It is evidently the time to film the 'unfilmable', with the big screen adaptation coming of Salman Rushdie's Booker-winning tome 'Midnight's Children' coming to cinemas hot on the heels of 'Life Of Pi' (and before that 'Warhorse', soon 'Les Miserables').
"I wasn't intimidated," reveals director Deepa Mehta, as charismatic as any of her leading actors. "Salman Rushdie had been a friend of mine for many years. I had lived with this book for a long time, and with the country inside it."
The country of which she speaks is India at a time of unprecedented hope, idealism, but also rebellion, war and betrayal - namely, the country's Partition of 1947.
Rushdie, who also wrote the screenplay and voiced the narration, describes two children who, among others, are born on the stroke of midnight of 15 August of that year, the very moment that India claimed its independence from Great Britain - a coincidence that plays havoc with the fates of both boys, switched at birth by a hospital nurse and brought up in completely different environments, but who fate has decided to intertwine all the way through to adulthood, war and love.
It is an allegorical fantasy full of the colours we have come to associate with India, but Mehta is keen the vibrancy of the visuals does not distract from the power of the story...
"I don't even like the word 'exotic' applied to India," she explains. "Of course, when you shoot in the country itself, it's impossible to escape the flowers, the trees, but it's a balancing act, because if you stress all that too much, the importance of the story, the real struggles, the complicated politics, can all be left behind. And I owed it to Salman Rushdie to tell his story fully."
Midnight's Children is in UK cinemas now. Watch the trailer below...