Interview: Abhishek Chaubey – “I look at film as an art. I am not an activist”
What made you start with screenwriting?
I grew up in various small cities of Jharkhand and Bihar. My family is from Uttar Pradesh and I was born in Ayodhya. My mother’s family is from Lucknow. I spent a lot of time in UP during my childhood, but I lived in what was then Bihar, and is now Jharkhand, as my father was posted there. My family is primarily a service-oriented one, but there was always a lot of talk of film in the family, and we would often go to watch films. Those were, of course, hardcore Bollywood films. Watching films remained a big thing for me even when I went to boarding school. And as I was growing up, it had started going beyond where my family was with films, which is to say that I had started looking beyond just thinking about the hero or a few songs. I had started deconstructing stories. Most of the films that we make in India follow a formula so whenever there was a film that even slightly broke the formula, I remember getting very excited and thinking about how and what they exactly did. In school, I was more inclined towards the humanities. I remember we used to have an option to either write an essay or write a story, and I always chose to write stories. I enjoyed writing them. They were, of course, very silly, childhood stories. I think when I went to boarding school in Hyderabad, my world started opening up. Until the 12th grade, I was a UP boy living in Bihar. But in Hyderabad, there was suddenly a new language called Telugu and there were people from different communities and backgrounds. In that environment, the excitement of watching films only grew. I spent most of my weekends watching films. In the mid-1990s, Hyderabad had single screens but since it was a big city, it also had a couple of places that showed English films. So, for the first time, I watched some English films. At that time, I couldn’t make head or tail of the American accent, and couldn’t follow anything the characters were saying. Yet, I remember watching TheFugitive (1993) and it blew my mind. I was like, “What is this!”
Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here
After that, I went to Delhi to study further and got into Hindu College. That’s when this pipe dream of doing something related to films started shaping up. I became a member of the film society in college, and started doing theatre. I also chose my friends carefully. I made friends with people who were interested in world cinema. Till that point in time, for me, there was no concept of a film which is not in English or Hindi, because I used to think, “How can one watch a film in a language they don’t understand?” But then I got the opportunity to watch some very good international films. I was already interested in the grammar of a film at a subconscious level, and after watching those films I started getting aware of the grammar in a conscious way.
In the late 1990s, mass communication was becoming a thing, so now I could tell my parents that I was doing a legitimate course, and the plan was not just to go to Bombay, and sleep on the footpath. So I came to Bombay and joined Xavier’s – XIC (Xavier Institute of Communications). To be honest, it wasn’t much of a course back then. It was rather sketchy. More than learning about film, the course offered me a place to stay and a chance to get acquainted with the city. Till today, I haven’t done a formal course on screenwriting or filmmaking. I have learnt largely by watching films, and of course, by learning on the job. After the course, I tried to find my way into the industry. The first couple of years were a struggle. The thing is I came here to be a director, and the importance of screenwriting wasn’t so clear to me back then. It was only after working for a few years that I realised that screenwriting is vital in my journey of what I want to do.
Was there an internal conflict or a certain rebellion in you that made you see the world the way you do?
I am generally not a very loud person. I’d say there was a quiet rebellion in me. All of us come from a very conservative society. And it is conservative to a fault. I always had a problem with that. I found our customs and our prejudices quite hilarious, and I was profoundly disturbed by some of them. I come from an orthodox, upper caste family, and to see those prejudices being played out in the real world, by people who are your loved ones, was frankly quite disturbing. I don’t know how anyone can miss it. If you are a good person, you are at the receiving end of it, and if you’re a North Indian, male and upper caste, damn you if you can’t stop it, and if you don’t feel disgusted by it. I think some of my films do reflect that in an unconscious manner. However, at the same time, I am also an aesthete. I don’t think of film just as a means to express my dissatisfaction towards the world. I look at film as an art, I am drawn towards the aesthetics of it, and I am not an activist. Of course, I am conscious and worried about certain things around me, and my films might reveal some of those things, but in equal parts, I make films because I am obsessed with the art and the craft of cinema. The importance of film is in its beauty more than its commentary about the world. That beauty itself reflects a stance and a worldview. And in beauty, prejudices don’t exist. That’s why we need art. I don’t think we need art to create commentaries; we need it to create beauty so that people can absorb it.
Now, you are better known as a director than as a screenwriter. In India, success is equated with directors but rarely with screenwriters. Some people remove themselves from the act of screenwriting once they make it big as directors. Where do you stand on that?
