Back to the Movies

Pragya Tiwari revisits three films she grew up on to find that she can no longer love them as she once did.

 

Cinema is a gift that keeps on giving. Over time it becomes more than itself— a part of collective and individual memory, personal histories, common language; a phantasmagoria of images that reflect what we know of life, love and loss. There are films we go back to and films that find their way back to us. These journeys also measure the distance we have traveled as people.

 

The Dreamers

 

I was an undergraduate in Cardiff when I first saw Bertolucci’s The Dreamers. Set against the 1968 student riots in Paris, the film evoked everything I had learnt to idealize as a child growing up in post-Naxalism Calcutta. It fueled my belief that everything is political, that middle-class morality is anathema to imagination and that poetry is petition. It reminded me that it is important to rebel, to put your life on the line even if it counts for nothing. It also convinced me more than ever that there were answers to be found in the French New Wave and that films should only be seen from the first row. Six years later when I saw the film again it had shifted from being the manifesto of my life to a nostalgic mood piece. I had a more nuanced understanding of the past and of politics by now. This time around I saw Bertolucci less as an uncompromised ideologue and more as an artist who couldn’t tell the follies of youth apart from glory days. It made me question every generation’s need to romanticize its revolutions and wonder if we will ever know the truths of history. It also made me miss the comfort of being able to see the world in solid monochromes.

 

Pyaasa

 

I was 13 when I first saw Pyaasa and was instantly in awe of Guru Dutt’s character, Vijay— a great poet first rejected then exploited by an opportunistic, bourgeois society. It was around the time when I had begun to wonder why I identified more with male protagonists in most Hindi films than I did with the women. It must be me, I thought. I am different. Of course I was not. The problem, as I now see, wasn’t with me but with the abysmally shallow portrayal of women in most Hindi films. Even in the eyes of a master director like Dutt, a woman could either be a prostitute-fan or a changeable, greedy heartbreaker— both created as mere circumstances in the hero’s narrative, with no stories of their own. Over time I also began to see through Dutt’s fetishization of suffering, self-pity and victimhood a little.  The world is what it is and it will give you ample opportunities to change your narrative. Ye Duniya Agar Mil Bhi Jaaye To Kyaa Hai is beautifully written, composed and shot. But it also signals clinical depression, which you ought to take to a doctor. I certainly wish Dutt had.

 

Casablanca

 

When I first saw Casablanca at the age of 18 it broke my heart. I wanted Rick and Ilsa to end up together so bad I began to feel the design of its narrative was intentionally perverse. How could anyone walk away from Bogart? For the life of me I couldn’t understand why Ilsa would leave with her husband, Victor. She still loved Rick, she said, then why should anything else matter? In my understanding of things love was one of life’s great causes and true lovers could never separate of their own volition. But of course, I knew very little of relationships then. Now when I see the film I can fill Ilsa’s silences with things she did not say. That romantic love is a luxury, an indulgent pleasure, so inconsequential in the larger scheme of life. That conscience is a greater cause than love. That loyalty has nothing to do with attraction. That the relationships you desire and the relationships you can sustain are usually not the same. That Casablanca is a place we must all visit but hold on to the letters of transit that will bring us back to reality and our larger purpose eventually.

 

The World Before Her

The World Before Her explores the very distinct, very disconcerting universes of the Miss India pageant on the one hand and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s women’s wing, Durga Vahini on the other. On the surface they tell the stories of two different Indias but when you look hard, at length, similarities begin to surface. Both these spaces are inhabited by women seeking to carve a space out for themselves in a near misogynist society. Both these spaces are run by people seeking to colonise the woman’s body and use it as a tool to further a patriarchal agenda in the guise of offering them tentative independence.

The documentary was released in select theatres across the country after winning laurels at the Tribeca (Best Documentary Feature), Traverse City (Best Foreign Film), Warsaw (Special Mention, Documentary Competition), Guantanamo (Special Mention) and San diego Asian (Special jury Award) Film Festivals and winning Best Canadian Feature at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival (North America’s largest). Viewers and critics have lauded the film and director Nisha Pahuja is all set to take it to an even wider audience now. At this critical point in the journey of the film we asked Pahuja two important questions. (each question jumps to the corresponding video segment above)

 

  •  1) What is the real aim of a film like this? Can all the energy generated from the responses to the film be harnessed for a more sustained, fruitful dialogue on gender rights in India? .
  •  2) What are some of the ethical and moral dilemmas Pahuja dealt with while making the film? .

 

Her answers are fascinating and thought-provoking.

 

Vishal Bhardwaj – TBIP Tête-à-Tête

Makdee was more than Vishal Bhardwaj’s debut feature— it was a promise, a sign of times to come. Times when the line between art and commerce would blur, when we would be treated with real stories, our stories, told in a manner that befits a country obsessed with stories; when literature would enrich our movies again; when cinema will be magic again. Twelve years on Bhardwaj has come a long way in keeping that promise. Getting him to reflect on his journey is an exciting prospect except he strongly dislikes being interviewed formally. Getting him to talk is a Vikram-Betal act— ask him a question he really wants to answer and hope he begrudgingly will. An exercise worth it only because the answers are so very fascinating.

 

An edited transcript:

 

What do you think of when you think of your childhood the most?

What do I think? I think of my sports days, you know. Because I am a sportsman. I have been a sportsman so I remember that I used to wake up at 4.30 in the morning, even in winters, and I never missed my morning workout and my evening nets. So my life was around sports only.

 

Okay. You know, your dad wrote lyrics for a couple of Hindi films. I believe your brother also wanted to work in cinema in some capacity. When you saw the Hindi film industry through their eyes, what did it look like? What were the impressions? And did that either deter you or spur you to go and explore it?

I mean, cinema from outside or from someone’s eyes always looks glamorous.

 

No, no, not cinema. I meant the industry. Log kaise hote honge (How would the people be)? You know, when you are a child you imagine something.

Not imagine, because I used to come over here. I used to accompany my father. Every summer holidays, we used to be here for a month in that heat. So, we all were cinema crazy people and my father was friends with Laxmikant-Pyarelal (popular composer duo Laxmikant Kudalkar and Pyarelal Sharma). And, at that time, we were all vegetarians. So, on Tuesday, we used to go to his house for dinner, and see lots of film trials. So, it was like a glamorous world. Jitne logon ke contact me aaye toh door se toh sabhi acche hote hain (From afar, everyone appears to be nice). Because this was not my father’s first profession. So, this was fine, we used to come here for a month or so and my brother— he wanted to be a film producer without money, so that was the most difficult thing to do. You don’t have money and you want to be a producer. So he also struggled here for a long time. I remember watching trial shows of many big films like Taxi Driver  of Dev Anand and Hema Malini, then Aetbaar  I saw with Smita Patil. So, those kinds of memories are there.

And I remember seeing a film called Damaad. In that, I remember Mithun Chakraborty sitting down because there was some old lady. So he gave his seat to that old lady and he sat on the floor and saw the whole film from the floor. So, it was an exciting world. I was like a child.

 

Vishal, I wanted to ask you. A lot of things happened early in your life. You lost your father; you lost your brother. I believe your father was also involved in some kind of a land dispute jahan aap log rehte the (where you used to live). You chose… you had to make a critical choice between cricket and cinema— well, cricket and music at that point. Do you see these as turning points in your life?

Turning point? Actually I think the turning point, you realize once you achieve the success and you look back. Then you see it as a turning point, and at that point it could be a very disappointing turning point. And then you realize some kind of a screenplay is there, some kind of a destiny is there. So, that’s why I am a big believer of this thing called destiny. That whatever happens, happens for the best. I seriously believe in this because when I came to Delhi University to study, it was not planned. I was to play for my state. And I was selected. I was actually the Vice-Captain of my team. Somehow, some objection came because of some eligibility issue because I was repeating my 12th (standard). So, some stupid rule was there that those who were repeating their 12th couldn’t be a part of the state team. So I couldn’t play and I dropped the whole year. And then I was so pissed off that I (thought), ‘I don’t want to stay in this state. I want to play for some other state.’ And that’s why I came to Delhi. And when I came to Delhi, my life changed. Suddenly I was exposed to the metro life, the people definitely behaved differently in a small town and in a metro city. My life changed, my friends changed. And because of that my taste changed. I discovered myself. So that was the main turning point, and everyone in my family was against that event, that I should go to Delhi and study. Everyone— my mother, my brother, it was only my father who was supporting (me). And financially, we were not in a very good position to send me, but somehow things happened and I landed up in Delhi. I was not a good student either but I got admission. I think that was the first turning point in my life. Yeah, that was the turning point because that’s where I met Rekha (Bhardwaj); I met lots of friends who were into music, poetry. And in those days, in 1980s, India was going through a very unique phase when ghazal was being rediscovered by the youth. It was the days when (Mirza) Ghalib was the rock star, and Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Sahir Ludhianvi, so it was a very unique period and one of the best periods of the last 60-65 years after Indian independence. I think that the eighties was a very unique period where the ghazal came back. And with ghazal, a lot of Urdu culture and the traditional things that came back to the youth of which I was a part of.

 

And theatre also, you were involved in theatre also.

Theatre was always there, but today’s youth, unko toh pata bhi nahin hai ki ghazal kya hai, Faiz Ahmed Faiz kaun hai, Ghalib kaun hai. Shayad hum bhi aise hote, humko bhi nahin pata hota (They don’t even know what’s ghazal, who is Faiz Ahmed Faiz, who is Ghalib. Perhaps we would have been like that too. We might not have known either). Jagjit Singh was a huge thing, or Pankaj Udhas, they were like… So, I think wahan se, uss ghazal se, uss poetry se, uss culture se meri grooming shuru hui. Aur wo agar main Delhi na aaya hota to shayad nahin hota wo mere saath. Toh Delhi aana meri liye bahut bada  turning point tha (So I think from there, that ghazal, that poetry, and that culture started grooming me. And had I not come to Delhi then that wouldn’t have happened. So, I consider coming to Delhi as a huge turning point).

 

No. I was just smiling because of the conversation we were having before, and now you are giving Delhi so much of credit after…

And leaving Delhi was a bigger turning point. That’s why I was waiting for you to say this so I could say that leaving Delhi was the bigger turning point. Because had I been in Delhi, I would have been so stagnant because there was no scope for musicians in Delhi. Even now, I don’t think there’s scope for musicians in Delhi. Even the good recordings are done in Bombay and there was some kind of unprofessionalism in the Delhi music circle. I remember in one studio where I used to record, after seven o’clock, the recorder used to make his drink and he’s recording and drinking, even if you are recording Gita ke bhajan (devotional songs from the Bhagwat Gita). So, he’s having his drink. And I have no problem with that. Somebody can have a drink—Gita ke bhajan ho ya (be it the Gita’s bhajans or anything else)but I am against that approach of unprofessionalism. So, I mean leaving Delhi was, and it was very difficult for me to leave because Bombay is very brutal. I remember when I first landed here, my brother had a small flat at Yari Road— Zohra Azadi Nagar, it’s called. And we were in that one bed and hall— if you say one bed and hall, the hall is smaller than your bedroom. But they say ‘one bed-hall’. It was a two room apartment where me and my mother and my brother with his girlfriend, they lived inside. And they… they don’t give you work. In Bombay you have to close your eyes and jump from the 120th floor, then only the city accepts you. Otherwise you have no place over here.

 

I believe the first thing you composed, I mean professionally, as in it was put out, was when you were 19. Was that true?

Yeah. Actually in a way this is my 29th or 30th year as a film composer. Because when I was 19, my father’s friend, his name was  A.V. Mohan. He was a big producer, he produced many films including Damaad, of the time I’m telling you about.  So he was planning a film at that time called Vahem. And my father was arranging some kind of finance for him, which he couldn’t later. Out of that favour, that producer agreed to take me as a composer. Not agreed to, I mean he showed as a gesture, he was a nice man. But my father couldn’t arrange the finance. But he was a nice man. He said, “So what if you’ve not arranged it? He’s going to be the composer of the film.” And in 1984 I recorded my first song when I was 19 with Asha Bhosle. And that studio, there was a very big, famous studio called Famous Tardeo. Now they have an Axis Bank over there.  A few days back I was travelling to Tardeo and I saw now they have a big Axis Bank branch over there.

 

When did you start taking it seriously? Being a composer, when did you start taking it seriously?

