plotted a story, but since he had asked us, his friends, to shoot a film, we were compelled to find a film within the footage we shot. If the subject had not been a friend, then this would have been a very different experience. Because this person is a friend, as well as a filmmaker, I feel the film provides access to something that’s like a conversation with a loved one. How would that feel? That’s what’s happening on screen. 

-Did either you or he consider this film to be an issue film? 

SB: For Chika, very much so. That’s what he meant when he wrote that the religions of Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam were not letting him have this [assisted suicide], as well as the governments of three countries. Everyday he wrote in his diary was very political and strong. And we made sure to incorporate some of the text in the film, because he was so upset and angry. None of us had really thought about it, what our position was on assisted suicide. We knew about euthanasia, but we’d never really thought through it. The moment it happens with a loved one and you think about it, then you realize, “Oh my God, this is so unfair.” Why can’t it be available to anyone? Even the privilege of being able to go to Switzerland and undergo this procedure, that was also something we discussed. Chika was, like, “People should be able to do this, even if they are poor and living in India. I’m rich enough and can come to Zurich and do it.” What he wanted was for the film to force people to ask these questions. 

NM: It started out being about the issue. But I think if that’s all it was, it would have been boring. It was a chance to access someone going through it and have a conversation with that person and then transform it all into a narrative, essentially. We found that narrative with the tools at hand. It just became an obvious thing: two friends going through this together.

-He even touched on that at one point, after he received a critical comment on his blog that said he was being “elitist and judgmental,” an opinion he seemed to agree with. 

SB: He had joined a group for terminals, and was writing about all this on his blog, and somebody read what he wrote and said it’s all well and good that you can afford to go and do this. In the longer piece that this person was responding to, Chika had written that he was not saying people in this situation should commit suicide, but that physician-assisted suicide was something else, and the person called him out on that and he apologized. He said, “Who am I to judge those who might commit suicide?”, because he had seemed to be judging them, so he had to backtrack publicly. 

-His personality is very vivid in the movie. You can’t separate it from the theme of the film. It’s not a documentary about assisted suicide, it’s a documentary about his assisted suicide, and he’s an arrogant guy.

SB: Yes.

-To me that was the whole point. Weren’t you ever annoyed having to deal with that?

SB: I mean, there’s that scene where I’m just, “I’m so angry!” And I told Nilesh, “Don’t put that in!”, and he’d say that we had to put it in. That’s why I say the movie was made by Nilesh and the editor, because I was so uncomfortable. But their thing was that it should be about Chika and me, that we should be the characters. Nilesh would say, “We can’t whitewash this. It’s just such a charged situation between the two of you. It’s human.” Those reactions must be included in the film. I did feel angry, and I didn’t want to. Those fights we had were terrible for me. We had never fought in 25 years of friendship. In a normal friendship, you hang out, you drink, you never get into heated issues in this way. 

NM: You see a person walking there and if you don’t know him you’ll judge him. If you’re making a film and you decide not to judge the subjects at all, then they don’t feel human. Narratively, realistically, you have to put them in spaces. That gives you the chance to make it more human, more 3-dimensional, and that allows the audience to judge them. It’s not just Chika being arrogant, but Shonali, too. “Your friend is dying. Why are you making it about yourself?” Now you can judge her or you can judge him, but in the end he is going to die and she is going to be left behind with all those feelings. And that is what happens to us. Someone goes away and someone gets left behind. It was a journey that helped us contemplate that in a very realistic way. 

-You met in Los Angeles, right?

SB: Yes. When he died he was 63 and I was 59, and we met a long time ago. 

-Wasn’t he a filmmaker, also?

SB: He was a wannabe filmmaker, but it never came to fruition. At the time we met, I had been a film student at UCLA and we were at a film event where he told me he had written a screenplay that he was going to direct. I replied that I had written a screenplay, too, and that I hoped to direct it. I went on to become a professional filmmaker, and it didn’t work out for him. But at the last meeting with him just before I got the news about his diagnosis, he said he had written another script that he wanted me to direct. So no longer was he thinking of being a director himself, but he did want to write films. So now Nilesh and I have decided that this documentary is a film by us and Chika Kapadia. It’s there in the credits. 

NM: Chika had three great aspirations. One was to be a filmmaker. Second, he wanted to be a standup comedian. And third he wanted to be a professional scuba diver. And he really did become those last two—it’s why there’s all that underwater footage in the film. He was truly a man who tried, and often succeeded, in doing many different things, and that’s what I loved about him. 

