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What Is The Number One Problem on Movie Sets?
It’s 2025, but toilets and changing rooms are distant luxuries on movie sets, especially for women lower down Malayalam cinema’s hierarchies.
Forty-seven — that’s the number of times the word “toilet” is mentioned on the 233-page Hema Committee Report that was released in August this year. “Changing room” too gets mentioned, but only 29 times. The report exposed the Malayalam film industry’s many malpractices, including the prevalence of the casting couch, wage disparity, and the lack of a legal framework to redress grievances. And it was just as vocal in calling out this industry as a workplace where “women are denied even basic human rights… by not providing adequate facilities like toilets and changing rooms”.
The report was originally submitted to the Kerala State Government on 31 December 2019. Five years, a dozen ₹100-crore blockbusters, and a global pandemic later, there don’t seem to be many changes in a business that has been traditionally misogynistic by virtue of being male-dominated.
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“Men can relieve themselves anywhere,” says filmmaker Kunjila Mascillamani. “Even when it comes to public toilets, only women feel the need for them. It then becomes a gender issue because it concerns only half of the population.”
For the anthology Freedom Fight (2022), Mascillamani made a short named “Asanghadithar”, a hilarious film about the struggles faced by saleswomen in Kozhikode’s busy Mittai Theruvu market, which has virtually zero toilets. “The gender ratio on movie sets is even more skewed,” she says. “In such places, when men find no inconvenience in urinating in public, the bigger inconvenience is caused by women who ask for toilets.”
Her title, Asanghadithar, translates to “unorganised”, a fitting name that best describes the haphazard processes comprising filmmaking.
Meena (name changed) was one of two female assistant directors (ADs) on the sets of a celebrated movie she worked on. She entered the field driven by her love for the medium, which helps her “overlook challenges when it becomes exhausting to fight, even if it’s for access to a restroom”.
The other women on her sets were the heroines and their costume and make-up artists and assistants, who were allowed to use the heroines’ caravan. As for Meena and her colleague, access was provided to the director’s caravan, as though it was a matter of generosity. Meena calls this “a privilege reserved for a few, a reluctant concession”.
It only got worse when the location moved. “We shifted to a small mountain village where roads were too narrow for regular caravans. So, they brought two small ones for the lead male actors, which were off-limits to us. There were no public restrooms — just a few in homes. Even the elderly supporting actress had no access to a changing area. Thankfully, some locals offered their homes. But it was frustrating when the production team’s response was to casually suggest that she could just ask permission to change in someone’s house,” Meena adds.
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The Hema Committee Report mentions these issues in graphic detail. “Almost all the women who were examined before the Committee stated that there is no toilet facility or changing room on the set, especially while shooting is done in many outdoor locations, which will be in remote places. What is being done now is, the women themselves will find some space in a nearby interior place like forest or behind bushes or a fat tree to pass urine, while on outdoor shoot. At times, some cloth is being held by one or two persons to help the other to change dress or to pass urine. No water will also be available at the site. [sic]”
This is the primary reason why senior actor and award-winning director Lakshmy Ramakrishnan takes weeks before deciding to work on a new movie, be it in Tamil or Malayalam. “The conditions of toilets are such that we train ourselves to resist the urge to use them. We drink little water through the shoot and wait until we get back to the hotel rooms at night to go to the loo. I can’t remember the last time I returned from a set without UTI (urinary tract infection).”
As a producer, too, she understands the need to be careful about costs in a volatile business, but finds no logic in cutting corners with something as basic as toilets. “It is a matter of priorities,” Ramakrishnan adds. “If better toilets had resulted in the film making more money, we would have some that were world-class. As long as they don’t, producers are incapable of seeing the implicit value in women’s comfort.”
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Ramakrishnan explains this with examples of how costly and sophisticated equipment reaches the sets within hours when a cameraman wants it. Or how bigger stars can come with an entourage of six or more people, each with access to facilities not afforded to other actors. “If a film costs ₹50 crore, producers are happy to pay ₹45 crore to the superstar. When you’re trying to squeeze out an entire film with the remaining, even toilets become a bone of contention.”
Apathy, too, is another reason why it gets messy, she says. Ramakrishnan recalls a painful incident during the night shoot of a scene centred around a protest. Naturally, it required the presence of hundreds of extras and a long shoot that needed to be finished as soon as possible. “An assistant informed us at the last minute that it was going to be a rain sequence. Neither I nor the hundred junior artistes had brought a change of clothes or innerwear. All we had were our costumes, as the crew tried to shoot through the night.”
She says she’s unable to forget the faces of those junior actors, stuck in the rain, trained not to expect better. “Do you think the same AD would have forgotten to specify this bit of information to a superstar?”