So far, that hasn’t happened to me. But never say never. You don’t know where life takes you. But I don’t see how it’s possible for me not to be involved with the writing of a film that I direct. It’s very hard to see where screenwriting ends and direction starts. I have heard a lot of people say in interviews, “I had to stop thinking as a screenwriter; I had to think like a director.” Frankly, I don’t know how that works. Essentially, what you’re doing as a screenwriter is putting down a story with audio-visual cues. When you are in the initial stages of a film when you are thrashing out a story, it is stupid to think about whether a shot should be taken from the top angle or not. You need to think about the theme of the story, the plot and what is happening to the characters. That’s the DNA of the film, and you can’t play around with it. But as the screenplay gets more solidified, when you’ve got your beats in place, you might get some visual ideas about how to shoot a particular scene. At a later stage like that, it’s fine. But to be honest, you are still screenwriting it. So, screenwriting and direction are very closely linked.
You have collaborated with other screenwriters. Particularly, Sudip Sharma and Vishal Bharadwaj. What is it like to collaborate with other writers, who, in some cases, are also directors?
Screenwriting is something that can be done completely alone, but it also works beautifully in collaboration. Even in the West, it happens often. I mean, Paul Schrader is one of the greatest writers, but a Martin Scorsese film is a Martin Scorsese film whether it’s Schrader writing it or anybody else. Having said that, a lot of times in Mumbai, directors take screenwriting credit because they have hung out with the screenwriter while he was developing the script. That doesn’t happen so much in the West. The contracts are not like that. Collaborative writing is also a feature of the form that you are dealing with. In poetry, for instance, it is impossible. With novels, some writers are indebted to their editor – there are some legendary editors like that. So, when it comes to structure, theme, and characters, there are a lot of discussions that you could have with others when it comes to screenwriting. One thing I know for sure is that there is no one right way to go about it. I can tell you how I work, but it may not work for you. I spend a lot of time with my writers, thrashing out the nuts and bolts of a story, and I try to arrive at a point where we have a story that works for us: The essentials, the building blocks are in place; we have a sense of flow, a sense of theme and a sense of mood as well. It’s important to know what kind of film you are making. Structure is very important to me. The mystery of a story lies in its structure. I spend a lot of time doing the structure. Once we are done with that, we go our own ways, and they send the material to me, and I keep making corrections. About 70% of the time goes in this. I delay the actual writing process to the nth hour. By this time, things are kind of airtight. Now, all that remains to be done is to write the scene.
This is how I operate with some of the younger writers. With every person the process is different. With Sudip, I had a lot more to contribute to Udta Punjab because that was the first time we were working with each other, and were still finding each other. On Sonchiriya, I did not take the screenplay credit because, by that time, we had achieved such a great rapport that I did not do anything more than some minor changes to the screenplay, and he wrote it entirely.
With Vishal, I had to do the beat sheets, scenes and everything. Also, he writes by hand and he used to write dialogue. With Vishal, it was his script most of the times that we were writing. With Ishqiya and Dedh Ishqiya, I could take a lot of liberty because I was also directing the films. But on his scripts, if I had to make a change, I had to address it to him before changing anything.
Most of your films are such that I can imagine, at a script level, they would have been extremely difficult to sell in Bollywood. And yet, not only did you manage to make them but also found mainstream success with some of them. How did you achieve this rare and stellar feat?
Yes, people walked out of the narration of Udta Punjab, and all those things happened. But I think what you call an achievement is not much to take credit for because we do what we can. This is what I came here to do, this is what I know, and this is what I like to do. In a way, it is a conscious call, but it’s not born out of the fact that I desperately want to do something different. It’s more to do with the fact that if I don’t do it this way, I won’t be able to sleep at night. Filmmaking is very hard. You sometimes have to work 18 hours a day. It takes a toll on your body. And if you are not happy with what you are doing, it’s a terrible place to be. If you just want to make money, then filmmaking is not a thing.
Anybody who tried to get such films made in or before the 1990s would have found it very hard. Anyone going against the grain at that time would have found it difficult to attract funding. Until the 1950s and a part of the 1960s, there was a genuine cinema movement in this country. There was Guru Dutt, Bimal Roy and others as well who were making middle-of-the-road cinema. People think it was the era of social consciousness, but social consciousness is there in commercial films as well. Every run-off-the-mill dacoit film would say, “Ladkiyon ki izzat karo” (Respect women). It’s not social consciousness that was special about these films – it was the aesthetic. Then, in the 1970s and 1980s, you had a beautiful place for some of these smaller films. They even had their own set of stars such as Naseeruddin Shah, Shabana Azmi, Smita Patil and Om Puri. If I had lived in that era, those are the films I would have made or gravitated towards because the other option was too mainstream. If you are a Manmohan Desai then it would be silly for you to make this kind of cinema, but for those of us who were or are not, that was the place to be; because I can’t do the Manmohan Desai kind naturally.