-His range was impressive. 

SB: He started out as an electrical engineer. He did all the lighting for the Queen Mary, the cruise ship, in Los Angeles. 

NM: He was a lighting engineer who came back to Bombay to sell his house, then go to Goa and settle there for one year, after which he said to himself, “Hmmm, not so great,” and then sell his house there and go to Bali, where he married a woman. They separated, and he just went on to something new. I mean, this man responds to life, to the moment. 

-Despite the fact that he was dying before our eyes, I found myself admiring and envying him for that quality. You couldn’t write that character if you tried. If you did, someone would read it and say, “That’s too much.”

SB: [laughs]

NM: Exactly. Too filmy.

-I have to find out how you did that hang-gliding scene. [At one point, Shonali takes a break from Chika “to be a tourist” and tries hang-gliding for the first time. During her flight with the instructor she pours her heart out to him, explaining why she was in Switzerland and, in the heat of catharsis, talks about her son, who died when he was a teenager, all while floating hundreds of meters above the ground.]

SB: In the car going to the hang-gliding spot, the [operator], who is always trying to get you to spend more money, told me that for an extra hundred francs, he will make a video for me. And at that moment I got the idea that I would say something about the film, though I didn’t know what, because I was actually scared. I didn’t know what I would say once I was up there, but it would be about Chika, for sure. And while I was talking about Chika, it just tumbled out about my own son, something I’ve talked a lot about on social media. It actually comes easy to me to talk about that. I was so nervous and that’s one of the easiest things for me to talk about. It’s interesting because that operator—and you remarked on this, Nilesh–was a very thoughtful listener. He had no clue what I was going to talk about. I asked him if the video included audio and he said, “yes,” because I told him there was something I wanted to talk about while I was up there. And it actually gave me courage, because he was so thoughtful in his responses to what I was saying. He was genuinely interested, so I just said what I said. And there’s no second take in a situation like that. 

NM: I told her, you cannot deny the filmmaker inside you. We come from a narrative filmmaking perspective, not a documentary one. So I am thinking about everything I see in the background in Switzerland, and when she said she was taking some time off to go hang-gliding, I thought, “Wow.” 

SB: When I told him about the hang-gliding, he suggested I keep filming, and at first I was unhappy. I just wanted to be a tourist. Nilesh said, “People go to Switzerland to make big Bollywood films, and you are now in Switzerland to see your friend die. Why not get some shots of the Matterhorn?” 

NM: I was thinking of in-between shots. 

SB: I wasn’t even thinking of this being in the film, but he was always conscious of what was there and kept telling me, “Shoot with the phone. Keep doing it,” so I was just doing it without really thinking. You remember the scene where I’m dancing by myself? At that point I just had the camera on in my room. I was trying to cheer myself up. I do it all the time at home in Bombay. I love to dance. If there’s a song I love, I want to dance. And I told Nilesh and the editor, “People don’t want to see that, take it out.”

NM: I’ve known Chika for ten years, and I’ve known Shonali longer. When you know somebody like that you know who they are. I know when she wants to dance, and I know how she deals with death. I know she’s not a person who, when Chika dies, is just going to sit there and cry. She’s not that kind of person. If she’s going out to be a tourist, it’s because that’s who she is. That’s what I wanted to get, the spirit of Shonali and the spirit of Chika. I believe that if you really put something out there and test it, then you know in your heart you’re not cheating or lying. And that’s what was very important about this film. It’s not as if I’d been working for ten years with this issue in my head, that I had to make this film one day. No such thing. 

SB: As filmmakers, you usually sit with an idea for a year before you start, but in this case, it was literally…it wasn’t when Chika told us about his situation in May at the club. He didn’t ask us then to make a film. If he had, we would have had time to think about it. It was when he was about to fly out [to Switzerland] and said, “Now you have to come [to shoot the film.] But the problem was that Nilesh couldn’t go because, as an Indian national, he would have had to apply for a visa. I have dual citizenship. I have an American passport, so I could fly out with Chika directly, visa-free. And I had no idea how to make this film, and Nilesh rented the best iPhone available at the time—mine was an older model. And he said to me, “Just keep shooting, whatever he’s doing. If he’s drinking with his friends, shoot it. If he’s doing this or doing that, shoot it.” And I left. The film was made in that way. Even documentary filmmakers plan and write. This film had only three days notice before shooting began. 