My father was writing songs for a film called Yaar Kasam. Funny names of the films, when I look back. He had written one song which I composed, you know ghar mein aise rehte hue. Sabhi  tune bana lete hain, toh maine bhi  tune banayi (you know, when I was at my house. Everyone composes tunes. So I composed some too). So then I came to Bombay with my father because that film ka mahurat, vagera hona tha (that film’s mahurat was taking place).  Usha Khanna was the composer of that film. So we were sitting at the director’s place, his name was Chand saab. He was, again, my father’s friend. So they were having drinks in the evening. My father said, “He’s also made a tune, that song I wrote.” So like a kid, they were having drinks and (said), “Okay, gaana sunaao, tune sunaao (Sing that song; sing that tune).” So I sang my tune and they all loved it and immediately he made a call to Usha Khanna ji  to listen to this tune. And I sang that tune to Usha Khanna and she said, “It’s so good.  So meet me tomorrow.” And she said, “I’m going to take this tune and now I’ll develop on this. Do you mind?”  I think I was so encouraged with that, and so was my father. For the first time I got the confidence that yeah, if a person, an artist of Usha Khanna’s calibre and stature is liking my tune and taking my tune, then maybe I’m good. That’s the first time I took myself seriously.

 

Aap ki kya umar thi uss waqt (How old were you at that time) ?

Around 18.

 

Did you have any formal training in music? Did you train in music at all?

No.

 

Who or what did you learn the most from when it comes to composing? Who taught you the most about composing?

Actually mostly self-taught.  But as I told you when I was in Delhi University, there were a lot of musician friends that I had. There was a flute player who was a very good friend of mine called Thakur, who’s now no more. Being with him I learnt about Mehdi Hassan. I was not exposed to Mehdi Hassan. Then there was a friend of mine whose name is Deva Sengupta. He sang a few songs for me in Anurag’s film Paanch and later in No Smoking  he sang one song. He was like the star of the University and he used to do professional shows even at that time. He was a ghazal  singer, classically trained and he knew western classical as well and very good in both western and Indian classical.  And I didn’t know anything about western classical. Indian classical, I had an idea because my sister used to learn sitar and there was something… Bhatkhande ki kitaab se main khud hi sa re ga ma pa dha ni sa, raag-vaag kar leta tha. And paagalon ki tarah main laga rehta tha toh mujhe idea tha (from Bhatkhande’s book I used to sing sa re ga ma by myself, and like a lunatic I used to keep at it, so I had an idea). But I knew nothing about western (music). So he taught me writing a chord chart and exploring a chord or understanding a western chord in one night. Because he had devised a method where he mixed both Indian and western things. And it was so easy for me, in one night I understood it.  And in that one night I knew the western method of chord deprecation. So then I kept on learning, jo bhi mila main use seekhta raha (whatever I got I learnt from it). And it’s still going on.

 

Yeh toh learning ki baat hui (This was about learning). I wanted to talk about influences. You know you spoke about coming to Delhi in the whole phase of ghazals. I’m sure that must have been an influence in the way you compose your music. How have the influences changed? What are the new influences that you have allowed in to the music you have composed, over the years up to now?

It’s not the question of allowing. If something is good, it comes in and overpowers you. You are overwhelmed by those things. I was a great fan of Jagjit Singh and a great fan of Mehdi Hassan. Then Rekha…

 

Matlab their compositions also you mean?

Their compositions also. I mean Mehdi Hassan’s style of singing and Mehdi Hassan’s style of composing, is so, so good, so unique and so beautiful. The way he expresses a word, a line, a whole ghazal, it’s out of this world. Jagjit Singh’s expression of words, his simplicity. Then R.D. Burman’s chord applications, his whole approach to tune. So I’m a mix of all these things— Mehdi Hassan, Jagjit Singh, R.D. Burman. Then I loved Madan Mohan. Unki jo emotionality jo thi gaane ki, jo jis tareeke se sur lagaane ke tareeke the, jo unke notes ka combination hota tha, jo unke raagon ka jo combination hota tha. (The emotionality of his songs, the way he applied sur, the combination of his notes and raag). Then Salil Chowdhury, S.D. Burman and yeah, I think I’m a mix of all this. And then I devised my own thing. Somehow I explored myself and I made my kind of music. But I remained open. I still remain open about this.

I was a big fan and I am a big fan of Gulzar saab and I grew up on his poetry. In fact, my father used to tease me. He used to take some of Gulzar saab’s nazm (poetry) or some song and then criticise it purposely in front of me ki  “What is this? Aankhon ki kya khushboo hoti hai (what fragrance do eyes have)?” And I used to fight with him, fiercely fight with him. And then I later realized that he teases me and that’s why he does it. But after this death, the ghazal  was just emerging, then I read one poet and his name was Dr. Bashir Badr. He’s a great poet. The greatest poet of this century. And I realized that he lives in Meerut where my family was at that point. So I read his poetry and I remained with him. Even now I’m in touch with him. He has been the greatest influence in my life as far as poetry, culture and sensitivity is concerned. Even now when I’m lowest or down in my life emotionally, I just open his book and I feel calm. And every time I open his book I find some new line in that. That’s where I developed my taste for poetry and I discovered Gulzar saab. And his films songs suddenly I started hearing it and listening to it in so many points of view. Mera dost tha, uska naam hai  Ankur Gupta. Gupta jiToh usko pata nahi  kahaan se itna accha taste tha songs ka. Toh woh mujhe rare songs sunaya karta tha Gulzar saab ke jaise— Auron ke ghar mein rehta hoon, kab apna koi ghar ho? Usme ek expression tha ki— Kiraye ke ghar mein aisa lagta hai ki jaise main apne aangan mein moze pehen ke baitha hoon. (I had a friend, whose name is Ankur Gupta, Gupta ji. I don’t know how he had such good taste in music. So he used to make me listen to rare songs of Gulzar saab such as, ‘I live in someone else’s house, when will I have a place of my own?’ There was an expression, in that song which went like, ‘Living in a rented house feels as if I am in the courtyard of a house wearing socks)’. I can’t feel the floor because I’m wearing socks. These kind of expressions-

Din khali khali bartan hai

Raat hai jaise andha kuan

Sooni andheri aankhon mein

Aansoon ke jagah aata hai dhuan

Jeene ki wajah toh koi nahi

Marne ka bahaana dhoondta hai’

(The day is an empty vessel

The night like a bottomless well

In vacant, dark eyes

There’s smoke instead of tears

There’s no reason to live

I look for excuses to die)

Iss  poetry ne mujhe itna zyaada affect kiya hai ki meri zindagi ka sirf ek hi dream tha ki main  Gulzar saab ke saath at least ek gaana kar loon. Doosra dream tha ki  Lata Mangeshkar mera ek gaana ga dein. With this dream I was living in Delhi. Aur Dilli mein ek recording studio tha. Uss waqt Gulzar saab Amjad Ali Khan saab ke upar ek documentary bana rahe the. Toh main uss  studio mein apne chhote mote  jingles record kiya karta tha. Woh [studio ka] owner Punjabi tha. Toh woh kisi din phone pe bola, “Haan Gulzar aa raha hai raat ko yahaan par”. Toh unhone jab phone rakha toh maine poocha, “Kaun aa raha hai raat ko?” “Arrey, woh hai na Gulzar, woh film director, woh yahan par aa raha hai raat ko Amjad Ali Khan ki  recording karne.” Kisi ke liye bhi izzat nahin thi uske dil mein. Toh bajeere shaam ko aur sardiyon ki Dilli, December ki raat. Kadaak ki sardi pada karti thi December ko. Ab toh nahi padti utni. To main wahan baith gaya ki main aaj Gulzar saab ke darshan toh karke jaaonga. Toh nau, sadhe nau baje aana tha. Toh sardiyon mein log chale jaate hain idhar udhar. Mere session main baitha hua tha. Toh phone baja. Maine phone uthaya toh Gulzar saab the, bhaari awaz mein bole, “Hello, main Gulzar bol raha hoon. Mujhe rasta nahi mil raha hai.” Bada odd si jagah tha studio, Safdarjung Enclave. Toh  Bengali sweets ki dukaan hai, Safdarjung Enclave mein. Toh unhone bola, “Main Bengali sweets se phone kar raha hoon.” Uss waqt toh  mobile bhi nahi hote the. Maine bola aap wahin khade rahiye, main aapko lene ke liye aata hun. Aur maine kisi ko bataya nahin aur main unko lene ke liye chala gaya. Wahan se paanch minute ka walk tha. Uss walk me maine unhe bataya ki, you know, “I am a composer. I am a big fan.” Aur bahut log unhe aisa bolte honge but he was very nice and polite ki, “Bombay aao toh milna.” Phir yahan aa kar milne ki koshish ki toh badi mushkilon se… phir main toh yahan aa kar pehle do saal main job hi kar raha tha as an Area Manager. Finally I met him through Suresh Wadkar, jo mere dost hain, jo singer hain, unke kehne se Gulzar saahab ek T.V. serial ka gaana likhne ke taiyar hue jiska naam tha Daane Anaar Ke. Chitrarth (Singh) uske director the aur do log hain Delhi mein – Vinod Sharma and Mohan Paliwal – uss waqt Doordarshan se serial pass hua karte the na, bahut badi baat hua karti thi, ki humaara 13 ka serial pass ho gaya, humaara 26 ka pass ho gaya, humara 52 ka pass ho gaya. Toh unka 13 ka ek serial pass ho gaya tha aur unlogon ko mujhse gaana karane ke liye bola and maine somehow chakkar chalaya ki agar Suresh Wadkar Gulzar saab ko bol denge toh woh likh denge.

(This poetry affected me so much that I only had one dream in life that I record one song with Gulzar saab. Another dream was that Lata Mangeshkar would sing one song for me. With this dream I was living in Delhi. And there was one recording studio in Delhi. At that time Gulzar saab was making a documentary on Amjad Ali Khan. So I used to record some of my jingles in the same studio. The owner [of the studio] was Punjabi. So, one day he said on the phone, “Yes, Gulzar is coming in the night.” So when he put down the phone I asked, “Who’s coming in the night?” “You know that Gulzar, that film director, who’s recording Amjad Ali Khan.” He never respected anyone. It was the night of December. And Delhi used to be really cold in December. Now, not so much. So, I was sitting there thinking, ‘No matter what, I will see Gulzar saab and then leave’. So he was supposed to come at around 9 to 9.30 p.m. So people, in the winters, go here and there. I was sitting during a session and my phone rang. I picked up the phone and it was Gulzar saab on the other end. He said in his deep voice, “Hello, this is Gulzar. I can’t find the way.” The studio was at an odd place— Safdarjung Enclave. So there’s a Bengali sweet shop in Safdarjung Enclave. So he said, “I am at the Bengali sweet shop.” At that time there were no mobile phones. I told him, “Stand there. I will come to pick you up.” I didn’t tell anyone and I went to pick him up. From there, the studio was a five-minute walk. During that walk I told him, you know, “I am a composer. I am a big fan.” There might have been a lot of people [who would have told him this], but he was very nice and polite and he said, “If you come to Bombay, do meet me.” Then when I came to Bombay I was working as an Area manager in a company for the first two years. I finally met him through Suresh Wadkar, who’s a friend of mine, a singer, and Gulzar saab agreed to write a song of a TV serial, which was called Daane Anaar Ke. Chitrarth (Singh) was the director and there were two more people in Delhi— Vinod Sharma and Mohan Pahliwal. At that time, serials used to be approved by Doordarshan. It used to be a big deal – “that my [serial of] 13 episodes got approved by Doordarshan, my 26 episodes got approved by Doordarshan, 52 episodes.” So, similarly, his 13 episodes were approved by Doordarshan and they told me to compose a song and I somehow, through Suresh Wadkar, made Gulzar saab write a song for me).

That’s how I met him. We did that first song. Then he developed some liking for me and he got me my first successful song. That was for serial called Jungle Book, Chaddi pehan kar phool khila hai. So, that song became a hit and the company I was working in, which was a recording company called Pan Music, R.V. Pandit was the owner of that company and he saw my photograph with Gulzar saab in some recording studio and he called me, “What are you doing with Gulzar?” So, I had said I am becoming a music composer now, I have recorded a song with him. So he said, “Can you arrange a meeting with me and Gulzar?” I said, “Of course. But, for what?” He said, “I want to make a film on 1984 riots, whatever happened in Punjab.” So, I asked Gulzar saab, “Can I arrange a meeting?” And that’s how Maachis happened. And I got my first break. Such a long story.

