Deepa Mehta insists it took some convincing for Salman Rushdie to adapt his 1981 novel Midnight’s Children into a screenplay she could direct.

“I said, ‘Salman, you’re going to write the screenplay, right?” she recalled Monday during a Mavericks session at the Toronto International Film Festival, with Rushdie at her side on stage.

“And he [Rushdie] said, ‘absolutely not!’” Mehta added.

But then, just as quickly, as if in a waltz, Rushdie took the lead in bringing the story of Midnight’s Children from page to screen, and Mehta followed by shooting the script this summer in Sri Lanka.

The Canadian director’s reluctance to hack into Rushdie’s second novel to hammer out a screenplay is understandable.

Midnight’s Children, about India’s transition from British colonialism to independence, is surrealist fiction that had Metha reading the novel three times before she admits to finding its inner meaning.

“So I didn’t want to say, ‘we want to do without these 10 chapters,” the director said rather sheepishly while Rushie looked on over his trademark horn-rimmed spectacles.

Turns out she’s not alone in finding Midnight’s Children a daunting read.

Rushdie recalled in 1981, soon after publishing Midnight’s Children, doing a book tour in New Delhi and a young woman rising in an audience to tell the novelist: “Your book, Mr. Rushdie, is a long book. But never mind, I went through it. My question for you is, what’s your meaning?”

Rushdie said he found it difficult to answer the young woman 30 years ago, but had to answer the question for himself when he started on the screenplay for Mehta.

His challenge was to find the “essential thread” for a screenplay.

“Midnight’s Children is always going off-the-point to tell a story over there,” Rushdie told the TIFF audience at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.

But you can’t do that in a movie screenplay, he added.

What allowed Rushdie to eventually do what Mehta could not – take a knife to his novel to carve out a screenplay – was the distance of 30 years.

The writer said he would have been hard-pressed to find a screenplay from a novel more recently written and published.

In the end, the script for Midnight’s Children did emerge, as did a collaboration with Mehta.

“It gave me great confidence because I felt we were pulling in the same direction,” Rushdie said Monday, with a beaming Mehta at his side.

Also released Monday was the first still from the film, featuring actors Satya Bhabha and Shriya Saran.