NM: One instruction I gave her, which was risky, was to try and capture the emotion of the moment. I think honesty was more important that the camera angle she used. If you have to turn the camera away and can’t see what’s going on, that’s fine. She would send me files where I couldn’t see the faces of the people talking, but that was all right. Sometimes the person becomes self-conscious about the camera. There was no space to plan things, so don’t worry about the exact language. The only language necessary is what you feel at the time. 

-So Nilesh wasn’t physically there at all?

SB: No, I was there by myself. 

NM: The most surprising moment for me was when she sent that file of rushes, and I’ll never forget it. I was watching a room where Chika was sitting. It was a long, 45-minute clip. Chika was chatting. And then he takes a sip [from a glass], leans his head back and starts snoring. And then the clip ends. And it was fifteen minutes before I realized that those were his last moments. I didn’t know that before I watched it. I didn’t know the setup. It was just a room and a couch. And I have to tell you, that was one of the most profound moments of my life, watching that. I’ve seen so many rituals after death, and none made me feel this way. 

SB: I had earlier wanted to cover the cremation. They do the cremation and then send the ashes. But at that point I understood his death. Somebody is just sitting there on the couch and then he’s gone. I hugged his dead body before I left the room, but it’s just so bizarre…

NM: Rituals and funerals have spoiled many of my memories of the person who died, because you don’t want to see the person like that.

SB: Somebody asked me about the poem. [Kapadia recites Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” in his last minutes] I knew everything that was going to happen. We talked about it. They’re going to have the potion, he’ll eat the biscuit [a sweet from Kapadia’s childhood to take away the bitter taste of the “cocktail”]. We knew the timing, he and I. But what he didn’t share with me was that he was planning on reciting this poem, because he knew the camera was going to be on him then, and he must have practiced it because he did it brilliantly in one take. Two minutes from death, he recites Robert Frost. And I wonder about it. He wanted it filmed because he wanted a legacy, but as the moment of truth is approaching, in his own mind he was an actor. It was performative. Somebody asked me if he cried, and if you watch it he doesn’t cry. He wanted to, but he couldn’t. Had he gotten in touch with that softer part of himself, what would have happened? Would he have chickened out? No. He went through with it courageously, but as a performance. All the little chit-chat that came earlier, before he took the potion, it was all nonsense. And he had planned it that way, I knew that. I knew what he was going to say. But he wasn’t being manipulative. He used that chit-chat as a tool to help him get through something that is so hard. I thought to myself and I wondered if I could go through with that. Even though I am resigned to death, I don’t think I could do it in that last minute. And Dignitas confirmed that to me. The majority of people who sign up back out in the end, sometimes at the last minute. But Chika planned it all, he planned the poem. He was on a stage knowing that this was being recorded and would go out into the world. 

NM: It’s really like playacting your death. If you’re an actor you place yourself in a mindset that gets you through a play. You know you’re going to fall on stage and people will clap, and then you’ll get up. But in this case you don’t. In a play the actor analyzes their own actions, but in this case you just don’t know. The funny part is that the biscuit that he ate is the cheapest, the sweetest biscuit that India ever produced. It was part of his childhood. When we asked him if we should bring anything [to Switzerland], he said, “Bring Parle-G,” and I’m like… 

SB: In the opening scene there was that one woman among his friends, and even Chika didn’t know that she was that little child on the biscuit package.

NM: The model. She grew up and ended up becoming his friend, and he didn’t even know it. 

SB: She’s one of the people who asked him, “Can we take your ashes to Raja Ampat?” That was the day I arrived in Zurich. 

-Have you any prospects for distribution?

SB: Actually, the most interest has been in Asia, but we’ll see.

NM: It’s best to get an idea of the public response first, and being here I’ve realized two things about the film. It’s realistic in nature, people recording each other, inside and outside, and that’s a form that a lot of people connect with. But when you put a subject in that form that no one wants to talk about, then I think it becomes more interesting. So now, after I’ve been here and seen this reaction, I think a lot of people will want to watch this. 

-For what it’s worth, I don’t think that people who advocate one way or another about assisted suicide are going to be able to use this film for their purposes. It’s too personal.

SB: Right. 

-You’d have to promote it from that perspective.

SB: And that’s something we haven’t explored yet.