'Kahaani' is not just the story of Kolkata and a pregnant woman, it is also the story of the new Bollywood directing sensation, Sujoy Ghosh. The 45-year-old has a background that could work as a plot for any thriller. His father was a taxi driver and his mother, a psychiatrist, who eloped to get married.
His grandfather fled Nepal to Kolkata after accidentally murdering someone, also to become a driver who eloped with his rich employer’s wife. As Bollywood nears its century, the Noughties that began as the decade of young frame makers continues to surprise with boldness and big bucks. They had all played different roles before their Bollywood incarnations: Sujoy Ghosh left a job with Reuters to write the script for Jhankaar Beats. Shoojit Sircar, the new celebrity director of Vicky Donor, the surprise hit of 2012, was a theatre man and the film-maker behind the Amitabh Bachchan commercials on Gujarat tourism.
His first film 'Yahaan' (2005) didn’t do well. Then 'Vicky Donor' happened. His new film Johnny Mastana aka Shoebite stars Bachchan and is due for release in 2012. Tigmanshu Dhulia, the Allahabad-born director of the other hit of 2012 Paan Singh Tomar, starring Irrfan Khan, started as a casting director with Bandit Queen. The director of Saheb Biwi Aur Gangster and the grandson of a freedom fighter, Dhulia has now completed the script on Begum Samru — the 18th century nautch girl, mercenary soldier and the eventual ruler of Sardhana near Meerut — and will start filming with Rani Mukherjee, who had turned down Paan Singh Tomar.
Ghosh, Sarkar and Dhulia may not necessarily be rebels, but they are part of an entirely new starcast behind the camera. The themes are smaller and tighter: a search in Kolkata; an athlete turning into a dacoit; a woman using sex for revenge; an ordinary young man who becomes a sperm donor. These directors are churning out films that are commercial successes and receive critical hosannas.
They are not afraid: characters spew abusive language in Delhi Belly; B-town newcomer Paoli Dam does bold erotic scenes in Vivek Agnihotri’s Hate Story. Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! director Dibakar Banerjee tightened the urban shot in Love Sex Aur Dhokha on MMS clips going viral. His next film is the political thriller Shanghai that stars Abhay Deol as a Tamilian. Challo Driver, a romantic comedy by Vickrant Mahajan — who has written, produced and directed it — will hit theatres this summer with a new cast that includes him.
Siddharth Roy Kapur, CEO, UTV Motion Pictures, dubs it the “most exciting time” for young filmmakers. “Never before has it been so good,” he says.
The Blockbuster Blitz
His enthusiasm is not unfounded. Big blockbusters are no more the exclusive portfolios of the big guns. They are being delivered with amazing regularity by first-time filmmakers. Band Baaja Baaraat, the unsuspecting 2011 hit starring Ranveer Singh and Anushka Sharma, brought Delhi’s middle-class culture in focus. It was conceived by the young Maneesh Sharma while working as an assistant with Yash Raj Films. Aditya Chopra smelt the film’s true potential. He went ahead, and the rest is history.
It was a film totally against type, though one thing it had in common with other recent hits is the middle class theme. The new directors themselves come from middle class backgrounds, the post-liberalisation boom in India having created a wider, larger audience. They also created new stars from the middle class: former VJ Ayushmann Khurrana who played the lead in Vicky Donor impressed the producer John Abraham so much that he has been signed on for his next home production, Hamara Bajaj, also to be directed by Shoojit Sircar.
Vicky Donor also launched the career of television actress Yamini Gautam. Parambrata Chatterjee and Sastwata Chatterjee who co-acted with Vidya Balan are looking forward to Bollywood careers after Kahaani. They also have a longer shelf life thanks to the new trend of multi-contracts: Aditya Chopra signed up Anushka for a three-movie contract in 2008; her first film was Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi. The next one, Band Baaja Baaraat, was the beginning of her journey to stardom.
The Dhinchak Twist
In the words of Habib Faisal, the scriptwriter for Band Baaja Baaraat, the film worked because it had the “dhinchak twist”. By which he means a simple love story with something new thrown into it. The director of Do Dooni Chaar is in his second stint on the chair; he is busy with making Ishaqzaade, his next, starring Arjun Kapoor and Parineeti Chopra. Speaking on the sets, its obvious he knows he is not being a loud mouth paying lip service to ‘dhinchak’, except while gorging on Lucknawi food. “Clichés work and will continue to work, but you have to give them a twist. That’s why you see so much ‘dhinchaking’ today. It started off with TV which gave urban audiences a taste of small towns. Dabangg or Singham worked because of their ‘dhinchak’ quality.”
