"I was innocent when I made Maqbool. I had little knowledge of various aspects of filmmaking," said ace filmmaker Vishal Bhardwaj. ''I made changes in almost every part of the movie, an adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth. When it went to the Toronto Film Festival, people questioned me on these changes.
Thankfully, they appreciated the movie. Had they not, my career could have come to an end then,'' Bhardwaj said speaking at the session on 'The difference between writing books and writing for a visual medium' at the second day of Odisha Literary Festival.
''Before my first film Makdee, I had made two short films for which I had written the script. It is then when I realised how bad I was at writing scripts. So I started looking for books because I realised writing for movies was nothing less than a craft, '' the seven-film-old Vishal added while recalling his initial days as a screenplay writer.
Echoing similar sentiments was popular Odia filmmaker Nirad Mohapatra. ''These are two different forms of writing and stand no comparison, for the simple reason that the book is a finished product and the screenplay, all said and done, is only intermediate stage, a blueprint which has no independent existence,'' said Mohapatra.
Quoting John Lucas Goddard, Mohapatra said: ''A film must have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order. The truth, however, is that most filmmakers don't work that way today. For reasons both artistic and commercial, they have a script in their hands before the process of actual shooting begins.''
As compared to cinema, he said, literature operates at a different level. ''Each reader forms his own corresponding image of the characters and settings and views it with a mental filter entirely his own.
It is through his active mediation that the literary work comes alive. Cinema, on the other hand, operates through concrete images and sounds and has a tendency to encourage passivity. Although, like literature cinema too, employs the same elements such as plot, character, sitting, dialogue and also shares it's tendency to manipulate time and space, the experience of the two are very different.
The root difference, some believe, is that in cinema, one extracts the thought from the image and in literature, the image from a thought,'' added Mohapatra, whose debut film 'Maya 'Miriga' was declared the second best feature film in 1984 at the national level.
The filmmaker said the first commandment of screenplay writing is to think visually. He further said that nothing that can be seen or heard, that is, nothing that can not be captured by the camera or the soundrecorder should not get into a script. ''Flower language is a no-no in films. No metaphors, similies, poetry, or mellifluosness. In other words, no artistry,'' he said, adding that this makes screenwriting far more of a craft than an art.
Vishal, on the other hand, lamented that despite being a difficult job, screenplay writers are a neglected lot in the industry. ''There is no money and respect for them in Bollywood. Hence, we do not find very good scriptwriters in the industry today,'' he said. Stating that a film is written on two tables - the writing table and the editing table - Vishal spoke in great details about his movies like Omkara, Kaminey, Blue Umbrella and his last release Saat Khoon Maaf.
Speaking on the occasion, Anik Dutta, maker of Bengali film Bhooter Bhabisyat which was widely appreciated, recalled his journey from writing for ad films to scriptwriting for his debut movie. ''I had no budget for hiring a scriptwriter, so then I had to do it myself. Only then I realised how difficult the job was,'' he quipped.