Barely ten days into the shooting of Crook: It’s Good to be Bad, based on racist attacks on Indians in Australia, filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt’s team is back from Melbourne, crying “harassment” at the hands of its City Council.
Bhatt alleges that his team wasted three precious days after the Council didn’t give them the necessary shoot permissions, following a comment made by producer Mukesh Bhatt in the local media.
“It is very expensive to have a film unit on a foreign location, and not be able to work,” said Mahesh, adding, “Some people in the Council weren’t happy that my brother (Mukesh) told a local paper that, ‘Melbourne is a nice city but the Melbourne City Council is not cinema-friendly. It’s bureaucratic and there’s red tapism.’”
“The Council kept making the shoot difficult. This experience is an obvious backlash of the animosity between the India and Australia.”
Film’s director Mohit Suri says, “We’re disheartened, we don’t know what to do now.”