Munsiyari, Pithoragarh ·
The road closes at four
Six days above Munsiyari, and a gate that shut at four every afternoon whether we had the shot or not.
We booked six days. The road gave us four and a half.
The highway above Birthi is single track from the second bend onward, and the men who keep it open shut the last gate at four in the afternoon so the loaders can clear whatever came down in the night. Nobody argues with this. You are either below the gate at four or you are above it until seven the next morning, and the difference between those two sentences is a hotel room or a truck cab.
Gate log · 16:00 daily, no exceptions
This is not a hardship story. It is a scheduling fact, and it is the kind of fact that decides a film long before anybody frames a shot. We built every day backwards from four o’clock. Golden hour, the hour every producer’s deck quietly promises, sits on the wrong side of that gate in March. So we shot the mornings, we shot interiors at noon when nobody shoots interiors, and we let the evenings go.
What the schedule bought us
Noon light in a stone house with two windows is not flattering and it is not soft. It is a hard slab coming through the east wall and almost nothing coming through the west, and it took about a minute to stop fighting it. We put the recordist’s chair inside the slab, we put everybody else outside it, and the room did the blocking for us. Three days of lighting plots, replaced by a window.
You can light a room for three days, or you can wait for the room to tell you where to sit.
Eleven hours up from Kathgodam
We came down with eleven hours of usable material and no evening exteriors at all. The cut does not miss them, and neither, so far, does anybody who has watched it. The thing a hard stop actually removes is the option to be indecisive, which on a documentary is worth more than an extra hour of light.
Two notes for anybody going up
The generator you hire in Haldwani will not start above two and a half thousand metres without a warm-up nobody budgets for. Carry the smaller one as well, and carry it yourself. And the last fuel that is reliably in stock is at Thal, not at Munsiyari, whatever the map tells you. We have now made that mistake twice, which is once more than is defensible.