We were both there as undergraduates and had a lot of mutual friends, Indian and Iranian friends that had found one another.Īravind Adiga: I was a foreign student, so my friends tended to be other foreigners, especially from the Middle East.

Ramin Bahrani: We met in college at Columbia University. Here, the two friends got together over the phone to talk about their early years, their influences, the unique challenges of a story like The White Tiger, and the movies they like to disagree on. It’s a collaboration that is set to continue: Netflix just announced that Bahrani will next direct a film adaptation of Adiga’s 2020 novel, Amnesty. But it turned out to be quite a personal project.īahrani (who was recently nominated for a WGA Award for his screenplay) had an instrumental role in the book’s coming to fruition he and Adiga have been friends ever since their days as undergraduates at Columbia University and regularly read each other’s screenplays and manuscripts. His latest feature, The White Tiger - based on the Booker Prize–winning 2008 novel by Indian author Aravind Adiga and starring Adarsh Gourav, Rajkummar Rao, and Priyanka Chopra - seemed like an unlikely effort at first, with its expansive story line and heightened, almost satirical narrative style. Ramin Bahrani became one of American independent cinema’s foremost names about 15 years ago with stark, poetic independent efforts like Man Push Cart (2005), Chop Shop (2007), and Goodbye Solo (2009). Imagine having to make a movie out of a book that was actually dedicated to you.

Adiga aravind the white tiger 2008