After many setbacks, Dev Patel‘s directorial debut Monkey Man premiered at the SXSW film festival to a standing ovation from the Austin crowd.
Patel stars in the film that follows an underground Mumbai fighter who starts a campaign of vengeance against his city’s corrupt elites, who are responsible for the murder of his mother. The film, which has been compared to John Wick, is inspired by the legend of Hanuman. For his part, Patel said he was inspired by The Raid and classic Bruce Lee movies.
At first, the plan was for Patel to co-write the screenplay and the production would find someone else to direct. “I took it to Neil Blomkamp, originally,” said Patel, who worked with the director and Monkey Man star Sharlto Copley on sci-fi feature Chappie. “Me and Neil were talking, and he went, ‘Man I thought you should do this. You know every corner of it.’ And I was like, ‘I can’t do it.’ He goes, ‘You can.’ I reluctantly got pushed into the driver’s seat.”
During a post-screening Q&A, Patel detailed an extensive list of delays, saying, “We faced catastrophe, every day.” This began with the COVID pandemic which stalled filming, with the production having to move out of India to Indonesia. The pandemic later shut down borders, leaving them scrambling for cast and crew. Stuntmen were found on YouTube, while crew members filled in as extras. “Every person you see in this is an accountant or a tailor,” said Patel.
Cinematographer Sharone Meir, who is known for his work on Whiplash, was dealing with faulty camera equipment and had to improvise, with Patel remembering when a crane broke they hung a camera from a swinging rope. Certain scenes were filmed on Patel’s personal cell phone, including a car crash sequence involving a tuk tuk.
The production was also a bruising experience. Patel broke his toes two weeks before production, later tore his shoulder while filming a fight sequence, and got an eye infection after a scene had him crawling on a bathroom floor.
In one of the more harrowing stories Patel recounted (amid a litany of harrowing stories), the British actor, on the second day of filming, broke his hand. “I was thinking, here we go again, production is going to go down. I was on the Internet because I couldn’t wear a cast for long because we didn’t have the budget to paint it out,” said the director.
He finished filming that night (“My hand was like an elephant’s”) and got on a plane, and then had a screw surgically inserted into his hand. “The doctor said, ‘You cannot put any pressure on it. You will ruin your hand. I said, ‘Got it, copy’ and went straight back into the action scene.” The fight choreography was changed so it could be done one-handed.
After all of that, Monkey Man was languishing in post-production without solid distribution when Universal grabbed the movie for theatrical release at the behest of filmmaker Jordan Peele. At the time, insiders said that Peele had a chance to see the movie, and was so taken with Patel’s vision that he believed it deserved a theatrical release.
Said Patel, “Jordan came along at the end and brushed the dust off of it and put it on the mantel and gave us this opportunity.”
Added Peele, “No one has put their soul, energy, mind, body into a film than this man. And he has done it for us to enjoy this film.”
Monkey Man will hit theaters on April 5.