 

Vishal, other than the films that you’ve done for yourself, films that you’ve directed, what would you say were your most exciting films as a music composer? Most exciting projects.

I think, Maachis, still remains my most exciting work because I had so much energy within me. I wanted the success so badly that I just blasted in that. So I think that work was very good. To an extent Satya was good. But I think the same kind of energy I felt again in Omkara.

 

You know, I also found your work in Paanch very exciting and I just thought it was, for lack of a better word, different from… like I remember hearing the cassette and then having to check who had done the music. Because my natural conclusion wouldn’t have been that it was you. I mean other than Akhiyan Chipki. Did you feel like that was departure for you in any way? Or little freer as a project in some way?

More than freer, I was very excited about it because it was not my kind of work. And it was Anurag’s first film and he showed me The Doors. And he said, “I want this kind of music.” And I was so excited to make a rock song and it was so ahead of its times that Main Khuda, that song, I feel so pained for that. Good you reminded me. That music, that film never came out. But it remained a cult film. But it’s available only to those people who… But I think, yeah…

 

Okay, I also wanted to ask you, before you made Makdee, you were doing a lot of films as a composer. Did you feel somewhere ki  you were getting stagnated as a music composer? Or did you feel that you just weren’t getting the opportunities to grow as a music director? Which one of the two did you feel— if any of them?

I think the second one. Because I was not getting the kind of films I think I deserved. I was feeling stagnant also. And one thing apart from these two factors, which I felt, was I’ll be very less important in the industry if I don’t do something really out of the box. So that was the reason. Because I knew that I’ll be out of work in some time. And I’ll have to go back to television or advertising. And I wouldn’t be in the mainstream of this industry, of this media and I always wanted that. I always wanted to be in the limelight. I always wanted to be in the front. I always wanted to lead. Wanted to, not now.

 

Not now?

Yeah, not now. So that lutf  (enjoyment) was at its peak, right? And that fire was… I’m a sportsman, I knew that if I don’t do something extraordinary, I’ll be out. I’ll be out of the team. I’ll be resting in the pavilion for the rest of my life. That’s how it started.

 

Tell me about the struggles about making Makdee. Particularly with the Children’s Film Society of India (CFSI). And do you feel now that you look back it was a blessing in disguise, that things didn’t work out very well with CFSI?

This is what I said at the beginning of the interview.  When you look back you see the turning point as, “Oh that was the turning point.” When you’re going through that, you think that you’re in a mess. And this is the worst situation you can be in your life. Yeah because they rejected the film I showed. I think they didn’t even see it properly because the way they used to see the film is like on a 24 inch T.V. with windows open behind. And if you’re trying to work in shadows and darkness, less light… They didn’t get it; it was a rough cut. They didn’t get the film. “Poor chap”, they said, “This is not a film, this is not what we expected.”

So there’s a friend of mine called Krishna and he really turned out to be Krishna for me. That he gave me 24,50,000 (rupees) that time. I paid that money, bought that film back, for a year I kept working and somehow had it released and then everyone appreciated it.

 

Vishal, do you feel that the attitude that the CFSI had at that point that’s also part of the reason why we don’t, despite being one of the largest film industries in the world, don’t make enough children’s films? Is that part of the reason why, you think?

It’s the attitude with which they approach cinema. I don’t think… I think it must be happening with every government organization. Because the kind of material that they produce, it’s so boring, so bad. And the government doesn’t have that kind of drive in it. Government and politicians, they don’t have time to do something good for public interest. Bichare apni kursi mein, apne problems mein itne phase huey hain, apne scams mein itne phase huey hain ki  (Poor things, they are so entangled in their own problems, scams that) they really don’t have time to do anything for the public. Parliament sits for one quarter of the time it’s supposed to sit. Toh kya kaam hua iss desh mein? (So what work really happened in the country?) It’s useless, in our lifetime we’re never going to see good governance for this country. So to talk about poor Children’s Film Society, it’s a very small thing.

 

Okay, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about screenwriting. Again, like you’ve not been to film school as such. What were some of the ways in which you taught yourself screenwriting?

Screenwriting is a… you can never learn. I mean you have to keep learning. I mean, it’s the most dicey form of cinema. You can never learn it. Every time you think that you’ve learnt it and you’ve failed next time.  So I read lots of books like a book called The Art of Dramatic Writing  by Lajos Egri. And just three days before I read a book. I still keep reading. I read a book called Backwards and Forwards  by David Ball. And suddenly I realized that what I was missing in my life. I mean, if I had got this book 10 years back, I would have made my films better. So it’s a very difficult thing to learn and understand and express, screenwriting.  Because it’s like the story telling and then you don’t know where you fail. Character establish karne mein  time nikal jaata hai, kabhi  conflict aane mein der ho jaati hai, kabhi  climax kharab ho jaata hai, kabhi  plot point one kharab ho jaata hai, kabhi  two kharab ho jaata hai. Kuch samajh mein aata nahin, jo kabhi achcha ho jaata hai, woh kashmas achcha ho jaata hai. Isiliye maine aaj tak hamesha collaborate hi kiya, writing mein (You need a lot of time in establishing a character, at times conflict arrives too late [in the plot], at times the climax is botched up and at times the plot point. Sometimes the plot point one hasn’t turned out well, sometimes the plot point two. It’s difficult to understand, and if at all things turn out to be well, it’s by accident more than anything else. That is why I have always collaborated in writing).

Because I’m so scared of writing alone. I think only my first film, which I wrote, Makdee, because usmein itna kam paisa tha, co-writer professionally aata nahin. Aur jo dost toh sab log  busy the. Mera paas kuch chaara nahin tha. Toh main socha bachon ki  film hai toh koi dekhega nahin. Main khud hi likh leta hoon (It involved such little money that I could not have afforded a professional writer. And all my friends were busy. Also, I thought since it’s a children’s film, no one will watch it anyway, so I might as well write it myself). Uske baad (After that) the more you work, the more you realize how illiterate you are in screenwriting. So that’s why I depend on Shakespeare, because I take his structure and I adapt it my way.

 

No but tell me something, is it something you enjoy? Do you enjoy the process of writing your films?

I mean there is no other choice because I enjoy making films. So if I have to make a film, I have to write it.

 

Why is that?

Because…

 

You’ve been a co-writer in all your films. But why do you have to be involved in the writing?

Otherwise I can’t direct. If the film is not internalized, the only way to internalize a film, the only process I know, is to write it. Otherwise I won’t know, if somebody else has written a character. I’m still not that mature a director where I can take somebody else’s work and internalize it. For me the process is that I have to internalize it and that process starts with when I sit and write it with my own hand and with my… or bounce it with my co-writer. But that’s the only way I know. I feel confident.

 

You’ve always… I mean after Makdee, like you’ve said, you’ve always worked with co-writers. How does that process work for you? Does it change with every writer?

With every writer, you know, you h­ave a different style but one writer friend of mine, his name is Matthew Robbins. He’s from L.A. And I met him in one writing workshop in Kampala, where Mira Nair had arranged a workshop. We all were mentors. He was head of all of us. He has written a film for Spielberg also, called The Sugarland Express, very early films of Spielberg. He has written films for the guy who’s made Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo Del Toro. So we became friends in Kampala. And he came to India. And I wrote a film with him. With him actually I learnt a lot, the methodical way of approaching a screenplay. Still you fail in that also, but at least you know how to approach this beast. That you have to start by catching it from the horns or by its tail. Earlier you just go and just uska sar bhidaa ke aap lad gaye. Ya toh aap gir gaye lahu luhaan ho kar ya script gir gayi. Pehla toh ye hi nahin pata tha. Ab yeh toh pata hai  at least light bujhake aur  torch uski aankhon me dal kar poonch se pakad kar deewar par marna hai. Toh ho sakta hai ki aap jeet sakein, toh uss tarah ke kuch gur aur, ya  how to approach. (Lock horns [with the beast] and either you fall down completely bloodied or the script turns out to be no good. Earlier I didn’t know all this. Now at least I know that I can switch off the light and flash the torch in its eyes, hold it by its tail and then bang it on the wall. If I do that, maybe there’s a possibility that I can win). Then I realized it’s like when you want to become a doctor, you go to a medical school. You want to become an engineer, you go to engineering school. But in cinema if you want to become a writer-director, you don’t have to do anything, just come. Hum toh bachchpan se, dil se writer hain, bahut bade writer hain, hum toh bahut bade director hain. Toh yeh jo cinema ko leke, jo logon ka approach hai, jo mera bhi raha. Main bhi toh aake seedha ghus gaya ki main  director ban jaaoonga, main  writer ban jaoonga  (Most people think that they are born writers, directors. So a lot of people approach cinema like that, and even I used to think the same that if I just come to Bombay I will become a writer and director). Fortunately for me things… because I was intelligent enough to understand that I’m a fool.  Some fools don’t understand that they’re fools, they are actual fools. So I’m very intelligent that I understood that I’m a fool. So I always had intelligent people around me, working with me, guiding me. So that’s how, you know, still, I am learning.

 

I have a bunch of questions on adaptations but I’ll start with this. There are so many forms of… Shakespeare ko har tarike se, har jagah, har kone mein adapt kiya gaya hai (Shakespeare has been adapted in every manner, everywhere). Two questions here. One of course ki, was there a sense of, did that make you a little wary or did that liberate you? Ki yaar sab ka ek alag Shakespeare ho sakta hai, mera kyon nahi ho sakta? Ek yeh sawaal hai. Dusra yeh ki what did you feel you had to add to that? Because it can also become a yeh sab toh kaha ja chuka hai? So what was it that made you want to adapt Shakespeare?

Actually to tell you honestly the truth, I thought nobody’s going to notice that I’ve adapted Shakespeare. And that was what I was made to feel by the industry people when I wrote Maqbool. So one of my financier friends, he told me, “If you want to make this film, please take out Shakespeare’s name. Because nobody will come to watch because literature is boring.” And I was somewhere, you know… and even I didn’t care for Shakespeare to be honest. I didn’t know who Shakespeare is, what his writings are. Because Shakespeare to me was a scary writer who haunted me in my school with The Merchant of Venice. And to me also, like anybody else, I thought that literature is boring, there’s going to be no drama in this. And in school you don’t even look at the drama, you look at the question-answer, what is this character doing, for what. So you miss the drama in school. When I saw Angoor  and in that, in the last shot Shakespeare winks. And I realised, this is a story by Shakespeare, this is very dramatic. That was in my subconscious. I wanted to make a film on the underworld and I was looking for a story. I happened to read in a child’s book, in a very abridged version form of Macbeth. And I thought it’s a very good for an underworld film, so let me adapt it to… And I think somewhere it was Angoor  I had in mind. So that’s how I started. And I didn’t realize that what kind of liberty I’m taking with such a great writer till my film was screened in Toronto (International) Film Festival on that premiere night when I was attending to the Q&A with the audience and the world press. And there were big filmmakers like, I knew Deepa Mehta. Like Deepa Mehta stood up and said, “Today I’m proud of India that a filmmaker has made such a beautiful film from my country. I’m so proud to be an Indian.” That really struck me. And then the kind of questions the press asked me. Fortunately they had loved the film and I realized— what if they had not liked the film? Toh mera kya hota? (Then what would have happened to me?) And I realized ki I mean Shakespeare ko leke, main aisa kar raha tha, jaise mere baap ki story hai. Maine kuch bhi change kiya uss mein (I was adapting Shakespeare’s story as if it’s my father’s story. I changed whatever I wanted to). I’ve made Lady Macbeth into the king’s mistress. But I think somewhere, I was very me. When I say I, I include Abbas Tyrewala. He was my co-writer. That we were very true to the soul of the film rather than the text. Soul of the play rather than the text of the play. And that encouraged me to do Omkara— Othello.

 

Do you sometimes miss that, for lack of a better word, a sort of carefree unknowingness? Do you sometimes miss that now? Because you can’t have that now, where you already know every film that you do will be scrutinized?

Yeah it is a problem because people come with their own screenplay in their head. They expect something. Then you’re told that your audience needs this, wants this, they expect this out of you, they take you so seriously. When I announced, when it was announced at one point I was considering doing Chetan Bhagat’s 2 States. I mean the kind of mails I got from that Facebook page I had for two months. And on my friend’s Facebook page that, “What has happened to him? He has come down from Shakespeare to Chetan Bhagat.” I mean this is stupidity. Chetan Bhagat has… he can write well, that novel is good. And I wanted to explore that frothy side of mine but it was such a strong reaction to my selection of that material. So I think obviously it’s a curse and this is very natural also.  When people love you, they love your work, equal amount of people hate your work. So it comes in a package.