By the time it came to my era, maybe because of what had happened in the industry over the past few decades, that niche was available, and fortunately, I could get in. In my work, some features of mainstream cinema are present. For instance, I have always had a problem with song and dance, but I do use music. I do use humour as well because everyone can identify with it. A laugh is a laugh. I know that people from the younger generation detest the concept of narration, but I don’t mind narrating my films. These are some adjustments that I have made in order to make my films happen. It’s a happy alliance because these are things I enjoy as well. I really enjoy a great set of visuals cut to a great piece of music. I mean, who doesn’t? So, I am able to do that, and therefore I can excite the imagination of a particular actor or producer.
Does working with stars compromise your vision of storytelling?
When a big star is attached to your film, there are way higher budgets to play with. And it’s not just their fees, but a star enhances the overall production budget of a film, which is very helpful. I am a visual director, and I like to design things, so the extra budget that a star brings with them is useful. And it’s not that I have 20 pieces of additional equipment lying on the set. I like to direct within the budget. But yes, I have shot according to light. I like to believe there is at least some sense of visual design to my films, and that costs money.
Now, to answer your question about a creative compromise, let’s be honest, there is some compromise. It’s impossible for any star to completely leave aside their image. That can’t happen. So, it is not possible to make a film in India without any compromise. But you need to try and minimise the compromise and also know what to compromise on.
Can you walk me through the journey of conceptualising, writing and making Udta Punjab?
I was still editing Dedh Ishqiya and I wanted to do something with drugs. I had some idea of people across the country using and abusing drugs. I had a notion that the war on drugs cannot be fought. It’s a losing war. An individual can win a war like that by overcoming the addiction, but you can’t fight the system. And that’s what I wanted to make a film on. That’s why the drug users in Udta Punjab win but people who are fighting the menace lose. I had this vague idea and I had only recently met Sudip (Sharma) and taken to his writing. I had read the script of NH10 – it was not even shot at the time – and I had quite liked it. We got along really well and used to hang out together. I told him my idea and he came up with the idea of doing it in Punjab. It made sense to me immediately. After this, we took another six months – it involved a lot of research, and Sudip spent truckloads of time on it. He is terrific with research. Now, I have professional research people involved in my projects, but with Sudip, I never felt the need. From there, my characters took shape, and the story kept evolving for the next many, many months. For about a year, we were only posting index cards on the board. But by the time we finished this process, we were absolutely clear about what was happening in the film. So, then we did not take much time. Sudip is very fast, and he started writing the screenplay. Both of us had a feeling that we had a problem in the third act, but we just told ourselves that it would take care of itself. By the time we reached the third act, we realised there was a genuine problem and if we didn’t do something about it, this was going to become a four-and-a-half-hour film. So, we got back to the drawing board and changed a lot of things. Initially, the character that Kareena played was a man, but that’s when we changed it into a woman and gave her and the cop some sort of an equation. Similarly, we changed many other things as well. Once we were done with the script, getting funding for it was very difficult. I went to a lot of places and some people were genuinely interested. But unlike Ishqiya and Dedh Ishqiya, Udta Punjab is very bleak. Some people told me that I’d have to make it with a bare minimum budget of, say, five crore rupees and a very small unit and stuff like that. So, I started thinking of the film like that. Had it happened that way, it may have been a grittier and much more intense film. But then I met Vikram Motwane and once it went to Phantom, everything changed, and we had it made with a much better budget and star cast as well.
In writing Omkara, you and Vishal set out to adapt none other than Shakespeare. How daunting was the task?
