Ismail Merchant has a winning smile that he can turn on like a light bulb - a feature that came in very handy when he was directing the new Merchant-Ivory production of VS Naipaul's novel, The Mystic Masseur. Because, having decided to shoot the film in Naipaul's native Trinidad, Merchant-Ivory Productions couldn't possibly have chosen a worse time to arrive.
The cast and crew - travelling from New York, London and Bombay - landed three months ago, jetlagged, in the middle of the furore surrounding Trinidad and Tobago's general election. The country's predominantly Indian-Trinidadian party, the United National Congress, had just scraped to a contentious election victory. Allegations of large-scale gerrymandering and fraud filled the newspapers, while the prime minister, Basdeo Panday, and President Robinson were engaged in a constitutional mud-slinging contest.
Robinson had refused to sign documents allowing Panday to appoint seven ministers who lost their seats in the election. Panday had been presented with a libel suit for calling someone a "pseudo racist", and added further fuel to the fire by claiming that the islands were being threatened by an impending coup.
It was a warning that many took seriously. In 1990, after all, there had been a real coup attempt, in which several people were killed near the parliament building. However, those responsible for that particular drama now said they knew nothing about this latest scare. Nor had the chief of defence staff heard any whisper of danger. Perhaps the prime minister, having only narrowly won the election, wanted to create a little tension so that he could be seen as a safe pair of hands.
Another possible explanation was simple scaremongering - Panday's way of making the president see things his way over the constitutional impasse. The two are old sparring partners and they don't call Panday, former union leader and actor of no mean repute, the "Silver Fox" for nothing. He insisted that Robinson - a physically sick man - was no longer fit to hold office. The president, in return, described the prime minister's rule as a "creeping dictatorship".
At first, none of this swordplay perturbed the film's producers. They assumed, quite reasonably, that it was none of their affair. "You've got to be a supreme optimist in this business or you never get anywhere," said Merchant, smiling. "Maybe the government, or someone, will be interested in investing in the film." With that in mind, he instructed his young nephew - Nayeem Hafizka, who was leading the production team - to seek out some useful contacts.
Nayeem is his uncle's clone: same charming smile, same soft manner of speaking, same tenacious approach to wheeling and dealing until he gets a discount on everything - from meals in restaurants to rented property for himself, the cast and crew. And he is very good at his job. Before long, the prime minister himself had handed over his mobile phone number. And the cameras had barely started rolling on the island's lush north-western peninsular when a local industrialist announced that he would be putting in half a million US dollars in return for a credit as executive producer.
However, Nayeem's smooth approach did not wash with BWIA, the national airline. The press officer was adamant: "We can't even consider giving discounts to film people." From Nayeem's point of view, though, it was worth a try: "It's very important to keep a close watch on the budget all the time."
Indeed, Merchant-Ivory had come to the tiny Caribbean state with a tight budget, believing that, as in Bollywood, they would be able shoot the movie for under $3m - a sum that would hardly have paid the food bill on some of their more lavish productions. Here, chicken and rice were the order of the day, with a few local vegetables and a slab of currant cake for dessert (although on the day Basdeo Panday took a break from his various crises to pop in for lunch on the set, they had shrimp).
Despite Nayeem's efforts, the purse-strings were at times pulled a little too tight. Om Puri, star of East Is East and City of Joy, who plays the scheming village storekeeper Ramlogan in the film, is prone to backache. After a few days and nights, he was in need of rest, but all he could find to to lie down on were some planks of wood. "There were only six chairs between 60 people," he said. "Not even a nurse or doctor handy on the set - which is usually the case." He spent much of his first day off from filming receving much-needed treatment from a Trinidadian masseuse.
Actor James Fox, who flew 4,000 miles from London on a Saturday to play a spiritual recluse in a single scene, found himself filming the next morning and flying back to England the following Tuesday. Merchant wasn't about to subsidise a leisurely break on a palm-fringed beach. "He really is quite mean," said Fox.
But it took just one frenetic day to vindicate Merchant's frugality. While filming in the island's old capital, Port-of-Spain, the crew cordoned off a street to traffic. They had chosen as their location an old printing works with a hand press - just the sort of place used in the novel by its protagonist, Ganesh Ramsumair, mystic healer and aspiring writer of books (played by Aasif Mandvi).