 

What is your approach to adaptation, one? And if you could quickly explain how the two (Ruskin) Bond processes have been different from the Shakespeare? Because you know, Bond is a living writer, he’s working right now, you know, again our milieu. So one or two quick differences that you can tell between the two adaptations. 

Shakespeare, I mean his work is timeless. Therefore it is so relevant even now, every filmmaking country makes one or two films in a year about Shakespeare. So his dramatic sense is definitely very unique and timeless. So it’s very easy to adapt Shakespeare. With me fortunately, especially in Maqbool and of course with Omkara  also, I never felt the burden of Shakespeare. I treated him as my co-writer, my invisible co-writer who has given me material and I say, “Thank you very much, but I want to change Lady Macbeth to the mistress of the king.” Because he is invisible, even if he is getting disappointed with it, he can’t tell. So I never looked at him, at Shakespeare like that. I looked at him like a friend who was…

 

The guy who winks at the end of the movie…

Yeah.  And who has done a very good, decent job in his story. I treat him like that. But I’m the director finally. That’s why that burden was not there and now I feel little burdened. But the day I’ll make another Shakespeare, I’ll again be treating him like that, “Come back, we haven’t met for so long, let’s have a drink together and talk about the story. Do you have anything new to offer?” So that way, you know, I was fine. And that’s why if you talk to Gulzar saab, his point of view is that my films are not adaptations of Shakespeare. He says, “Just for cheap publicity, you say Shakespeare and because you want to have (the) publicity of Shakespeare, you want Shakespeare’s name attached to your work. Therefore you’re saying. But otherwise they’re not adaptations of Shakespeare, they’re original films.”  So I don’t know whether it’s a compliment or it’s not a compliment. I don’t ask him because I don’t want to know. I take it ki  okay it must be a compliment. But he says that.

As far as Ruskin Bond is concerned, Ruskin is actually like a friend. And I told you, I have a house in Mussoorie, where we share the same wall. And most of the time, you know, he’s… Sometimes on a wintry evening, he’s standing on his window and I go on my terrace for a smoke. So he says, “What are you doing?” I said, “I have a good malt.” He says, “Why don’t you offer it to me? I’m coming to your house.” So we actually sit and have a drink and we discuss. And even sometimes, when I’m not doing his stories, I bounce off my work with him. He’s like an encyclopedia of storytelling. Sometimes he takes out a book which is like 72 years old, printed in 1942 or 1946 and he just presents it to me ki, “ I think, I have marked this story called Cocaine, you go and read, you’ll get a good inspiration for your work. The kind of film you are doing, the kind of script you are writing.” The Blue Umbrella  had a problem because it was a very short story and there was not enough material to turn it into a film. So some day a friend of mine, Minty Tejpal, who co-wrote that film with me, he came out with this idea ki

 

What if it was actually stolen.

Stolen and the person comes with a red chhatri  (umbrella). And then we made it like jo hamare folktale hain, ki wo seeyar pani smarang mein gir gaya aur aa gaya toh (in our folktales, where there’s a jackal that falls in the pond and then came back), we took that route. And in 7 Khoon Maaf  he wrote it specially for me, before that was a short story called Susanna’s Seven Husbands. Then I asked him, I want to make it into a film can you write a novella for me? Toh  it was specially written for me.

 

Okay Maqbool, you set it in the underworld, the Mumbai underworld. But it was not like the underworld films that were being made. It was still your underworld film. It was not… for us underworld films are… it was not Satya, it was not… How much research did you do and how much of it was… Was it a real Mumbai? How did you balance the real and the sort of ‘inspired’ Mumbai underworld?

It was not at all real underworld. In fact I was amazed that nobody noticed that. Because it was the underworld of the 1960s. That Abba ji  kind of figure, was like a reference to Karim Lala or Haji Mastan. I had met Haji Mastan once, long back when I came to Mumbai around 1988-89. I happened to meet him. I went to his house, so I had that image. Then I met few police officers who did encounters, like that. But I think, what I did and what I generally do is I take a fantasy and treat it very really, in reality. That is what I keep doing. I take a fantasy and treat it in reality. That is what Maqbool’s underworld is. That is why Omkara is politicized the way it is. That’s what actually happens. It’s not that it’s totally fantasy. Like Omkara, there’s one scene where police is being frisked by the gangsters. And actually it happens, in one of the villages, if the police had to go in, the gangsters actually search, frisk police.

 

No, but in Omkara  there was a lot more… Also, that was very real.

Yeah because that’s where I come from so I know it. But the Mumbai underworld you don’t know, it’s a fantasy for you.

 

Actually Mumbai underworld is a fantasy space in any case. You know the gangsters mimic their own screen versions and their screen versions. You don’t even know what is…

Yeah, you don’t even know who’s whose mirror.

 

Who came first, it’s a chicken and egg thing. Okay, now tell me a little bit about the choices of making Lady Macbeth, not Lady Macbeth but the mistress of the king. And the other one, of making the witches more active than passive. Just handing them more power.

Lady Macbeth, the reason was, because I thought, in a married relationship with a man and woman, which Macbeth had, I thought it’ll be so boring. Because it’s only being done for money. It’s only being done for power or for the lust for power. Because Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, they must have been married for a long time. And Lady Macbeth wants that power, that throne. So I thought that it’ll be so dry. So what if Lady Macbeth becomes a throne herself for Macbeth? He has to kill his father to get that throne and there will be a lust. A real lust, a romance hidden with lust. So I thought that will be so good to explore. That was the reason, to have romance, otherwise there’s no romance in a married relationship of 12-15 years and where they’re planning to kill their father. So it’s a different zone, a different tone, a different genre. So I didn’t want to treat it that way. I wanted to have a little passionate romance, throbbing romance between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. And the only way was to avert the obstacle of the king. The king is the obstacle. Which is… I thought that, because I was looking at the contemporary parallels of all the things in Macbeth. The first thing was witches. So I thought the cops in the contemporary world will make the best witches.

 

Yeah but what about making them more active? They’re not just predicting, they’re also in a way making it…

They’re making it happen, yeah. Again I told you, that I treated it as my story. That after a point I forgot about Mr. Shakespeare, that I thought the basic material is his, I’m… like Gulzar saab says, ki main uske zameen pe apni  building khadi karke bol raha hoon ki yeh Shakespeare ki  building hai. Toh Shakespeare ki toh sirf zameen hai, building meri hai, toh (that on Shakespeare’s land I am constructing my own building and I am saying that it’s Shakespeare’s building. But only the land is of Shakespeare, the building is mine) this is what he says. But I don’t like that. I want this building to be called Shakespeare Apartment. So I can sell it well.

 

Okay Omkara. How quickly did that choice of the adha-brahmin come to you, how quickly did that…

Because again I was finding it parallel to the Moor.

 

But there are lots of other parallels. I mean yahaan pe aur bhi parallels ho sakte the, jo aap explore kar sakte the (there could have been more parallels, which you could have explored). Of that psychology, of that…

Kyonki iss mein ek… Nahin! Nahin hota (Because there could have been one more… No! It wouldn’t have been possible). You tell me what is the parallel of a Moor? What will be a parallel of a Moor? I mean… there I think with a Moor, which I very smartly avoided is that he’s a… it’s to do with a skin colour. And the person who is complexed with his colour, with his looks and he’s more complexed with the beauty of his wife. So that’s where I realized okay, he is jealous of his wife. He’s jealous, not jealous of his wife, he’s a jealous man because he is complexed with his wife’s beauty. Because he doesn’t see himself as beautiful as he should. Which I think the beauty has got nothing to do with your looks. I think it is your inner looks which make you beautiful or not beautiful. So for that, I think that adha-brahmin where uski maa…father Brahmin tha, he’s…

 

You grew up in U.P (Uttar Pradesh). You are a Brahmin yourself. How much did your own… what you actually witnessed, how much did your own experiences and things that interested you about the politics of U.P., go into this film?

The characters actually, more than politics. Politics sabhi jagah ek si hai, but wahan pe (the politics is the same almost everywhere but there) politics has a muscle wing. So every political party has or had a muscle wing. One big gangster is affiliated with one party. That is what the politics was. Aur uske bahubali hote the. Ki ek bahubali yeh hai, uska bahubali kaun hai (They used to have chiefs. That he’s one chief, who’s the chief of that group)? Matlab they had their muscle wing. But what I used with my experience of living in western U.P. were the characters. Like Langda Tyagi ka character. That character was a senior to me in my school because I studied in a government college. And there we had students from all classes of society. So I’m very fortunate. At that time, I was very… later I was very angry, that I should have gone to some English medium and you know, where high class, people from the high class of society were there. But now I thank God, thank God I was there, because I could see so many people. Which I would have never experienced in my life. So Langda Tyagi was there, he used to carry a knife in his pocket and he was a gangster and later he became a very big gangster. And when I went to research, I came to know that he is a professor in a college now. So this was his growth. Then Ajay’s character, there was again a gangster called Rampal. When we were kids we used to go through Tyagi Hostel which was there in the film also. So all those characters I had seen in my childhood.

 

I want to talk a little bit about the… see Shakespeare’s universe has a very distinct moral universe also, very in tune with the Victorian times, right? How different is the moral universe of your films from Shakespeare’s? And what other things influence the moral universe of your films? Because morality and how you interpret that changes over time. The drama doesn’t but the morality does.

I don’t think morality changes. I don’t think morality changes because… and morality has a very strange point. I have a very strange point of view for this morality. When we are watching cinema we all become very moral. We must be doing the same wrong thing in our real life, but when we watch a film, we actually become very moral, that good should win. He is a bad guy, why did he do this? And it’s very natural that, it’s very strange that we become so moral. When we are watching film in a theatre or with bahut logon ke saath baith ke dekh rahe (a lot of people). We become very moral. So I think morality never changes. And the morality you are talking about, it has got to do with the filmmaker. Uski jo morality hogi, wohi screen dikhayegi (Whatever his morality is, you will be able to see it on the screen). What he thinks about women, what point of view he has on relationships, what way he treats kids, whatever he is in his real life, is shown on the screen.

 

Whatever he is or whatever he is interested in exploring?

He explores only those things which he is interested in. You keep going back. It’s like a domino thing, you keep going back and you’ll find the filmmaker only. He’ll only… because nobody will give his life for…

 

Something that he doesn’t…

Something that doesn’t interest him.

 

There were lots of ways in which Susanna’s Seven Husbands could have been interpreted. What was your first attraction to the… what was it that “Mujhe yeh explore karna hai (I want to explore this).” Kya tha usme, story mein (What was in it about the story)?

Usme  I think the character Susanna, and the characters of the husbands.

 

And the idea of love? The very strange idea of love?

Uh…Yeah. I think what attracted me [was] the black humor part of that, that she kills her husbands. I liked the streak of that character, which actually attracted me. And it was so unusual, and it was based on a real character, Ruskin told me about that.  So, I found it very fascinating that a lady who can kill, get married seven times, and kill her husbands.

 

Why did you think that the film didn’t do as well as should have really?

I think what I was hoping that, I was actually following Hitchcock’s line that thrill is better than the suspense, that we know that she is going to kill a person but how she’s going to kill a person, that process is interesting. And I think that didn’t work with people, that they knew that he’s going to be killed so they weren’t interested in the process, they wanted him to be killed as soon as possible. So, I think that episodic feel, which came, that didn’t work with people. For me, I think I still love that film. I think it was a very literary work of mine, where I put in the history of India through her husbands, and you see the Pokhran (nuclear explosion), you see 1984, and I think a doctor who makes killer mushrooms, so I think it was a very literary work of mine. The only thing which I am ashamed of in that is the makeup of Priyanka’s (Chopra) older look, which I hated and I was cheated by a foreign company who promised, we did tests in L.A. six months back, but the people who did the test didn’t come. It was a different team, which came, and there was so much at stake and we were in flow. Then I was promised by the special effects guy that we’ll do it in the post—that’s the easy way to get out, so don’t worry—but finally it couldn’t be achieved. But I think that wasn’t the reason that the film didn’t do well because it must be something else.

 

Was it also, did you feel that because you didn’t explain Priyanka’s character that people didn’t understand this character somewhere. They wanted a more directly moral tale for a woman. They didn’t get what was driving her? It wasn’t a black and white moral tale. Yeah, I mean she does turn to God in the end and all that but…

Yeah, I think because, two things for that. One is, there were explanations about her character but people don’t pay that kind of attention. It was very subtle…

 

It was. Ped ke neeche baith ke (sitting under the tree), when she’s saying why not just divorce them, why kill them, and she explains that. It’s an almost poetical explanation; it’s not a spoon-feeding explanation.