I read Shakespeare in college because I’m a literature student. When I read the first half of the script of Omkara, I was very impressed because Vishal had not studied Shakespeare, and he was never daunted by the idea of Shakespeare. He was impressed with the basic conflict of the story. Before Omkara, he had done one other Shakespeare adaptation, Maqbool, which he wrote with Abbas Tyrewala. He wanted to do another one and we kept discussing it. In his first draft of Omkara, a lot of the mood of Othello was already there. At that point, Vishal had a film with Aamir Khan called Mr Singh and Mrs Mehta, which imploded in production. Suddenly, he didn’t have a film lined up and had the time to get to this. Around the same time, he met Ajay Devgn, who offered to work with him if he did another Shakespeare. It was a nice coincidence of sorts. Now, Ajay only had dates in January, and we were in November. I was worried that Vishal had a chance to make a really big film but hadn’t written anything, and it could all be a mess. We had two choices: Set the story either in Delhi University politics or make it a western UP gangster film. We decided on the latter, which was closer to what I had in mind. Omkara had a unique journey, and I have never been able to work like that before or after. We spent a week In Meerut, meeting a few gangsters and made a note of some wonderful lines, characters and behaviours. From there, we immediately went to Mussoorie, and with all the data and the world that we had imagined, we wrote the film in 18 days! That’s nuts; it’s insane. Finishing a script like Omkara in 18 days is exceptional. Our backs were against the wall, and it just happened. If we try it again, I am not sure it will happen. So this cannot be used as a reference!
Tell me about Kaminey? Also, do you agree that Kaminey is one of the weaker films you’ve written?
Vishal had once conducted a workshop in Africa and someone had got his script to the workshop, which Vishal had really liked. It was set in the slums of Nairobi. So, when it came to Kaminey, Vishal called up that guy and asked him if his film had been made. It wasn’t and Vishal officially bought the rights from him, and we adapted it. That guy is also credited in the film.
I wouldn’t say I’m too unhappy with the film. I think its last third has a problem. But I’m a writer on the film, and Vishal’s vision for Kaminey was different from what he had for Maqbool and Omkara. With Kaminey, he wanted to have fun. It was never supposed to have gravitas. Also, he wanted to explore the technical side of filmmaking. It is so sharp, the way it looks, the way it moves. Even the writing is like that – witty, punchy. It was meant to thrill on the surface instead of shaking you from within and I don’t have a problem with that. If that’s what we want to do, that’s what we want to do. We wrote it to the brief. I was there only on the first draft of the film because I was getting into the prep of Ishqiya. Sabrina Dhawan came on board to help Vishal with the later drafts, and Supratik Sen was the other writer on it.
If there’s anything that can be called “Indian zany”, it is Ishqiya. Tell me about it.
I was looking for a film to direct myself because I had worked with Vishal and written with him for a number of years. I was a little tired of the process and Vishal was tired of me too. So, he told me it was time I made something of my own. I was looking for a subject and I had a story I had written long back so that idea evolved in my head. I wanted to do something like a comedy noir. I wrote down the basic idea as a three-pager and pitched it to Vishal. He immediately loved it. But the writing process went crazy because Vishal and I were so much in love with our craft, writing crazy scenes and dialogues, that somewhere we lost sight of the plot. We had some hilarious scenes, but it was really not going anywhere. At best, it would have been a zany art film, which I wouldn’t mind, but it would have bombed at the box office for sure. We thought of moving on to some other project but I really believed in the characters. Vishal got Sabrina on board, and I worked with her for a month. She cracked the idea of Krishna’s (the character played by Vidya Balan) past and her husband’s back story. The fact that her husband is alive and not dead was Sabrina’s idea. That sort of completed the film and got it back on track. Then I rewrote almost the entire script – this went on for about a year and a half. For that year-and-a-half, I did not make a single rupee, and it was a painful time. But then, fortunately, the film got made and it became what it did.
What is success for a screenwriter?
Easy availability of funds for the next film. Maybe even a raise. Money is definitely a factor. Also, general appreciation. Peers, colleagues, friends, if they genuinely appreciate my work that means something to me.
What is failure for a screenwriter?
I experienced some of it with Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola though I don’t think it is as badly written as it is made out to be.
Name a few films and filmmakers who have influenced you.
There are various kinds of influences. When it comes to film grammar and aesthetics, it’s French masters like Truffaut or Godard or other European masters such as Bergman.
For me, the mood and the tone of the film are very important. Sometimes, they are the most important things for me. Sometimes, themes are not as important for me. When it comes to those, Kubrick and the Coen Brothers are huge influences. Fargo is my all-time favourite.
I also really admire a lot of Indian filmmakers who have managed to do alternative cinema. It is notoriously difficult to do that in Hindi cinema. I respect a lot of people from parallel cinema from the 1950s to the 1980s. Especially Shyam Benegal. Bhumika is one of my all-time favourite films.
Mihir Chitre is the author of two books of poetry, ‘School of Age’ and ‘Hyphenated’. He is the brain behind the advertising campaigns ‘#LaughAtDeath’ and ‘#HarBhashaEqual’ and has made the short film ‘Hello Brick Road’
What made you start with screenwriting?
