A Beautiful Mind

Filmmaker Shruti Ganguly talks to her friend, the award-winning author Salman Rushdie, as he releases his new novel, The Golden House

- Shruti Ganguly

Shruti Ganguly: How did you craft the protagonist of The Golden House, René?

Salman Rushdie: I started with René as a writer and I thought, “This is awful and so boring”. It would be more interesting if he was an accountant. Anything except a writer. At a certain point, I thought,“Well maybe he wants to be a filmmaker”. He was the real discovery in the book, and then he became central.

SG: What do you create first—the story or the world?

SR: I had the character of the old man, Nero Golden, from the beginning. This idea of somebody with a shady past trying to move across the world and start again. Other things just fell into place. The gardens began to seem like a stage, a theatre in which all the action could take place, where all the characters could watch each other. I began to think about family, and gradually I got the characters of the three sons. I asked myself, “Why aren’t there any women here?” and I had to find the answer to that question. In the end, there are some very important female characters, including one based on you [called Suchitra]. Once I put René in that world of movies, I didn’t want him to be in this successful, grand Martin Scorsese world, but a more contemporary one, which includes videos and things that get made for the internet, which is what you’ve been doing.

SG: Your previous book was almost an imagination of the future, and this one is a meditation on the past, but also very current.