Director Homi Adajania has delivered merely three films in the last 14 years—Being Cyrus, Cocktail and Finding Fanny. His latest, Angrezi Medium, is a sequel to the 2017 film Hindi Medium. Homi says he has a life outside of films which keeps him busy. “I am living life to the fullest which is a full-time job. I have kids and love spending time with them. I love adventure sports. I love scuba diving, which I spend time doing.
I used to teach scuba diving in Lakshwadeep years ago. Now,I do it at Galapagos and the Andamans. I read and write and come back, and make a movie. When I find a script I want to make a film, I trouble my producers. If I feel I haven’t reached where I want to [in the film], I pull the plug. According to my producers, I am the most expensive resource who does nothing,” says Homi.
Working on Angrezi Medium has made him feel lighter, says the filmmaker. “The experience of working with Irrfan has been life-changing. I think somewhere we take our lives too seriously. He was undergoing treatment [ for cancer] and there were good days and bad days. It was a different experience and not the standard structure of shooting. He has such incredible resilience and spirit that we were feeding off his strength rather than him feeding off ours. Sometimes, I look back and wonder how we made the movie. Hats off to the producer (Dinesh Vijan). I don’t think anyone would have the guts to do it.”
While Homi has mostly done urban-centric stories, Angrezi Medium will see him venture into a different space. “I have a fixed process. The characters in a film are important for me. I love that process of building and loving the characters, and handing it over to an actor and he or she can take it somewhere else,” says the director, who went on a recce to meet people to draw inspiration for the film. “I travelled to Jaipur, Udaipur, Bikaner, Jodhpur and a lot of other places, and talked to people and took in their nuances.
I met a rich businessman in his 60s and I asked him if he had been abroad. He had the money but he said he didn’t feel the need to go outside the country. I found him to be exactly like Champak’s (the protagonist in Angrezi Medium) character. His son told me he has travelled to Thailand but he wants to go to Europe.
In the film, Champak (Irrfan) asks his daughter, ‘Why do you want to go to Europe?’ She replies saying she wants to go to Europe for the quality of life it offers. The exposure these children have forms an interesting dynamic,” says the 48-year-old. He further elaborates on his filmmaking process: “Tomorrow, if I want to make a Japanese film, I will go through this again. It’s not about language. The universal core of emotions has nothing to do where human beings come from. I draw my characters from relationships.”
An adventurer at heart, Homi says he will never make fan action film. “I am interested in the complexities of the human mind. We are a bizarre species. The way we behave is unpredictable, interesting and complex. I don’t think I can do film remakes either. But I can do an adaptation,” he asserts.
About his upcoming work, Homi shares, “I have written a story for the web titled Saas Bahu aur Cocaine. It’s about matriarchal family living in a crumbling haveli where the men do nothing. The women have a embroidery business and also run a drug cartel in South Asia. I am also going to make another feature film. But it is under the scripting process at the moment.”