‘Kasaravalli said no one would fund a biopic made on him’

Author OP Srivastava says the book is an extension of his biopic film on Kasaravalli which he made in 2014.

BENGALURU: Banker-turned-filmmaker O P Srivastava launched his book, Life in Metaphors: Portraits of Girish Kasaravalli, recently at the Bengaluru International Film Festival. The 61-year-old, who considers Kasaravalli as his mentor, has interviewed filmmakers, film critics, his family and actors who have worked with the director.

Srivastava says the book is an extension of his biopic film on Kasaravalli which he made in 2014. “I felt the film couldn’t justify his life and work. I couldn’t capture all the information I had in the 84-minute film. So I thought of working on a book,” he mentions. Life in Metaphors: A Portrait of Girish Kasaravalli, was Srivastava’s first film and it won him a national award for the best biopic in 2015. He has always been passionate about films. At the age of 57, he quit the post of general manager of a private bank in Mumbai to pursue filmmaking. “I was born in Lucknow.

I grew up watching films and was especially fascinated by the new wave cinema started by Mrinal Sen and the others. Since I was from a middle class family, I couldn’t take it up then. I took up exams and got into the banking sector,” he says. But he had made a pact with his family that once he buys a home in Mumbai and his children grow up, he would follow his dreams. “I had also told my wife on the first day of our marriage that she’s my second love. My first love is cinema.  She’s been living with it ever since,” he laughs.

While he was still working, he took up a filmmaking course in 2012 at Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), where he met Kasaravalli at one of the lectures. “He showed us his film Dweepa and I was mesmerised. He became my role model. I introduced myself to him as a banker after the lecture and told him about my passion for filmmaking, but he didn’t seem convinced. It took a while before he agreed to have me as his assistant on his sets. We had an agreement that I would come to the sets when he would give me a call,” he says. At that time, Kasaravalli was working on two of his films on U A Ananthamurthy and Adoor Gopalakrishnan. “After filming for the day, I would request him to allow me to talk Ananthamurthy and Gopalakrishnan. I would interview them and shoot with the same cast and crew on my own,” he adds.

Two years later, when he was looking for a subject to make a film on his own, he couldn’t think of anything better than a biopic on Kasaravalli. He says, “I was surprised that a man of such a calibre is not known outside Karnataka. When I asked him if I could make a biopic on him, he said no one would fund it. Also, being a new filmmaker, finances were an issue. But I told him I could manage on my own. The biopic got the national award and my family also realised that I was serious and not just someone who was spending his wife’s money to make films.”

Srivastava has made three more films – YKT Mumbai, A Few Days, which is based on brain cancer, and another on Alzheimer’s which is yet to be released.

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