Yeah, and there was an explanation for that, where one of the servants, the three stooges, one of the… Jab wo bachpan mein school jaati thi to ek kutta bahut bhaunkta tha, jis galli se jaati thi. Toh usne apna raasta nahin badla, toh usne apne  father ki  gun le kar kutte ko uda diya. Toh Sahib raasta nahin badla karti hain, Sahib kutte ka bheja uda diya karti hain. (As a child, when she used to go to the school, a dog in one of the gully on the way used to bark a lot. She didn’t change her route; instead she used her father’s gun to kill the dog. So, Sahib doesn’t change her route, she kills the dog instead). So, she was like that, that was she had in that. She wouldn’t change her way; she would rather get rid of the person. And, she was looking for love, every time she was deceived in love. If you see all those marriages, she was betrayed in love every time and I think after one point, she became, to me, a psychopath. After the third murder, when after John’s character, I think she became a psychopath because when she kills the Russian husband she had a… she didn’t have to kill him, but I think by that time she had just started enjoying the killing. So, to me, she became a psychopath killer. And it was supposed to be black humour, which people didn’t get. So, it was supposed to be… and maybe Ruskin also blames me for that. Ruskin said that you have made it so intense that the black humour went out of the window.

 

Okay, I want to talk to you about Kaminey. What did you start with? It was a caper film, it was a sort of take on a very Tarantinoesque genre, it was a sort of… whatever, it was a hat doff to Bollywood clichés. What did you start with, where do you root those characters, where do you find those characters in the world that you wanted to root it in?

Again, it was like a fantasy put into reality. But, my starting point was to make a caper. To make a Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, Pulp Fiction, those kind of influences, so the starting point was that. And, then I wanted to have a little depth that why did these two brothers are at war… and yeah, I think that was my intention and that remained my most successful film so far.

 

Okay, Matru (Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola) intrigued me even more. Where did you find, again, there was that fantasy, there was this bi-plane out of Tintin, the cow, the socialist politics, the whole land grab thing? Where did the characters in Matru… come from?

It comes from Brecht’s play called Mr Puntila and His Man Matti. And Brecht took those characters from Charlie Chaplin’s film called City Lights, in which a drunkard man takes Charlie Chaplin home and he’s drunk and treats him like his best friend, and when in the morning he’s sober he kicks him out, forgets that who is this guy, why is he sleeping next to my bed. So, that was a starting point and of course, I think there was a left side of me politically, so it was an expression of my left…

 

So you were also trying, was it also something, like did you also want to explore (Emir) Kusturica’s idiom?

Yes, yes, Kusturica, because I gave homage to Kusturica at the end because I loved his films, Underground…

 

But, that’s how he treats politics, right? There are these characters that he’ll create but the way…

Yes, it’s treated like farce. Black Cat, White Cat; Underground; those films were a big influence on me.

 

I wanted to quickly talk to you about dialogue writing. Because that is something, you know, you do for all your films. Tell me about some of the pitfalls of dialogue writing? Tell me two secrets of good dialogue writing?

One secret you can acquire, you can achieve. The other you can’t. First is, which you can acquire and achieve is, never let two people agree in a scene. Even if they are saying the same thing, never let them agree. So that’s where the conflict comes and that’s where the fun comes. If there’s a conflict, people are interested, and if there’s no conflict, they are not interested then. If two people are fighting, they are interested, so, this you can acquire. Okay, three things. Second thing is, never, which I learnt, I’m not giving you a gyaan, but this is what I do. The second thing is, never say things directly, say it through some object. If I want to tell you something, I will tell you through biscuit— that why don’t you have this biscuit. I will start my conversation, I will say through, I will say it indirectly, not directly. That always has an impact. And third thing, which you are either born with it—you either have it or you don’t have—which is sense of humour. If you don’t have humour then you can’t be a writer and you have to be… the more wicked you are, the better dialogue writing you can do.

 

Casting. Especially when you have casted for smaller roles, character roles, it’s something you are really known for. Something that’s widely discussed about your films. One, is there anybody you consult or take advice from, when it comes to casting? Secondly, is there a director that you admire for their casting?

Now, we have good casting directors, who weren’t there before. In my case, that guy, Honey Trehan, he has been my assistant the day he landed in Bombay, he has been with me. And over the period of time, he became a big casting director. And, as far as my casting is concerned, I am never excited about stars who are working in my film. I am always excited about the side cast, who are working. So, I get a kick out of their performance not by the stars’ performance, so that’s why they become very important for me. Like Deepak Dobriyal in Omkara, or Chandan Roy Sanyal or the Bengali brothers in Kaminey, or like Bhopey Bhau. So they give me child like excitement. So that and the one director I admire for it, I think, (Quentin) Tarantino. His casting sense is out of this world. If you see the Kill Bill, that Bill’s casting, I mean, such a great casting.

 

Two things, like I said with dialogue writing, that you have learnt along the way with directing actors, be it stars or actors? Two things that you have learnt on the job, or three things that you have learnt on the job about directing actors? Some tricks that you have picked up.

Yeah, never ask them to repeat what they have done in the shot. If the shot is okay, and for some reason you have to do it, never ask them to repeat the same thing. And, I never spoon-feed them about what they should be doing. In fact, and that I came to know, because they have worked with many different directors. But when they work with me, am told again and again, especially many times by Priyanka, that when an actor comes and asks me that this is the scene and you have to go and sit over there, there’s a biscuit plate lying over here, and I have to come and sit over here. So, this is the scene. So, they ask me, if they ask me, that, “What should I do? Should I come from this door or that door?” I never tell them. I say, “It’s your character, you should tell me where your character should come from. Don’t ask me to think for yourself. You think and tell me. If I don’t like it, I will tell you.” So, if I do my first rehearsal, I tell no one what to do, I tell no one how to do, I just tell them, let them weigh themselves, and that’s where they get thrown off. This director is not telling us anything! This is my style of working. I never give directions. If I feel they are going wrong, I will tell them, “This is not the way. Your character should be doing this.”

 

Tell me, why did you turn producer? What was one big reason that you turned producer?

To have the power for the final product. Because I saw Gulzar saab suffering in Hu Tu Tu, then that producer after the release of the film, he went to the theaters and edited the film, the way he wanted. And, I saw him in pain, and when I became the director, then I realized that that’s the way you can kill the director. So, to avoid that day in my life I became a producer.

 

How much creatively… you know the kind of films you produce, which you are not directing yourself, how much do they have to be a piece of your own creative sensibility? And, how far would you say that, okay…

Yeah, it’s a very difficult thing to produce and I am stopping to produce anymore now.

 

Really?

Yeah.

 

Are you taking a break or stopping?

I mean, stopping for the time being. I don’t know, right now I am not in a mood to produce forever for anybody. Because it’s a pain.

 

What is it that gets to you about producing?

Because you are wasting your energies, you know. I can make my own films. Why am I doing it for others? This is the first feeling that came to me. Because I don’t do it for money. I never get money back. My films don’t make money, so then why should I be doing this? I should be creating my own work, why should I be doing it for others?

 

Have you gotten better at understanding marketing, or selling a film?

No, I don’t understand because even if I understand marketing better than the marketing people, the marketing people think that they’re understanding the marketing better. So it becomes a very difficult situation when it comes to marketing because they have preconceived notions about a film because they have set patterns that so many hoardings, hero should be there, the masses should come for this. So, it’s very bad, marketing, I mean, should be left to a filmmaker, which doesn’t happen because of the co-production thing. And the corporate has its own marketing wing— a bunch of fools, who know nothing about it.

 

What kind of aesthetics are you drawn to, when it comes to cinema?

Excellence.

 

I mean, I am not going to ask you to even explain that. You know, a lot of filmmakers have a thing for creating a partnership with a cinematographer. You know, whether it was (Jean-Luc) Godard or whether it was (Satyajit) Ray, they did that. You have not. You have worked with different cinematographers, you have repeated one. But you have worked with different cinematographers at different points of time. Why is that? I mean, is that because you did not find the partnership, or making the partnership doesn’t interest you?

I want to remain in a live-in relationship in my creative world. I don’t want to marry, so this is one thing. And because the problem with cinematographers is that they think that actually they are directing the film, the director knows nothing. This is the basic problem with most of the cinematographers because they are either failed directors or they didn’t have the courage to become a filmmaker, or they don’t get a chance to become a filmmaker. So that kind of arrogance, because they have a kind of power on the set. Because the scene has to be lit and then they say that, “I am not getting my meter correct. I need so much time.” They have that kind of power. So I have had a very bad experience in my first two films with my cinematographer, that’s where I thought I am not going to repeat my cinematographer. One reason because that cinematographer, he was a friend of mine, that he kept saying to everyone that he has directed those first two films, he (Bharadwaj) knew nothing about it. He knew nothing about the lens. True, on the first film I knew nothing about the lens, but by the second film, I knew everything, everything, but… and I felt very offended, I felt very offended with that, and to prove him wrong and prove to myself that I can work with any Tom, Dick, and Harry, and get my job done, and that’s why I started doing this. Now I enjoy… because it’s a very boyfriend-girlfriend, husband-wife, kind of a relationship between the director and the cinematographer. By the end of the film, he knows all your weaknesses and you know his, but the problem is he knows your weaknesses. So, the next time he knows how to manoeuvre you, how to manipulate you, and I just don’t like someone manipulating or manoeuvring me. So when you get on the set with a new cinematographer, by the time he realizes your weaknesses or problems, the film is over. That’s why I don’t and I won’t.

 

Do you allow yourself flourishes as a director? You know, like a painter, as one of those flourished strokes, which may not be needed but it’s a flourished stroke. Do you allow yourself flourish, just purely indulgent, as an artist, as a director, strokes in your films? I mean, indulgent in a way that would not spoil the story but your own, jaise keeda kehte hain, kuch bhi kehte hain, jaise bhi…?

Yeah, I think, all the creative people do that.

 

Not all, I think.

Yeah, but if you realize that it’s an indulgence then… you know, that’s why I am very conscious about what I do. I don’t like to do anything for the sake of intelligence, but now I think I feel I should have in few cases.

 

But why Vishal? I mean, the whole reason why you are doing this is because you have to enjoy it, right?

Yeah, yeah, but you know when the film comes to your final stages you become very insecure that whether it’s reaching what you wanted to say, whether it’s reaching or not, and I am very scared of one thing, which is boring people. Because I get bored very easily. Like if I am talking to you or if I do not like being in someone’s company, I feel that’s the most horrible thing. And I don’t want to do that to people, so sometimes it happens. But in few cases I am saying I should have been indulgent, like Irrfan’s (Khan) story in 7 Khoon Maaf, I think that’s the best work I have ever done in my life, but I butchered it because of my editor and I will remain angry with him all my life. Because that section was 20-25 minutes, 30 minutes long, or 25 minutes long and there was total poetry, no dialogue in that. The whole relationship was translated on the screen in poetry, using music and poetry. Still there’s no dialogue in the film in that story but that was long, and I should have gone with that.

 

Do you ever self-censor while making films for the fear of running into censorship problems?

 No.

 

Never?

The thing is, I am always morally right when I am doing a film.

 

Haan, but phir bhi hassles bhi bahut hote hain na? (But still there would be a lot of hassles, right?) You are also a practical director, and a producer, so is there something where you say, I don’t need this yaar, forget I am not going to

Nahin, ab problem aane lagi hai kyunki satellite deals mein woh maangte hain (Nowadays, there’s a problem because satellite deals need) U/A, so broadcasters have started blackmailing. That’s where the cinema is feeling a big hurt and we will realize it after five years. Because of that the filmmakers are forced not to do certain things, which is very wrong for a creative man.