I grew up in various small cities of Jharkhand and Bihar. My family is from Uttar Pradesh and I was born in Ayodhya. My mother’s family is from Lucknow. I spent a lot of time in UP during my childhood, but I lived in what was then Bihar, and is now Jharkhand, as my father was posted there. My family is primarily a service-oriented one, but there was always a lot of talk of film in the family, and we would often go to watch films. Those were, of course, hardcore Bollywood films. Watching films remained a big thing for me even when I went to boarding school. And as I was growing up, it had started going beyond where my family was with films, which is to say that I had started looking beyond just thinking about the hero or a few songs. I had started deconstructing stories. Most of the films that we make in India follow a formula so whenever there was a film that even slightly broke the formula, I remember getting very excited and thinking about how and what they exactly did. In school, I was more inclined towards the humanities. I remember we used to have an option to either write an essay or write a story, and I always chose to write stories. I enjoyed writing them. They were, of course, very silly, childhood stories. I think when I went to boarding school in Hyderabad, my world started opening up. Until the 12th grade, I was a UP boy living in Bihar. But in Hyderabad, there was suddenly a new language called Telugu and there were people from different communities and backgrounds. In that environment, the excitement of watching films only grew. I spent most of my weekends watching films. In the mid-1990s, Hyderabad had single screens but since it was a big city, it also had a couple of places that showed English films. So, for the first time, I watched some English films. At that time, I couldn’t make head or tail of the American accent, and couldn’t follow anything the characters were saying. Yet, I remember watching TheFugitive (1993) and it blew my mind. I was like, “What is this!”
Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here
After that, I went to Delhi to study further and got into Hindu College. That’s when this pipe dream of doing something related to films started shaping up. I became a member of the film society in college, and started doing theatre. I also chose my friends carefully. I made friends with people who were interested in world cinema. Till that point in time, for me, there was no concept of a film which is not in English or Hindi, because I used to think, “How can one watch a film in a language they don’t understand?” But then I got the opportunity to watch some very good international films. I was already interested in the grammar of a film at a subconscious level, and after watching those films I started getting aware of the grammar in a conscious way.
In the late 1990s, mass communication was becoming a thing, so now I could tell my parents that I was doing a legitimate course, and the plan was not just to go to Bombay, and sleep on the footpath. So I came to Bombay and joined Xavier’s – XIC (Xavier Institute of Communications). To be honest, it wasn’t much of a course back then. It was rather sketchy. More than learning about film, the course offered me a place to stay and a chance to get acquainted with the city. Till today, I haven’t done a formal course on screenwriting or filmmaking. I have learnt largely by watching films, and of course, by learning on the job. After the course, I tried to find my way into the industry. The first couple of years were a struggle. The thing is I came here to be a director, and the importance of screenwriting wasn’t so clear to me back then. It was only after working for a few years that I realised that screenwriting is vital in my journey of what I want to do.
Was there an internal conflict or a certain rebellion in you that made you see the world the way you do?
I am generally not a very loud person. I’d say there was a quiet rebellion in me. All of us come from a very conservative society. And it is conservative to a fault. I always had a problem with that. I found our customs and our prejudices quite hilarious, and I was profoundly disturbed by some of them. I come from an orthodox, upper caste family, and to see those prejudices being played out in the real world, by people who are your loved ones, was frankly quite disturbing. I don’t know how anyone can miss it. If you are a good person, you are at the receiving end of it, and if you’re a North Indian, male and upper caste, damn you if you can’t stop it, and if you don’t feel disgusted by it. I think some of my films do reflect that in an unconscious manner. However, at the same time, I am also an aesthete. I don’t think of film just as a means to express my dissatisfaction towards the world. I look at film as an art, I am drawn towards the aesthetics of it, and I am not an activist. Of course, I am conscious and worried about certain things around me, and my films might reveal some of those things, but in equal parts, I make films because I am obsessed with the art and the craft of cinema. The importance of film is in its beauty more than its commentary about the world. That beauty itself reflects a stance and a worldview. And in beauty, prejudices don’t exist. That’s why we need art. I don’t think we need art to create commentaries; we need it to create beauty so that people can absorb it.
Now, you are better known as a director than as a screenwriter. In India, success is equated with directors but rarely with screenwriters. Some people remove themselves from the act of screenwriting once they make it big as directors. Where do you stand on that?
