India Filmmaker Seeks World Record With Fast-Produced Terri Schiavo Movie 
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by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
March 2, 2006
Hyderabad, India (LifeNews.com) — A filmmaker from India has possibly set a record in the Guinness Book of World Records for taking the shortest time to film a feature-length movie. His movie is loosely based on the euthanasia death of Terri Schiavo and the 74-minute picture was finished in just two hours and 14 minutes.
The 45 year-old man named Jayaraj is an engineer turned movie producer and he says his movie, titled Atbhutam (Wonder), tries to capture the drama of euthanasia in the last 90 minutes of the life of a US-based Indian-born playwright suffering from pancreatic cancer.
"I felt the power. When we started, the whole crew was in a trance … a kind of invisible energy, and we were just flying one from one sequence to the other," Jayaraj told the Australian Sunday Times newspaper.
"And just before the last shot, when my associate said ‘one shot left,’ that’s when I realized my dream is finally going to come true," he said.
In filming the movie, Jayaraj used an Oregon hospital as his setting because it’s the location of the nation’s only law allowing assisted suicides.
Jayaraj, who has produced 110 films, got help from the Andhra Pradesh State Government to get paperwork to Guinness.
He approached British and U.S. government officials years ago about making the a movie, but they didn’t think he could successfully film a movie so quickly.
"I originally wanted to make the movie in less than 10 hours. They all discouraged me since the producers couldn’t imagine a movie getting completed in such a short time," Jayaraj told the newspaper.
The movie is scheduled for a March release date.
