It’s a journey, and not a destination. From script to screen is the road full of potholes, so profess thirteen Bollywood directors in an insightful compilation of “life stories, and valuable experiences” of both box-office purveyors and experimental craftsmen. All of them learnt on the job while some of them unlearnt after studying the baby steps from the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune, realising all that knowledge gained watching world masters at work is useless and redundant unless one incorporates the texture and colour of the soil on which they stood.
Collating stories of painful, even humiliating struggles, journeys, experiences before kissing moderate to big success is a singular achievement, even if at times one feels the yarns have been allowed to go unchecked too far. But then therein also lies a message that needs grabbing by new aspirants to the coveted crown of thorns—one moment success lifts to the clouds and failure licks desert sands. While providing insights into the mind and craft of diverse style of film-makers, the author tries to distinguish between old-school practitioners and new-age film technocrats about execution of scenes on the sets or location—those who still rely on instinct and then instruct or those who run to video-assists before okaying the shot.
Scripting, cinematography, direction, editing are the underlying factors of this multi-dimensional narrative dealing with various aspects of filmmaking. Also while probing the minds to put together subtle hidden nuances between the competent and the unusual, Rakesh Anand Bakshi has, consciously or otherwise, random as well varied experiences that can easily serve as a handbook for anyone dreaming of becoming a film-maker. The book has material that no acting or film making school can provide. As Bakshi spells out in his compact and matter-of-fact Introduction: “Film-making can be akin to a military exercise. The director can be a general who disguises himself as a common soldier (Prakash Jha, Santosh Sivan) to dig creative trenches in the minds of his creative collaborators and contributors. He is the ultimate illusionist.”
What is also unusual about Bakshi’s text is that instead of only probing into the craft, their evolution from being first-timers to achievers in their respective styles and choice of subject, it explores their family backgrounds, education, memories of growing up years and the extent to which they sought to transfer them into at least their initial dream projects. Why someone like Subhash Ghai, who had been a student of acting at the FTII and was together with Rajesh Khanna as one of the winners of United Producers Talent Context, chose to move from acting to direction. Or the wild balloon, Mahesh Bhatt who holds the belief that “in a good film the director is invisible. The presence of a director is a sign of a bad film.”
Three other insights worth pondering over come from three diverse style of directors: Govind Nihalani who began as Shyam Benegal’s cinematographer; Ashutosh Gowariker who moved from acting to direction and in his third attempt made the unforgettable Lagaan after two flops; Santosh Sivan whose breakthrough into cinema began with still photography in Kerala, and who believes: “cinematography is an extension of photography” and whose first parley behind the camera was Aamir Khan’s forgotten debut film Raakh.
Space constraints prevent one from listing out other individual insights of Anurag Basu, Farah Khan, Imtiaz Ali, Prakash Jha, Tigmanshu Dhulia, Vishal Bhardwaj and Zoya Akhtar that make the book a compendium for every aspirant. A bonus comes in the form of an interaction with production designer in the form of an Epilogue.