 

You know, Vishal, I am very intrigued because you had an anti-smoking song, you had an AIDS awareness song. How do you feel about the regulation that says that you have to put a warning? Where do you think the line needs to be drawn? Do you feel like it’s fair game to say that there should be a warning every time someone, a character, smokes on screen? Or, the long ad that happens before…

Mera mann karta hai main jaa kar parda phaad dun (I feel like tearing the curtain). It is so inhuman. It is so stupid. It is so unnecessary. It’s like a fascist thing the health ministry is doing to us, the filmmakers. Because it’s not treated like fine arts, no? It is not treated like (one of the) arts at all. Abhi bhi nautanki tamashe ki tarah liya jaa raha hai cinema ko. (Cinema is still treated like a gimmick). Seriously lete hi nahin hain, kuch bhi ho cinema ke saath yeh kar do. Jaise har cheez film galat kar rahi ho. (They don’t take cinema seriously, whatever be the situation, cinema will be on the receiving end. As if cinema is responsible for everything wrong). Now this is really, really stupid. Isse bura aur kisi filmmaker ke saath ho nahin sakta hai, filmmaking community ke saath isse bura kaam nahin ho sakta hai. (That’s the worst that can happen with any filmmaker, with the filmmaking community). Now they are trying for alcohol also. That anytime if somebody has a drink, that (a warning will appear that) ‘Alcohol is bad’. I think kuch dinon ke baad yeh bhi karna padega ki kuch acchi cheezein jo kha rahe hain ki biscuit khana accha hai. Nimbu toh zada nahin khao (After some days, they will start showing that eating biscuit is healthy; don’t have too much lemon). That was my retaliation when I did the smoking song. That’s the way I retaliated to what they were doing ki zyada nimbu khaane se daant kharaab ho jaate hain magar cigarette peene se aap mar sakte ho (your teeth will be spoiled from a lot of lemons, but cigarettes can kill you). So, it is… I mean, I was feeling frustrated.

 

Vishal, you are a composer but the trend today is not to have songs as a part… matlab item numbers ho sakte hain, (you can have item numbers though) but songs as part of narrative, in a way they take the story forward, brings out the inner conflict that is becoming… Is that something you would regret if it went out of our cinema entirely?

No, no, I think I would rather like it. Because mostly, songs are not required in our films.

 

So, then what happens to the rich, absolutely rich treasure of lyric songs woh bhi toh chala jayega na uske saath (even that will go with it)?

Haan toh maybe uske saath non-film music upar ayega jiske liye (So, in that case, the non-film music will shine more), you were regretting. Delhi guys will have much more fun.

 

Yeah, but I don’t mean to have my life without Sahir Ludhianvi, without Gulzar..

But then Sahir Ludhianvi or Faiz Ahmed Faiz ne kaunse filmon ke gaane likhe? Ghalib ne kaunse filmon ke gaane likhe? Uss waqt toh Ghalib poetry kar rahe the…Toh aur cheezein upar ayengi na? Filmon ki wajah se aur cheezein upar aa hi nahin paati hai na. Film sab kuch apne andar absorb kar leti hain. Aap bahut bade poet hain, apne koi filmon ka gaana likha hai? Nahin likha. Toh aapke upar glamour hi nahin ayega. Dr. Bashir Badr ka naam bhi suna hai kisine, Dr. Bashir Badr jaisa poet nahin hua pichle sau saal mein. (What film songs did Ghalib write? At that time Ghalib was writing poetry. So other things would shine, right? Because of films, other things are not able to come up. Film absorbs everything. You are a renowned poet, have you written any songs for films? No, so you would not be glamorous. No one has heard of Dr. Bashir Badr. A poet like him has not been in our country for 100 years).

 

You touched upon the cinematographer, what about the editor? What is the balance? What is the secret of that relationship? What is the ideal relationship between an editor and a director? And have you ever found it?

No, I am still finding it. Yeah, editing ka bada hi tricky hai, woh donon hi confuse ho jaate hain aapas mein baat karte karte ki kya theek hai aur kya nahin theek hai. But, I think usme apne gut ke upar jaana chahiye. (Editing is very tricky. A director and an editor often get confused while talking to each other about what’s right and what’s not. So, in that case, one should go by his instinct). Which I will try in my next film. Sometimes it’s not working as a whole story. I mean, you come across with very strange choices when you are going for your final cut. Very strange choices. Some moments you would want that is not adding to the story, so it’s very, very strange, the choices that you have to make. And you would realize your mistakes after six months or one year, like I am realizing about 7 Khoon Maaf.

 

What would you want in an editor, ideally?

I am telling you it’s a very strange relationship between an editor and a director. But, what I want? That he should not contradict me. He should listen to me whatever I say. Not come with justifiable logics.

 

Come on! You know you also want that because otherwise you have no counterpoint at all. You are living with one film for so long. Clearly, you haven’t made your wish to Santa Claus about editors yet…

No, I am very happy with the editor I am working with right now, A. Sreekar Prasad. But one thing you hate about editors, when they read the script they don’t realize that it’s not needed. Once you have shot it, they say it’s not needed, so what were you doing? Were you sleeping when reading the script? So, this is one thing I hate about editors. They say it’s not needed. But, you read the script? Yeah. But now it’s not needed, so…

 

You know Vishal, the way we make political films in India, either it is a backdrop of politics or it’s a moral film disguised as a political film. Do you feel we have a mature political cinema in India? And, what kind of politics woven in cinema attracts you?

We can only make farcical cinema, as far as politics is considered because politics is farce in our country. Either we can make farce or we can make (it) very dark because there is no middle road. Most of the institutions are corrupt. Which good political films we have made? Koi bhi nahin. (Nothing).

 

What has shaped your politics?

I think social justice. I mean, if you are an artist, you can be an artist only if you are left. If your left is strong, only then you can be an artist, otherwise how will you take the injustice happening in society? If you are taking that, and you are still happy then you are not an artist. And only left provides you that window, which makes you see okay, that’s why you keep reacting with your left.

 

Why did you take a break from Shakespeare?

Because I am very scared of being slotted in something, and again, you know the fight within me, with myself, why can’t I say original stories? Why can’t I say original stories? For that I tried Kaminey so it’s because of that.

 

Why did you drop 2 States? You mentioned earlier that there was some opposition, but why did it not work out?

There were many reasons for that. One thing is that Shah Rukh (Khan), he developed cold feet, and then I thought it will be very insensitive of me to go and make this with somebody else. This was the main reason. Because we planned that film together, but then both of us, we thought that…then he thought that he shouldn’t be doing this, then I thought I don’t want to do this.

 

What attracts you towards romance? How would you like to explore romance? What kind of romance in cinema attracts you and how would you like to explore… Is there any way in which you would like to explore romance in your cinema?

I think the Ijaazat kind of film I want to make, because that is one of the most romantic films ever on Indian screen. Very beautiful film and that went unnoticed. That kind of romance where hawaldar ne ulta ek athanni de kar karke lautaya tha, usme meri ek chavanni padi hai, woh bhejwa do. Mera kuch samaan tumhare paas pada hai wo bhejwa do. I think that is one of the best romantic songs an Indian film has seen.

 

You know, you have explored your Kusturica’s idiom, your Tarantino kind of medium, (Krzysztof) Kieslowski, where you started off, you have always said that’s one big push you got towards cinema. How would you like to explore that idiom? What is it about that idiom that you would like to explore, if in future?

You know those kind of quiet films he made, which looked quiet on surface but they were screaming from within, that kind of quality of cinema I am really excited to make, and want to explore because Kieslowski’s films had this quality. To explore extraordinary conflict in an ordinary life is the most difficult thing and that’s what Kieslowski did in all his films. You see his (The) Decalogue, you see his (Three Colors:) Blue, White, Red— extraordinary conflicts in ordinary life. Otherwise, it is very difficult to create gangsters, it is very difficult to create politicians, or you know farce, or those kinds of films, very easy to make. But to explore that conflict in normal people, that’s the most important thing.

 

What is your ambition today as a filmmaker?

To create a very, very honest film, which (it) has always been.

 

 

Sooni Taraporevala – TBIP Tête-à-Tête

Sooni Taraporevala, 56, grew up in a large Parsi family in South Bombay, leading a fairly regular life until the day she found out she had been accepted to study in Harvard University as an undergraduate. She had applied for a lark and still cannot believe she got in. Harvard opened up a whole new world for her, sowing the seeds for the extraordinary work she was to do as a photographer and screenwriter later in life. It was also here that she met her collaborator in cinema, Mira Nair. After her post-graduation she moved back to Bombay without a plan, “for emotional reasons”. Back in her hometown, she began photographing her community, building an unparalleled body of photographic work compiled in several exhibitions and a book called Parsis : The Zoroastrians of India – A Photographic Journey. Furthermore, she brought to life a city slum in Salaam Bombay!, Mira Nair’s directorial debut. Since then she has written several films including her own debut feature as a director, Little Zizou. She wants to continue writing films, directing them and taking pictures. Also on the bucket list is a novel. Here is hoping the newly acquired and richly deserved Padma Shri will keep her motivated.

 

An edited transcript:

 

Okay, so we are going to start from, obviously the beginning.  You grew up in Bombay?

I did.

 

What were those times like? When you think back to your childhood, what is it that stands out the most in your memory?

I grew up in a large extended family. Went to an all girl’s school, Queen Mary School next to Kennedy Bridge, and I guess what stands out is that I had a really happy childhood because I had a very large extended family. I am an only child myself but the extended family was pretty large and we did everything together, like large groups going for holidays and everything, so I think that stands out for me.

 

Did a lot of people live together as well?

Yes. I grew up with my parents, my grandparents, my father’s two brothers. Unmarried brothers.

 

Okay, okay. So that’s a fairly large group. And you went to college here as well?

I went to Xavier’s (St. Xavier’s College) for a few months and then I got very ill and could not attend college and then applied to a lot of American universities, got admitted and so never went back to Xavier’s.

 

How did Harvard happen?

Just by chance (laughs ). Fluke. Luck.

 

Yeah it was undergraduate studies. It was not very common for…

It was not at all common and in those days, you know, no undergraduates went, actually. And everyone severely discouraged me, not my family, but everyone else. The USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services), people who knew, they said, “Don’t be silly, you will never get in.” I just wanted to try and I just tried. I wrote to forty universities; that got narrowed down, down, down and then Harvard was the only one where I got admission as well as a scholarship.

 

Wow! Not a bad choice.

It was an amazing thing. I still can’t believe it actually, so many years later. I don’t know. It was one of those amazing things.

 

This was the seventies, right?

This was… yeah… I went in 1975.

 

What was Harvard like in 1975?

It was kind of… You know, it still had shades of the sixties when I was there, but kind of fading. I was there through the mid-seventies in America and the eighties. The eighties were very much an era of (Margaret) Thatcher and (Ronald) Reagan and all that, so in comparison the seventies were much more like the sixties.

 

At least the shadow of the sixties. What did you major in?

Literature but did a lot of film and photography courses as well.

 

Which is also very interesting to me because this is photography, this is not when digitization had come in such a big way. And you were at the centre of lot of intellectual discourse being in Harvard. What were the kind of conversations that were happening around photography, anything that you can remember? I am sure there was a lot going on because that was also the time when someone like Susan Sontag was writing On Photography. On Photography was published, actually, I think in 1975 or 76.

You know I never really took part in any intellectual conversations about photography.

 

Anything that you remember of how people were thinking of photography then or what was trendy?

What was prevalent in those days, I think, was street photography, documentary photography and it’s something that I also was very interested in and went into as opposed to commercial advertising or things that were set up. Which is also, I think, kind of leftover over of the sixties, because that was what was really prevalent in the sixties as well, that kind of photography. But my photographic education was very different in the sense that I took mostly independent courses so that I could use the facilities and the dark rooms to do my own work and projects. So I was always very…. I did a lot of independent studies which was basically fashioning my own projects and my own courses and I didn’t really learn photography, like, I never really learnt screenwriting. So I approached both of them kind of indirectly. And I was taught photography by a fellow student who was a stringer for The Boston Globe at the time, who was also a student at that time. And he taught me the basics— how to use the camera, how to print etc.

 

So you took more technical….

I took help for technical stuff and then developed my own kind of style and my own eye. I didn’t really do courses that taught me how to see or what to see.

 

 What did Harvard leave you with? What was your takeaway from Harvard?

My takeaway was huge. It opened my eyes; it gave me an entire world. It’s impossible, actually, to describe it because I went from Xavier’s to doing one text in an entire year to doing courses like Shakespeare’s tragedies. All his tragedies in one semester, all his romances in the other semester. Three thousand courses to choose from. Every semester you had a week where you could shop for courses— that’s what it was called, it’s still called that. Sort of a mall, you went into lecture halls to see which courses you wanted to take. It was huge— the breadth of knowledge, what you could study, how intensely you could study it. It was really amazing.

 

What about after Harvard? You stayed on in the US for a bit after Harvard.