So far, that hasn’t happened to me. But never say never. You don’t know where life takes you. But I don’t see how it’s possible for me not to be involved with the writing of a film that I direct. It’s very hard to see where screenwriting ends and direction starts. I have heard a lot of people say in interviews, “I had to stop thinking as a screenwriter; I had to think like a director.” Frankly, I don’t know how that works. Essentially, what you’re doing as a screenwriter is putting down a story with audio-visual cues. When you are in the initial stages of a film when you are thrashing out a story, it is stupid to think about whether a shot should be taken from the top angle or not. You need to think about the theme of the story, the plot and what is happening to the characters. That’s the DNA of the film, and you can’t play around with it. But as the screenplay gets more solidified, when you’ve got your beats in place, you might get some visual ideas about how to shoot a particular scene. At a later stage like that, it’s fine. But to be honest, you are still screenwriting it. So, screenwriting and direction are very closely linked.
You have collaborated with other screenwriters. Particularly, Sudip Sharma and Vishal Bharadwaj. What is it like to collaborate with other writers, who, in some cases, are also directors?
Screenwriting is something that can be done completely alone, but it also works beautifully in collaboration. Even in the West, it happens often. I mean, Paul Schrader is one of the greatest writers, but a Martin Scorsese film is a Martin Scorsese film whether it’s Schrader writing it or anybody else. Having said that, a lot of times in Mumbai, directors take screenwriting credit because they have hung out with the screenwriter while he was developing the script. That doesn’t happen so much in the West. The contracts are not like that. Collaborative writing is also a feature of the form that you are dealing with. In poetry, for instance, it is impossible. With novels, some writers are indebted to their editor – there are some legendary editors like that. So, when it comes to structure, theme, and characters, there are a lot of discussions that you could have with others when it comes to screenwriting. One thing I know for sure is that there is no one right way to go about it. I can tell you how I work, but it may not work for you. I spend a lot of time with my writers, thrashing out the nuts and bolts of a story, and I try to arrive at a point where we have a story that works for us: The essentials, the building blocks are in place; we have a sense of flow, a sense of theme and a sense of mood as well. It’s important to know what kind of film you are making. Structure is very important to me. The mystery of a story lies in its structure. I spend a lot of time doing the structure. Once we are done with that, we go our own ways, and they send the material to me, and I keep making corrections. About 70% of the time goes in this. I delay the actual writing process to the nth hour. By this time, things are kind of airtight. Now, all that remains to be done is to write the scene.
This is how I operate with some of the younger writers. With every person the process is different. With Sudip, I had a lot more to contribute to Udta Punjab because that was the first time we were working with each other, and were still finding each other. On Sonchiriya, I did not take the screenplay credit because, by that time, we had achieved such a great rapport that I did not do anything more than some minor changes to the screenplay, and he wrote it entirely.
With Vishal, I had to do the beat sheets, scenes and everything. Also, he writes by hand and he used to write dialogue. With Vishal, it was his script most of the times that we were writing. With Ishqiya and Dedh Ishqiya, I could take a lot of liberty because I was also directing the films. But on his scripts, if I had to make a change, I had to address it to him before changing anything.
Most of your films are such that I can imagine, at a script level, they would have been extremely difficult to sell in Bollywood. And yet, not only did you manage to make them but also found mainstream success with some of them. How did you achieve this rare and stellar feat?
Yes, people walked out of the narration of Udta Punjab, and all those things happened. But I think what you call an achievement is not much to take credit for because we do what we can. This is what I came here to do, this is what I know, and this is what I like to do. In a way, it is a conscious call, but it’s not born out of the fact that I desperately want to do something different. It’s more to do with the fact that if I don’t do it this way, I won’t be able to sleep at night. Filmmaking is very hard. You sometimes have to work 18 hours a day. It takes a toll on your body. And if you are not happy with what you are doing, it’s a terrible place to be. If you just want to make money, then filmmaking is not a thing.
Anybody who tried to get such films made in or before the 1990s would have found it very hard. Anyone going against the grain at that time would have found it difficult to attract funding. Until the 1950s and a part of the 1960s, there was a genuine cinema movement in this country. There was Guru Dutt, Bimal Roy and others as well who were making middle-of-the-road cinema. People think it was the era of social consciousness, but social consciousness is there in commercial films as well. Every run-off-the-mill dacoit film would say, “Ladkiyon ki izzat karo” (Respect women). It’s not social consciousness that was special about these films – it was the aesthetic. Then, in the 1970s and 1980s, you had a beautiful place for some of these smaller films. They even had their own set of stars such as Naseeruddin Shah, Shabana Azmi, Smita Patil and Om Puri. If I had lived in that era, those are the films I would have made or gravitated towards because the other option was too mainstream. If you are a Manmohan Desai then it would be silly for you to make this kind of cinema, but for those of us who were or are not, that was the place to be; because I can’t do the Manmohan Desai kind naturally.