It was another superstar who first offered his caravan to actor-producer-politician Kushboo, back when they were shooting together in 2000. Having come into the film industry as a child actor in the ‘80s, she had been trained to find nooks around the location to change long before the arrival of “this luxury”. Until the late ‘90s, she says, all actors were used to changing in their cars, including superstars, just like dancers or junior artistes still do. “It was the same for everyone, even Amitabh Bachchan, Jeetendra, Hema Malini….”
“Vijayakanth sir was among the first in our industry to get a caravan. When we were shooting near Pollachi, he offered it to me because I was pregnant with my first daughter. He made sure I got everything to be comfortable,” Kushboo adds.
But, the arrival of caravans or trailers only fortified the hierarchy. Until then, makeshift toilets, enclosures or pandals were more common because they were to be used by actors, too. But, with caravans, there was no need for any extra money to be spent on such arrangements if they were not going to be used by actors.
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A senior background dancer, who has worked in all the South Indian film industries, explains this shift. “Earlier, when films were shot on studio floors, there were restrooms for all. But, with shoots moving outdoors and song shoots being set in exotic locations, dancers too began to travel with crews to distant spots. We were given a house or a room somewhere to change. The actresses, too, would have to change with us at times, so there were some arrangements made by the crew,” she says.
With caravans being granted to senior actors, even this bit of convenience is not a given for background dancers. “Song shoots generally last three to four days. Even if they last longer, it does not justify the cost of building concrete structures such as toilets or changing rooms. But songs always attract crowds who come to watch the shoot. This leads to a lot of harassment with the locals, creating issues as we have no option but to change in public.”
The cost of renting an air-conditioned trailer, excluding fuel, can range from ₹20,000 per day to upwards of ₹50,000 for the more sophisticated models. A preferred model is one with two rooms and two toilets that can be used by two people — either actors or members of the crew. In stark contrast are the much more cost-effective portable toilets, which cost ₹14,000 per day for two toilets and a changing room. Depending on the water supply and location, this can be used by as many as 50 people.
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Kushboo urges people to think from the producer’s perspective. “Portable toilets are provided, but it’s not always practical in remote locations. If you’re shooting with 1,000 extras there, how many toilets can you bring there? We do not even have companies that can supply that many portable toilets. In such places, toilets are far away, and we cannot have people who are constantly away from the spot to use them. In production, time is money. A rupee saved is a rupee earned."
She adds that there’s unfair attention being given to such issues in the movie industry when it’s common to all. “Do you think people who do fieldwork in all professions get access to toilets wherever they go? I wish some of this scrutiny would be shifted to other industries too, where there are just as many issues.”
But this issue isn’t limited to the Malayalam or Tamil film industries alone. A Mumbai-based junior actor says: “You’re lucky to get one vanity between all the 50 to 60 junior artistes. Sometimes, they will only bring vanities for the stars, and the rest of the crew has to go back to base if they want to use the facilities. On a recent film, the base was 40 minutes away, so you had to stay on set for 4 to 5 hours and then you could go back to base if you wanted to use the loo.”
K. Rajasekharan — Secretary at Saga Nadigar Sangam, the Tamil Nadu-based association in charge of junior artistes working in Tamil cinema — recalls that there were several issues earlier, even with regard to food for junior artistes, but insists it has gotten a lot better. He has worked as a junior artiste for over 40 years, witnessing the shift from studio floors to outdoors. “Members of our union would not have faced any such problems in the recent past. When smaller productions shoot with non-members, then we hear of issues about food or toilets. Members know they will get what they were promised because our union is strong.”
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A Better Tomorrow?
A systemic change is required if one wants free access to toilets and changing rooms across locations, says actor Archana Padmini. For starters, workplaces within cinema need to be clearly defined by the government as an industry. “The Hema Committee can be a good first step towards this,” says Padmini, who is also a member of the Women in Cinema Collective, an organisation formed by women in the Malayalam film industry, working for gender equality for women in cinema through advocacy and policy change. “At least at this stage, we need strong rules and regulations that stipulate a certain number of toilets, proportionate to the number of people on a set. If permissions need to be sorted for shoots, they should first stick to such rules for them to be allowed.”
Mascillamani believes that a “lot of such issues can be solved if men with responsibilities learn to think from [their] side.” However, the proof is in the pudding. “But look at how these men write women characters. Have you ever seen a movie where women are allowed to talk freely about going to the toilet? There are thousands of scenes written around men farting or peeing in public.”
Women are either vamps, goddesses or overt feminists, with no room to fall anywhere in between, adds Mascillamani. “When was the last time you saw a woman on screen enjoying a meal with finger-licking relish? Until this representation changes, how can we expect men to worry about the women on the sets? Aren’t Indian women a strange mixture of submission and dominance, after all?”
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