Yes. I then went to graduate school at NYU (New York University). I was, actually, at Columbia’s film school but I transferred out to NYU because NYU had a dark room and I did cinema studies at NYU and, again, did a lot of independent courses in the photo department.

 

Okay. I have read that your decision to come back to India was more an emotional one, but didn’t you want to stay on for a little longer in terms of your work? How did you reach that decision? I read somewhere you quoted, actually, a very beautiful (T.S.) Eliot verse in some interview about coming back, about making a journey and then coming back and discovering a place anew. What were your concerns? Were they purely emotional or were they also professional? I mean, at that time was it easy for someone like you to do what you wanted to do there in the US as well?

See the thing is Mira’s (Nair) father’s nickname for me was ‘rudderless ship’. I had no clear career goals or plans. Itwas purely an emotional decision. I didn’t even know what I was going to do because I graduated in cinema studies. I knew I didn’t want to teach and I didn’t want to be a film critic. Everything I did I did because I wanted to do it. I liked studying films but it had no practical kind of consequence in terms of… and I might add that I only did all that because I was on a scholarship. Had my parents been paying high fees I would have probably been more practical. But I was lucky that I didn’t have to be practical and that I could, actually, follow my heart and do what I wanted, which is what I did. But at the end of those two years I said, “Now what am I going to do?” And so photography was almost… being a professional photographer was almost like a default kind of thing to do.  I love photography, it’s not that I didn’t, but to make it my career was because I didn’t want to teach and I didn’t want to be a critic. And I didn’t think I had the personality to be a filmmaker because at that time I thought, and rightly so, that filmmakers really have to go out there be extroverted, sell themselves, sell their projects, be kind of mini army generals putting together crew, putting together money. I just didn’t feel that I had that kind of personality and photography was just myself with one camera and a few lenses.

 

Tell me, you didn’t study screen writing, right?

No I didn’t study screen writing.

 

You mentioned that it was something you taught yourself, like photography in a lot of ways. How did you go about that? Did you read a lot of books on screen writing or…

No, no. Actually I didn’t even know that such a thing like the three act structure exists when I wrote Salaam Bombay!. My education as I said was very indirect but I am glad that it happened that way. For instance, literature taught me a lot of things about character, about point of view, about narrative. Studying films taught me a lot about how you construct a film, how you make a film and photography taught me about the visual world. So I approached screen writing through all those three strands when I wrote Salaam Bombay!.

 

Did you ever, at some point, go and read the different theories?

I did, and I am so glad that I didn’t start out that way because had I done it I would have not continued; because a lot of them are very confusing and very scary, in a way. Everything is so like, you have to reach your turning point at this page and that and that and that. It was all very complicated so I would not have made it as a screenwriter.

 

Have you ever referred to any of those theories?

Sometimes when I am stuck, I do but I have never actually gained much from it. Sometimes I wish that I had learnt it that way because sometimes it would be easier rather than trying to forge your own quirky path but it is what it is.

 

Mississippi Masala and Salaam Bombay!, I want you to talk a little bit about both the processes and how they might have been slightly different. I know that research was involved for both. And the director was the same. So tell me about how the processes were different for you.

Sorry, I will have to think about this because it has been so long… but I suppose when I wrote Mississippi Masala I was one film old but otherwise it was, I think, pretty much the same in the sense that Mira and I were working at it together.  What was really different is that we had this huge star, Denzel (Washington). Sorry, actually there were lots of differences. What was also very different was that I was writing about the African American community and that I felt very responsible about getting it right and very scared about not getting it right. Though having said that, Salaam Bombay!  had the same kind of responsibility of not being part of that world but representing that world and wanting to get it right.

 

Actually that was my next question. Salaam Bombay!  is based in Bombay but it’s the Bombay right outside where you lived, where you grew up and this is completely different. Is it important for you as a writer to find certain connects to the story you are writing? Even if only in your head?

As a writer you always I think unconsciously or consciously, most often unconsciously, bring your personality and everything into it, into the character.

 

Of course. So where did you find your points of connects for both these?

With the characters. It would sound strange to say because I am so different from Jay. I am so different from Mina in Mississippi Masala but made her an only child like I am. When you are writing you bring things in from your own life. I think everyone kind of does that.

 

 Did you work with Mira at the scripting stage, a lot, as well?

You know, we were friends before we started working together.

 

You guys met at Harvard, right?

Yeah we were both college students there. We were both undergrads there. We both got there, in this near miraculous way and we both couldn’t figure out how we had got there. So there were lots of points of contact, lots of similarities. We shared a lot of things. My process with her is very different than if it was a purely professional kind of thing with a director. We can’t rule out the friendship part of our lives together.

 

Which is probably the best part. Tell me what the success of Salaam Bombay! meant for you guys. It might have seemed like… you guys did make a great film but it was your first time and it was 25 years ago. How did the Oscar nomination happen?

I don’t know how it happened but it happened. At that time, because I was not a screenwriter and it was my first script, I didn’t really realize the import of what had happened. It didn’t really strike me as how amazing it was. It was fun and it was great but it was not like earth shattering like it would be now; because now I have been in the industry for 25 years, so if an Oscar nomination happened it would be a completely different deal than what it was in those days. In those days also nobody in India knew or cared about the Oscars. So Mira and I were there in L.A. and as Mira jokes, “The Indian government didn’t even send a telegram saying congratulations.” We were completely out there. Nobody knew. They used to broadcast the Oscars on Doordarshan early in the morning. Nobody knew, nobody watched. It is very different now, from when we were there.

 

How did you process that? How did you guys process that success?

Well, it gave me a career for one thing. Salaam Bombay!  gave me a career. I was always really surprised. I knew it would do well, but not as well as it did.

 

Salaam Bombay!  also gave you a lot of other things. Lifelong friendships, a lot of people in a production house you guys went on to form, the trust that came out of that. Tell me a little bit about those journeys.

The trust Salaam Baalak Trust is still running very successfully in Bombay and Delhi. Sorry, what else?

 

The friendships and the production house. Lot of people from the Jigri Dost production house are also from Salaam Bombay!.

Mulchand Dedhia who is the most famous gaffer in India now started out with Salaam Bombay!. A lot of people started out and stayed friends. The late Hassan Kutty became India’s most well known continuity person and assistant director; he started out with Salaam Bombay!.  Lots of friendships— Dinaz Stafford, Anil Tejani. And when Dinaz and I started Jigri Dost Productions to make Little Zizou, my debut film a lot of the same people came on board and that was lovely.

 

Where did the name come from?

Jigri Dost Productions is actually a name that Mira was thinking of calling her production company; which then became Mirabai Films. I had always remembered it and so when it came time I said this is the name I want.

 

It’s a lovely name, I am glad you used it. You have worked on two adaptations.

Actually more.

 

Yeah, but I wanted to compare these two: The Namesake  and Such a Long Journey. Both very popular books, read by lots and lots of people. I just want to understand how both these processes were different. The novels are different essentially.  How are the processes different? How were the challenges different? Did you work with the writer in either?

I didn’t work with the writer in either. Both of them stayed away from the script process and actually went and came down for the filming, for part of it. Jhumpa (Lahiri) was there in the America part of it not the Calcutta part. Both of them were very hands off with the script and I didn’t really work with them at all. Such a Long Journey  was my first adaptation and so I was very, very nervous about it, I had never done it before. It’s a very different book from The Namesake. It is full of incident, detail, plot, character. It is extremely dense and long and rich and amazing.

 

The Namesake  is almost the polar opposite of that because it’s a very sparse sort of novel. Almost something that would be thought un-filmable.

Absolutely.The Namesake  is much more interior. Though The Namesake  also spans generations and continents.

 

And journeys.

So they both have a sweep but I remember Such a Long Journey  being much, much harder to kind of condense into a 100 pages. The Namesake  was hard for other reasons. Finding out whose story it was, how to convert something that’s so interior into something that’s exterior, that’s cinematic. So those were the challenges of The Namesake.

 

Can you remember couple of things you changed for both?

I don’t think I changed much in Such a Long Journey. The Namesake, a couple of scenes were added that were not in the book. One is, after his father dies, Gogol’s father dies, in the film he goes to this barber in a black neighbourhood and gets his head shaved. It’s a lovely scene because Mira put this great rap music over it and then he comes back and at the airport his mother and sister are surprised to see him with his shaved head and his mother says, “You didn’t have to” and he says, “I wanted to.” That scene was new and for me it was a way of showing that he had come round to the Indian side of his life, that he felt a certain regret and a certain kind of… almost feeling guilty about his father’s death because he had not been great to his parents. He had kind of favoured his girlfriend’s parents over his own so that scene was new. I can’t think of what else.

 

There was a place. You guys changed the place.

Mira wanted to make it New York instead of Boston. Yeah, that was changed. And of course, also she (the character of Ashima Ganguli) is a singer in the film where she is not in the book.

 

Why was that?

Again Mira wanted it so that we could do things with music and just give her more of a personality rather than just being a housewife.

 

You studied literature. You are familiar with so many books. Can you, at the top of your head, think of some book that you feel like, ‘That would be a really difficult novel to adapt’?

You know, some novels are really about style, about the way they are written. For example, The God of Small Things. You could make a film of it but you would just be making the plot, you would not be translating the language and so it would not really be a true… it would not really be in the spirit of the book. I think novels where the writing is as important as the story, the way it is written, those are harder to translate.

 

Can you think of a couple of adaptations that have worked for you, which you haven’t written? Can you think of any that you liked and any one that you feel like was couldn’t live up to the book?

I have seen a lot of adaptations which I think are good films but I haven’t necessarily read the books that they were adapted from. I loved The Last Emperor and I remember actually studying it because I was actually doing Such a Long Journey  at that time and I actually watched that film and tried to study it to see  how they went from past to present etc. I remember really liking that adaptation. Of course Pather Panchali  is one of the most well known and most well beloved adaptations but again I haven’t read the original.

 

I want to come to Little Zizou, which given that  you felt for the longest time that you did not have the personality of a filmmaker, you started to make a film quite late in your career. What was the first idea, what was the first seed of idea? How did you start with the…

You know I came back from shooting. Not shooting, I came back from visiting the set of The Namesake  and I had some time on my hands and at that time there was a lot going on with fundamentalism around the world and it was (George  W.) Bush’s America— there was Osama (bin Laden) on one side and Bush on the other side. And in my own little Parsi community, there was someone very junior to both of them, trying to aspire to that level. It was out of a sense of frustration at the state of the world that I started on this. I also had never embarked on a Parsi kind of film before because I thought that, you know, the reality could never really match up to whatever I would put on film. But when I started I said, “Hey, you know, actually…” and then I made a list of everyone who could act in this film and there were lots of people at that time and I actually wrote parts for specific actors, including my two kids. I wanted to address this business about patriarchy, about religious fundamentalism. But I wanted to do it with humour and I wanted to make a local tale have universal resonance. So those were the ideas that went into Little Zizou.

 

You’d already documented your community in a book, which we will come to later. Was this, part of the impulse for this, also a sort of documenting your community or just the ways of your community, not documenting your community itself?

No, no. I don’t think that I think I could have made the story in any other community. The reason I did it in my own was two reasons. One is that I think that basically first you have to look at yourself before you can point fingers at others and secondly, for my first film I wanted something I knew really well in terms of a world. I didn’t have the confidence to make a first film like Mira made Salaam Bombay!  about a world that was actually out of our comfort zone. I didn’t want to do that because I didn’t think that I could. So I stuck to what I knew best, which was this community that I grew up in.

 

Tell me about where some of the characters came from?

I don’t know actually.

 

How many of them were amalgamations of people you knew and how many were direct translations of people you knew?

Well, the two antagonists, the newspaper editor and the religious nut were based on real people. My kids, I used a lot of their sibling rivalry and many things that I heard them say and do I put it into the script. Tknow Francorsi, one of the friends, I met him at a party and I loved the way he looked and when I found out he was half Parsi, half Italian that went into the script. The flight sim came out of a real situation, and I am not allowed to say the name but a dear friend had actually made a flight simulator like that. I think what was enjoyed most by the community was watching who was going to come next on screen.

 

That was practically enjoyed by even Bombayites who are not part of the community.

My husband used to say, because whoever I’d meet I would say, “I am making a film, you ought to be in my film.” My husband Firdaus would say, “Are you crazy? What kind of film are you making? Anyone, come on, come on. Be in my film.’” Anyone and everyone was in it. It was made with a great deal of love by the crew and the cast and it really was a very pleasant and great experience making the film.