By the time it came to my era, maybe because of what had happened in the industry over the past few decades, that niche was available, and fortunately, I could get in. In my work, some features of mainstream cinema are present. For instance, I have always had a problem with song and dance, but I do use music. I do use humour as well because everyone can identify with it. A laugh is a laugh. I know that people from the younger generation detest the concept of narration, but I don’t mind narrating my films. These are some adjustments that I have made in order to make my films happen. It’s a happy alliance because these are things I enjoy as well. I really enjoy a great set of visuals cut to a great piece of music. I mean, who doesn’t? So, I am able to do that, and therefore I can excite the imagination of a particular actor or producer.
Does working with stars compromise your vision of storytelling?
When a big star is attached to your film, there are way higher budgets to play with. And it’s not just their fees, but a star enhances the overall production budget of a film, which is very helpful. I am a visual director, and I like to design things, so the extra budget that a star brings with them is useful. And it’s not that I have 20 pieces of additional equipment lying on the set. I like to direct within the budget. But yes, I have shot according to light. I like to believe there is at least some sense of visual design to my films, and that costs money.
Now, to answer your question about a creative compromise, let’s be honest, there is some compromise. It’s impossible for any star to completely leave aside their image. That can’t happen. So, it is not possible to make a film in India without any compromise. But you need to try and minimise the compromise and also know what to compromise on.
Can you walk me through the journey of conceptualising, writing and making Udta Punjab?
I was still editing Dedh Ishqiya and I wanted to do something with drugs. I had some idea of people across the country using and abusing drugs. I had a notion that the war on drugs cannot be fought. It’s a losing war. An individual can win a war like that by overcoming the addiction, but you can’t fight the system. And that’s what I wanted to make a film on. That’s why the drug users in Udta Punjab win but people who are fighting the menace lose. I had this vague idea and I had only recently met Sudip (Sharma) and taken to his writing. I had read the script of NH10 – it was not even shot at the time – and I had quite liked it. We got along really well and used to hang out together. I told him my idea and he came up with the idea of doing it in Punjab. It made sense to me immediately. After this, we took another six months – it involved a lot of research, and Sudip spent truckloads of time on it. He is terrific with research. Now, I have professional research people involved in my projects, but with Sudip, I never felt the need. From there, my characters took shape, and the story kept evolving for the next many, many months. For about a year, we were only posting index cards on the board. But by the time we finished this process, we were absolutely clear about what was happening in the film. So, then we did not take much time. Sudip is very fast, and he started writing the screenplay. Both of us had a feeling that we had a problem in the third act, but we just told ourselves that it would take care of itself. By the time we reached the third act, we realised there was a genuine problem and if we didn’t do something about it, this was going to become a four-and-a-half-hour film. So, we got back to the drawing board and changed a lot of things. Initially, the character that Kareena played was a man, but that’s when we changed it into a woman and gave her and the cop some sort of an equation. Similarly, we changed many other things as well. Once we were done with the script, getting funding for it was very difficult. I went to a lot of places and some people were genuinely interested. But unlike Ishqiya and Dedh Ishqiya, Udta Punjab is very bleak. Some people told me that I’d have to make it with a bare minimum budget of, say, five crore rupees and a very small unit and stuff like that. So, I started thinking of the film like that. Had it happened that way, it may have been a grittier and much more intense film. But then I met Vikram Motwane and once it went to Phantom, everything changed, and we had it made with a much better budget and star cast as well.
In writing Omkara, you and Vishal set out to adapt none other than Shakespeare. How daunting was the task?
I read Shakespeare in college because I’m a literature student. When I read the first half of the script of Omkara, I was very impressed because Vishal had not studied Shakespeare, and he was never daunted by the idea of Shakespeare. He was impressed with the basic conflict of the story. Before Omkara, he had done one other Shakespeare adaptation, Maqbool, which he wrote with Abbas Tyrewala. He wanted to do another one and we kept discussing it. In his first draft of Omkara, a lot of the mood of Othello was already there. At that point, Vishal had a film with Aamir Khan called Mr Singh and Mrs Mehta, which imploded in production. Suddenly, he didn’t have a film lined up and had the time to get to this. Around the same time, he met Ajay Devgn, who offered to work with him if he did another Shakespeare. It was a nice coincidence of sorts. Now, Ajay only had dates in January, and we were in November. I was worried that Vishal had a chance to make a really big film but hadn’t written anything, and it could all be a mess. We had two choices: Set the story either in Delhi University politics or make it a western UP gangster film. We decided on the latter, which was closer to what I had in mind. Omkara had a unique journey, and I have never been able to work like that before or after. We spent a week In Meerut, meeting a few gangsters and made a note of some wonderful lines, characters and behaviours. From there, we immediately went to Mussoorie, and with all the data and the world that we had imagined, we wrote the film in 18 days! That’s nuts; it’s insane. Finishing a script like Omkara in 18 days is exceptional. Our backs were against the wall, and it just happened. If we try it again, I am not sure it will happen. So this cannot be used as a reference!
