QUEEN’S ROAD: Q, the maverick Bengali film director behind movies like Gandu and Tasher Desh, is now directing a film based on the Bangalore quizzing scene of the 1980s.
A coming-of-age tale of four college quizzers, the movie has completed principal shooting.
The story for the film, titled Naman B, comes from S Ramachandran, a Bangalorean ex-quizzer who now lives in London. He says the story is entirely true.
Ramachandran happened to be friends with Steve Barron (director of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), who is now the executive producer for Naman B. The two developed the script and approached Q to direct the film.
“I was kicked about the fact that this happened in the late ‘80s, a period I know well. The story is about my time, when we lived a slower life. Many of my friends were hardcore quizzers. Also, the script was excruciatingly funny,” Q told City Express.
The main characters are geeks, he says, at a time when geeks weren’t cool.
“They’re extremely bright but also awkward and hormonally challenged. What’s great about quizzers is that they know an awful lot about many things, but it’s also quite silly that they don’t know what to do with all that information, because it’s basically trivia,” he says.
The film makes a departure from Q’s avant-garde style, but he is delighted about how easy the process was.
“It was a different atmosphere and aesthetic that I was exploring. However, it is still very much my kind of film — all about dodgyness and satire, and talking about otherwise unheroic and traditionally insignificant characters,” he says.
The titular character Naman is played by Shashank Arora, fresh off the Cannes film festival hit Titli.
Naman’s quizmates are played by actors Tanmay Dhanania, Vaishwat and Chaitanya, all found after a laborious casting process that took close to a year and a half. “It was quite an organic process, and we sent out casting agents to the US and UK to find these guys,” says Q.
But it’s the fifth character that Bangaloreans are going to be excited about, played by Siddharth aka ‘Sid’ Mallya.
Portraying the role of Ronnie, Sid is the rich, good-looking quizzer, who is all set to lock horns with Naman and team.
“Sid put in a lot of effort into developing his character and was chilled out to work with. He contributed positively to all the workshops we held,” says Q.
While Naman B sees Q make a mainstream film for the first time, he’s also busy working on his independent projects. He is currently finishing post-production on Ludo, a horror-gore fable, as well as a documentary on Nabarun Bhattacharya, the writer.
However, the director can’t help but feel a little jaded in his views of contemporary indie cinema in India.
“The term indie is being appropriated wildly and with impunity. I have a serious problem with that. But generally speaking, I feel that we have been producing much more decent cinema than we were 10 years back, which is great. However, distribution is still a big problem,” he says.