Chamoli district ·
The fixer is the film
Crews arrive with a shot list and a translator. What they need is somebody who knows which bridge takes a grip truck.
Every enquiry we get from outside the region opens the same way. A shot list, a range of dates, and a sentence that begins: we just need somebody who can help us with permissions.
The permissions are not the hard part. The hard part is that a shot list written four thousand kilometres away assumes the mountain is a backdrop. It is not a backdrop. It is a working district with a forest department, a tehsildar, several hundred families holding grazing rights, and a monsoon that closes the approach for eleven weeks of the year.
What the work actually is
The word fixer does the job no favours. It suggests somebody who arrives after the problem. In practice the work happens six weeks earlier, on the telephone, and consists almost entirely of finding out what is true: which office signs the reserve-forest letter and how many days it sits on that desk; whether the bridge below the village is rated for a grip truck or only for the van; who to ask before you point a lens into a courtyard; and what a village will reasonably expect in return for a week of strangers.
Six weeks out is not early. It is late.
None of that is glamorous and none of it is optional. The most expensive day we have ever had was not a day lost to snow. It was a day eleven people and two vehicles spent at a barrier because one letter named the wrong sub-division, and the office that could correct it was closed until Monday.
A film shot without asking is a film you have to defend for the rest of its life.
Why we ask for dates first
Because the dates decide what the shot list is allowed to contain, and we would much rather tell you that in August than in the second week of the shoot. A list that is impossible in July is routine in October, and no amount of budget moves that. When somebody sends the list before the dates we send back one question, and the answer to it usually rewrites the schedule.
We take this work because we cannot make our own films any other way. The relationships that get a visiting crew into a courtyard in November are the same relationships that let two of us come back alone in March with one camera and no letter of introduction. Treat them as a service line to be invoiced and they evaporate inside a season.