Suddenly, as they were preparing for the first take, a commotion broke out in the street. A family sitting outside their house refused to budge out of shot until they been properly compensated. "We want 1,500 [Trinidadian] dollars [about £150] ... and put it in writing," they said. Nayeem and Ismail turned on the smiles. No go; the locals claimed that no one had warned them that the street would be closed for two days. The police were called. Still no go.
Sensing an opportunity, a barber and a barkeeper decided to join in. Both complained that they would lose so much trade, they would not be able to pay the rent at the end of the week. The family, meanwhile, who were now squatting on the pavement, were opening up to the idea of negotiation. If three of them were taken on as extras, they said, they might reconsider. For the first time that day, Nayeem and Ismail lost their smiles, and capitulated. Finally, filming got under way.
Opportunism was not the only problem facing the crew. Naipaul's story - that of a simple faith-healer who becomes a successful diplomat - describes an honest man's struggle against ignorance, greed and big-city corruption in the 1950s, a time when Trinidad was struggling for independence. Accordingly, some of the period props proved very hard to track down. Top of the wanted list were a 1937 Vauxhall and a 1952 Rolls-Royce; then there were the pre-war bicycles and all the stock for the specially built village store and various wooden houses. As the film-makers soon realised, Trinidad has little in the way of film infrastructure; no storehouse of historic treasures saved for posterity. Long before the first roll of film was completed, the two Englishwomen responsible for set design and dressing were exhausted. Fortunately, a Trinidadian woman with a lot of contacts and energy stepped into the breach and worked miracles.
One local producer, who had spent weeks hunting for suitable locations, quit the film in exasperation over the terms of her contract. So much was expected of her so quickly, and for so little reward, she said, that she felt she was being exploited.
A local film director, Tony Maharaj, brought in as associate producer to help Merchant "fix things", said: "It's been a nightmare of leaving things until the last minute. When we needed a rain scene, they only asked for the fire brigade the night before filming."
The Mystic Masseur was Merchant's fourth film as director - James Ivory has taken the helm on most of their previous collaborations - but it was his first film in Trinidad, and he was having to learn the ways of the island by trial and error. He arrived in the country with the impression that the Pulitzer prize-winning Naipaul was a local hero, and that the locals would be only too happy to cooperate. But it was not to be so. It soon emerged that the relationship between the author and his countrymen is something of a love-hate affair: Naipaul's fiction captures every twist and turn in the Trinidadian psyche, and many do not appreciate his candour.
Some locals, however, were more sympathetic, and keen to play some small part in the making of the movie. Although as the producers admit, they might not have been quite so keen if they had known what they were letting themselves in for.
When it came to the filming of the Governor's Ball scene, for example, 60 or so Trinidadians were hired as extras. They arrived on the Saturday evening full of enthusiasm, chattering excitedly as they were dressed for the shoot. Soon afterwards, however, they discovered what being an extra really entails: endless hours of waiting around for something to happen.
The first attempts at filming were catastrophic. Someone had forgotten to hire the string quartet; the lighting was not quite right; the choreography wasn't coming together. At 2am they abandoned the set, and told everyone to come back on Sunday afternoon.
The long-suffering extras were paid just 100 Trinidadian dollars a day [just under £10] for their pains. Fortunately, the majority were not in it for the money. Most were thrilled simply to be involved in the film - especially in such a grand scene as the governor's dinner, filmed in prime minister Panday's newly refurbished offices. Some of those at the colonial bash, seated at the long dinner table, resplendent with cut glass and silver, came from old Trinidad plantation families whose grandparents would have attended such affairs in the past. Being from the country, like the film's hero Ganesh, they didn't have a clue about codes of dress or the parade of wine glasses and cutlery glinting at them from the snow-white linen.
However, the novelty and grandeur of the occasion had long worn off by the time filming ended. Further complications meant that the scene was finally wrapped at 5am - only an hour before the prime minister wanted his office back. Ivory, who had flown in from New York to escape the cold and cast a back-seat eye over the production, laconically referred to the night-long filming ordeal as all part of "the degradation of being an extra".
In spite of such stressful days, all concerned are agreed that the experience of filming The Mystic Masseur has ultimately been a useful one - as much for Trinidad as for the Merchant-Ivory team. The government's tourist office, for example, is hoping to leave the little village of Mount Pleasant, created by the film-makers in Chaguaramas, just as it is, as part of a heritage site.