Tell me about Kaminey? Also, do you agree that Kaminey is one of the weaker films you’ve written?
Vishal had once conducted a workshop in Africa and someone had got his script to the workshop, which Vishal had really liked. It was set in the slums of Nairobi. So, when it came to Kaminey, Vishal called up that guy and asked him if his film had been made. It wasn’t and Vishal officially bought the rights from him, and we adapted it. That guy is also credited in the film.
I wouldn’t say I’m too unhappy with the film. I think its last third has a problem. But I’m a writer on the film, and Vishal’s vision for Kaminey was different from what he had for Maqbool and Omkara. With Kaminey, he wanted to have fun. It was never supposed to have gravitas. Also, he wanted to explore the technical side of filmmaking. It is so sharp, the way it looks, the way it moves. Even the writing is like that – witty, punchy. It was meant to thrill on the surface instead of shaking you from within and I don’t have a problem with that. If that’s what we want to do, that’s what we want to do. We wrote it to the brief. I was there only on the first draft of the film because I was getting into the prep of Ishqiya. Sabrina Dhawan came on board to help Vishal with the later drafts, and Supratik Sen was the other writer on it.
If there’s anything that can be called “Indian zany”, it is Ishqiya. Tell me about it.
I was looking for a film to direct myself because I had worked with Vishal and written with him for a number of years. I was a little tired of the process and Vishal was tired of me too. So, he told me it was time I made something of my own. I was looking for a subject and I had a story I had written long back so that idea evolved in my head. I wanted to do something like a comedy noir. I wrote down the basic idea as a three-pager and pitched it to Vishal. He immediately loved it. But the writing process went crazy because Vishal and I were so much in love with our craft, writing crazy scenes and dialogues, that somewhere we lost sight of the plot. We had some hilarious scenes, but it was really not going anywhere. At best, it would have been a zany art film, which I wouldn’t mind, but it would have bombed at the box office for sure. We thought of moving on to some other project but I really believed in the characters. Vishal got Sabrina on board, and I worked with her for a month. She cracked the idea of Krishna’s (the character played by Vidya Balan) past and her husband’s back story. The fact that her husband is alive and not dead was Sabrina’s idea. That sort of completed the film and got it back on track. Then I rewrote almost the entire script – this went on for about a year and a half. For that year-and-a-half, I did not make a single rupee, and it was a painful time. But then, fortunately, the film got made and it became what it did.
What is success for a screenwriter?
Easy availability of funds for the next film. Maybe even a raise. Money is definitely a factor. Also, general appreciation. Peers, colleagues, friends, if they genuinely appreciate my work that means something to me.
What is failure for a screenwriter?
I experienced some of it with Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola though I don’t think it is as badly written as it is made out to be.
Name a few films and filmmakers who have influenced you.
There are various kinds of influences. When it comes to film grammar and aesthetics, it’s French masters like Truffaut or Godard or other European masters such as Bergman.
For me, the mood and the tone of the film are very important. Sometimes, they are the most important things for me. Sometimes, themes are not as important for me. When it comes to those, Kubrick and the Coen Brothers are huge influences. Fargo is my all-time favourite.
I also really admire a lot of Indian filmmakers who have managed to do alternative cinema. It is notoriously difficult to do that in Hindi cinema. I respect a lot of people from parallel cinema from the 1950s to the 1980s. Especially Shyam Benegal. Bhumika is one of my all-time favourite films.
Mihir Chitre is the author of two books of poetry, ‘School of Age’ and ‘Hyphenated’. He is the brain behind the advertising campaigns ‘#LaughAtDeath’ and ‘#HarBhashaEqual’ and has made the short film ‘Hello Brick Road’
Denial of responsibility! Techno Blender is an automatic aggregator of the all world’s media. In each content, the hyperlink to the primary source is specified. All trademarks belong to their rightful owners, all materials to their authors. If you are the owner of the content and do not want us to publish your materials, please contact us by email – [email protected]. The content will be deleted within 24 hours.