 

What I also found interesting was, Such a Long Journey. I know you didn’t make your films to portray the community in any way or to document the community but how would you say the portrayals of the community were different in Such a Long Journey  and Little Zizou?

For one thing, I think, Such a Long Journey ‘s characters are more middle class. The building and everything is different from Little Zizou. I mean, no one is practicing black magic in Little Zizou . They are listening to ‘Hey Mambo’. Such a Long Journey , the main characters are about a family that has seen better times but are now facing hard times. Little Zizou  is not about hard times, in that sense. It’s more about a psychological hard time that the characters go through. So I think that’s the main difference that I would say.

 

I want to start talking about the book now. The first question I want to ask you is that, I believe that the exhibition that you are having, an exhibition of your photographs on the community, I believe that your edit for that is slightly different from the book.

Yes it is.

 

Two things I heard you mention. One is that—but I want you to explain more because I didn’t understand what you meant— that this edit is a little more courageous, if you will. Basically what you said was that you were not afraid of courting controversy with this edit and the other was that you also said that this was more about contextualizing the community in the larger social space, which perhaps the book was not. I wanted you to talk a little about both.

You know, when I did the book there was no visual documentation about the Parsis at all and when I did the book, also the first edition, the kind of issues that are confronting us today were not really at the forefront. So my book was a kind of non controversial document of the community. Also when I did the book I felt responsible to portray not every aspect, but as wide a breadth as I could. My mentor Raghubir Singh who started me on this journey was very eager that I document as much as I could, that I don’t stay in one area, just make it as broad as possible. When I did the exhibition, I was not concerned about representing the community; I just wanted it to be a visual journey. That’s it. So I chose photographs that I liked visually and that I thought would look great on a wall and that I wanted to see blown up. So the show is really a photographer’s show. It’s not really a Parsi photographer’s show. It’s a photographer who photographs Parsis putting up a show. The book is really about the community. It’s not about me, it’s about the community.

 

Tell me how you started, a little bit on how did the journey begin to…

For the book?

 

Yeah. For the book.

It began a long time ago when I just came back from NYU. Before that I had come back, I had taken a leave of absence, I’d bought a camera and I was photographing. Among the pictures I took, I took pictures of my family— aunts, uncles, grandparents. I met Raghubir Singh in 1982 and he is the one who saw my pictures and said, “Concentrate on this because you have a feeling, you have unique access etc.” That’s the time when I started out actively working towards the book. Then Salaam Bombay!  happened. I was a screenwriter. Photography kind of took a back seat. I got married and Firdaus, my husband, said—and his name is Firdaus Bativala, he hates it when people call him Firdaus Taraporevala. My husband said, “What are you doing with all this? Do something with it. It’s all going to just catch fungus and disintegrate if you don’t.” So then I started again putting it together and the first edition was published in 2000. Unfortunately, Raghubir Singh passed away a year before and so never saw the book, which I really regret. I hope he can see it from where ever he is because he was a huge, huge help to me.

 

Of course the access, the feeling is there and all of that but it can be very tricky for an artist to document their own community. It’s so common for photographers now to work with communities, they look for communities to work with. They go out find a community and document them. I am sure you have seen a lot of that work. For example, even someone like Ketaki Sheth, she has done work with the Siddi community. I could think of so many. Karan Kapoor has done work with the Anglo Indian community. How is it tricky in ways for you to be documenting your own community? How did you see your own journey vis-à-vis theirs?

I am just trying to think. I think the tricky part is not the photographing; it’s what you choose to show afterwards. That’s the tricky part.  Because I have such an affectionate feeling for my own community, at heart, I really don’t want to offend anyone or hurt anyone. Other than that, I can’t think of any kind of land mines that I negotiated.

 

What about the access? You spoke about it, how much access did you get from your own community?

I got fantastic access. Everyone was very warm and welcoming and open.

 

And you also shot in the Agiarys.

You are allowed to actually, except you are not allowed to shoot the central fire which I didn’t ever do. At that time, I was also allowed to shoot at the Towers of Silence. Now it’s a complete no-no. I would never be allowed.

 

Why is that?

Now people have become very paranoid about Towers of Silence. It has become a very contentious issue and so now I would never be allowed. There are certain things that have divided the community very bitterly. One is the issue of who is or is not a Parsi, and the other is how we dispose of our departed. These are very emotive issues that people feel very strongly about one way or another.

 

What about the response from the community? Has it been uniformly…

Even when the book was out, because we are such a… (laughs ) you know we love to fight, we love to argue. So I was expecting anything after the book came out. But I was very pleasantly surprised that it was received so warmly and so well. Same with the exhibition.

 

Tell me something. What are some of your continuing concerns about the community and would you want to continue to document the community? If yes, in what ways would the journey be different? What else would you like to explore?

You know, I will always continue photographing. Whether it will become anything or not, for my own, for myself I will continue photographing because now I do have a document that spans 35 years so there would be no point to my stopping it. If I continue, it would become even richer. So I will always continue. I don’t know if I will do a book or show or anything else. I might just do it for myself. So that will continue. I don’t think I will make any more movies on Parsis, now I am going to move on.

 

Tell me something, what has being a writer brought to your photography? Do you feel like it helps you to build a narrative or tell your story, in any way?

No because I don’t do photo stories that well. All my photographs are like single shots but within those single shots, when I first started photographing I did them only for myself. I did these five pictures from India. I had printed them small and I wrote a story around each one of them. It wasn’t a photo story or photo essay. It was a single picture but within that single picture I created a story of the people in that picture. So in that way I can spin stories, imaginative stories of people in photographs. In that way maybe it helped but I don’t know how else.

 

You actually spoke a little bit about it earlier; how has photography helped in writing? The other way round.

A lot, in terms of screenwriting because it helps me to think visually which I think is essential if you are a screenwriter.

 

What about film making?

Same. I am not saying cinematography for film and still photography are same. Not at all. I could never operate a film camera but I do know my lenses and I do know what I want it to look like and I do know light and things like that.

 

How do you edit your work? Your photography work, how do you edit it? Do you take help from other people or do you take opinions from other people for your edits?

I pretty much do it on my own. Though of course Ketaki is a very old friend and a very dear friend, so I show her. I show my husband. But basically on my own. It’s just a question of getting it down, down, down. You start large and then you edit, and it’s smaller and then you edit and it’s smaller. That’s the way I do it. That’s the way I did the show.

 

Raghubir had a very studied approach to photography whereas someone like Raghu Rai always spoke about it being in the instinct of the moment and being very… where do you stand on this? What is your approach to photography?

I think more instinctual because Raghubir, you are right, it wasn’t a studied approach but Raghubir was very into that you need to know the history of photography, you need to know the traditions, you need to know (André) Kertész, you need to know (Eugène) Atget, you need to know this that and the other. Which I actually kind of glanced through but I don’t know it as well as I should. I instinctively like certain works and I instinctively don’t like certain work. That’s how I approach photography. The work that I instinctively liked very much and still do is the work of (Henri) Cartier-Bresson because for me the way he used the medium, for me, it’s the way… What is so unique about photography for me is that it can really capture a moment in a way that films can’t do and books, words can’t do. So for me that is the joy of photography, is capturing a moment and capturing it and rearranging the world to make it make sense stylistically. All of it comes together to form content, that is what I find exciting about photography.

 

Other than Bresson who are some of the photographers who have either influenced or..

Robert Frank’s The Americans. (Robert) Doisneau, who again did a lot of street work in Paris. Atget, Kertész, Brassaï. A lot of French photographers.

 

Have you ever, consciously, paid a tribute to any picture that you really loved or any photographer that you really loved with any of your work? Okay, I will give you an example. A friend of mine who is a photographer, went to shoot a film in Benaras and the first shot that he took was of a boy leaping from…

Like Raghubir?

 

Yes. So I was wondering if you’ve done tribute somewhere or emulated something.

I am too uneducated to do these tributes (laughs ).

 

Pictures are for the uneducated really.

Yeah. I would be thrilled if I could actually do a tribute to someone like Bresson, to Raghubir, but the situation hasn’t arisen.

 

I wanted you to name a couple of films that have either professionally or, simply, personally really moved you.

All the films of (Federico) Fellini. I saw his films when I was an undergraduate at Harvard and they really spoke to me, they really moved me, they really touched me. The characters I felt I knew, they were like Parsis to me. So, I would say Fellini.

 

I can see that. Little Zizou  was about your concerns, of course you wanted to speak about the themes of the film, the community which was a second layer. I also felt like—I don’t know if you tried to do that—it was also a sort of portrait of a much lesser seen Bombay, at least to a viewer. I don’t know if that was the intention.

Yes, absolutely it was an intention that these were locations that were usually not seen on film.

 

Also the locations, which perhaps is great because they’ve been documented. I don’t know long they will look the way they look. You came to Bombay, it was an emotional decision but the city has changed so much in the last 20 odd years. Have you taken well to the way it’s been changing?

Not really. No.

 

What are your concerns about the city today?

I am concerned that we don’t have any sense of heritage, that we are breaking everything down for money and very soon there is going to be nothing left and these are buildings that once they are gone we are never going to get them back. I think it’s very unfortunate that even the ones that we say are heritage… It’s the most ridiculous thing that you keep a facade and then you will have some skyscraper shooting up from the middle of a beautiful old bungalow, that’s our idea of heritage. Everything is about development and everything is about money and its going to be a horribly ugly city in a very short time if we continue this way.

 

Do you think its character is changing in other ways as well, not just architecturally or externally but its character is changing internally as well?

I think so. From what I read in the papers, there is horrific stuff going on. I don’t know if it’s just Bombay or all over India. I don’t know, maybe you didn’t read about it when I was growing up but it just seems to be… every day is more horrific than the next in terms of what comes in our newspapers.

 

But it’s also interesting for us. Do you feel that in the last 20 years or 25 years… has there been any incident that you feel the city has changed around? In the way that 9/11 changed New York, in a lot of ways, not just the fact that the towers are no longer there but it’s a slightly different city.

Of course I think all the bombing and the riots completely changed the character of the city. The city that I grew up in was very different in terms of tolerance. I mean there were riots but now people have really closed themselves into their various communities. I grew up in a different city which was genuinely cosmopolitan, Bombay was.

 

What endures? What is something that survived through the years in Bombay?

All those gyms at Marine Lines. Parsi Gym, Hindu Gym, Islam Gym, Christian Gym, Catholic Gym.

 

I don’t know if they are the same anymore but they have survived. Final question— what’s next for you? Are you going to make another film, I know it’s not going to be about Parsis. You said that.

I am hoping to. I’ve been working on something for the past few years but it’s a very large subject, it would be a large film. I want to get the script right before I take it out. So that’s something I am doing. I am also writing something for Mira and an American studio, that I can’t talk about right now.

 

Have you found the personality of a filmmaker or have things changed?

I think I have adapted the personality to suit my own personality and I have realized that you don’t have to be a certain way to be a film maker, that’s what I have realized.

 

Also things have changed. A lot has changed for filmmakers. It’s not so difficult anymore.

That’s true. I have certainly become an addicted filmmaker and I certainly want to do it again.

 

I hope you make a lot of films. Tell me, I know I said that was the last question but I’ll ask you one more, why did you never think of writing a book?

I have thought of it and it’s something I want to do. It’s on my bucket list.

 

It’s on your bucket list. Will it be fiction or non-fiction?

Fiction. That’s a huge commitment. I don’t know how writers do it, it takes years and you’re completely isolated and you have to have so much confidence in what you are doing. At the end of it, it may never be published. It’s a very courageous thing to do.

 

But it’s also a fantastic journey. It’s a lonely journey but once you take a few steps, it’s also a fantastic journey. Well, I hope you write that book and make that film. Thank you.

Thank you.

 

Little Zizou by Sooni Taraporevala is available to watch free online on Hulu

(Geographical limitations apply, not available in the Indian sub-continent)

 

Ayushmann Khurrana – TBIP Tête-à-Tête

Ayushmann Khurrana, Bollywood Class of 2012, is one of those bright young actors that makes us feel hopeful about the Hindi film industry. Talented, dapper, hard-working, sorted, he has done theatre, been a video and radio jockey, acted in TV soaps, participated in reality TV shows and writes poetry. But there is also a little something more about him. He is a happy guy. And that sense of joy overrides his slight discomfort at being interviewed, his slight anxiety about how he is answering questions. Here is a young man who knows his mind, accepts the highs and lows of his life and reminds us that the only thing worth savouring is the journey.