HYDERABAD: He says he started off on his own when he was only a kid. He moved to the city of Nawabs from Bengaluru and since then has been doing everything on his own. This may seem like a story of any other youngster who has moved out of home to make it on his own.
But Subhakar’s story is not just any other.
After working on 10 corporate films single-handedly, he went further to experiment and made an independent 90-minute-long film, Darwin’s Daughters, all by himself – from the start to the finish.
“I sat and wrote the script of Darwin’s Daughters in four days in 2012, created Facebook account, picked actors in two months, shot the film in 23 days without hiring any technician or equipment - just me and a camera and the actors” he tells us adding that he edited the film in 2013 in 65 days at home. Sound and music are being done now,” he informs.
Opposing the fact that man is a social animal, this filmmaker believes that when one is on his own, the learning is quite different he says, “When one works alone on a film, the process – from writing the script to editing the footage – helps the filmmaker become a better scriptwriter. Your writing becomes sharper, more economical, more purposeful. You also stop writing like a self-indulgent scriptwriter and become a filmmaker who can also foresee how the film can be edited and which sound track can be added to it while you are still writing,” he shares adding that it also helps a filmmaker in improving the film’s content. “I experienced the benefits of working alone while shooting short corporate films. I wanted try it out on a full length indie film before I could move on to anything bigger,” he says.
And the process of filmmaking is catharsis for Subhakar who also spent some time as a writer and director of original plays for theatre. “I love film for the control it offers me as a filmmaker. It is free-spirit detached from every place. It gives you the chance retake a shot, the chance to move content by simply moving a camera, the power of editing that gives me a chance to invent a new narrative within the original story, the greatness of sound and music that elevates a scene that otherwise feels ordinary. All this makes film my favourite medium,” he elaborates.
Ask him what interests him and he begins, “Good books, honest writing, original music, kind women, long walks, free runs, people-watching, automobiles, farmhouses, Iowa fields, old American diners, large windows, open spaces, outdoor-living, ‘sohbet’ - a real conversation, Amtrak, coastal highways, Bob Dylan, Beyerdynamic headphones, pure water,” and the list is unending.
The independent filmmaker also believes that web is the future of filmmaking. “Facebook will help you find anyone you want to work with, Amazon will help you buy any equipment you want, eBay will help you sell it back once the job is done, YouTube will help you recover your costs one day and PayPal will help do all transactions online and transparently. And these are just a beginning,” he opines.
Darwin’s Daughters is going to be screened for a single show per day for a week or two at Inox Movies at GVK One in Banjara Hills from June 26.
About Darwin’s Daughters
It is about playing the game in order to stay in the game.
“Darwin’s Daughters is going to release on June 26 and it may seem like just another urban romance. But, at its core, it actually is about man’s need to survive and the beauty in surviving everything that tries to steal from us our right to happiness and our very right to remain alive,” he explains further. The film is a seamless edit between two stories separated by a generation - one is a romance between a man and woman in the past and the other a father-daughter tale from the present.
What’s lined up
Doing this film as a one-man-crew made me an ideal candidate for the next film I will take up – another indie in English with a bigger budget and a small team to be shot in USA with American/multiethnic actors for US release for my newly-founded American film company, Facta Films.