The Indian-born Canadian film director Deepa Mehta is set to adapt Salman Rushdie’s masterpiece Midnight’s Children, which was twice selected as the best-ever Booker Prize winner.

The Guardian reports:

Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie’s panoramic 1981 allegory of the birth of modern India, is heading for the big screen. Deepa Mehta is to direct and co-write the adaptation with the author, and the film is expected to start production in 2010, it was announced in New York yesterday.

Apparently, the two have been friends since meeting at the New York premiere of Water, the final movie in Mehta’s Elements trilogy, for which she is best known. The plan for the collaboration was hatched over dinner at Mehta’s Toronto home, when Rushdie was in town for a recent round of publicity.

As of yet, no studio has signed on to finance the famously unfilmable novel. But Mehta seems unfazed when it comes to tackling 650 pages of magic realist-steeped allegory.

War and Peace has 1,000 pages and they made a movie of that, she said, adding, The great thing about film is that it can compress in a few images what takes 40 pages in a book to describe.