Like his BBB scriptwriter Maneesh, Faisal is a Delhi boy, with a professor for a father. The Rishi Kapoor-led Do Dooni Char, a bittersweet satire on the middle-class desire to buy a car, was born of some of his own personal experiences. What marks this new wave of directors is their need to turn the spotlight on homegrown, return-to-roots hypothesis and place before the audience their milieu and its facets, giving their work authenticity. “We wanted to show working-class Delhi in a different light, and not the usual Punjabi stereotypes,” Faisal says.
Director-actor camaraderie is a must. “There is certainly an energy that the young bring to the fore. Working with Ranveer and Anushka was like hanging out with friends.” Maneesh, who is now calling Ranveer a friend, had, at first, turned him down. “Today, it is impossible to imagine Band Baaja Baaraat without Ranveer,” laughs Maneesh.
The Risk-Takers
Unlike Maneesh, Nila Madhab Panda took an ‘Indie’ route. While he had no Yash Raj waiting to roll out a carpet for him, he realised the best thing to do was to find a like-minded producer. The small film with a big soul turned out to be I Am Kalam with an unheard-of cast, using Dr APJ Kalam as a metaphor for hope.
Hailing from a small town in Odisha, Nila had little idea how to negotiate the zigzag alleyways of Bollywood. But what Nila does know is that it would have been difficult to make a debut with such a concept film a few decades ago. “In the 90s, would I Am Kalam have worked? I doubt it very much,” he says.
Doubts are a professional risk in film-making. As a kid, Abhinay Deo, director of the hit Delhi Belly, started out with none. At 15, he wanted to make his first film about a man at war with himself. His father, the famous Marathi theatre actor Ramesh Deo, was impressed. His brother Ajinkya Deo would go on to become a popular Marathi film actor while Abhinay, unimpressed by tinsel town, would get behind the camera to shoot more than 300 ad films until Aamir Khan chose him to direct Delhi Belly. He worships Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and Satyajit Ray, not necessarily in that order. Abhinay rewrote the script to emerge as one of the hottest new directors of Bollywood. He is one of the 30-odd celluloid impresarios who are turning the silver screen into gold along with Sohan Roy, Luv Ranjan, Bejoy Nambiar, Parvin Dabas and Nila Madhab Panda. Small budgets and big hits are catching on as cinema gets corporatised in tinsel town: Kiran Rao’s Dhobi Ghat was made for Rs 10 crore and Delhi Belly for about Rs 18 crore. Paan Singh Tomar was made within Rs 4.5 crore and earned Rs 17 crore. Likewise, Shaitan which cost Rs 4.5 crore snagged a profit of Rs 10 crore.
Girl Power
Today’s hatke young female directors are Kiran Rao, Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti. Loveleen Tandon is hatke too, but she’s more Hollywood. But they actually follow the tradition of the earlier women directors who made ‘different’ films: Mira Nair, Deepa Mehta, Aparna Sen, Sai Paranjpye, and Kalpana Lajmi.
The new B-town entertainment from a woman director started with Farah Khan’s maiden film and 2004 superhit starring Shah Rukh Khan, Main Hoon Na . Then she delivered the biggest hit of 2007, Om Shanti Om — another SRK thriller. Her goodwill and respect in the industry was revealed in the star cast: apart from the biggest names in the industry in the main roles, a song had all the legendary names in B-Town from Dharmendra, Hema Malini, and Govinda, to Sridevi and Urmila Matondkar shaking a leg: after all Farah was one of Bollywood’s most successful choreographers.
Unlike the men, the successful new women directors have strong Bollywood family ties like the big actors. Kiran Rao is the formidable Aamir Khan’s wife, while Zoya Akhtar is the daughter of legendary lyricist and poet, Javed Akhtar who along with wife Shabana Azmi is Bollywood royalty. Film historian Anupama Chopra recounts an interesting anecdote in The New York Times on how the new women directors are ‘big girls’ in their own right. On the sets of her first venture, Luck by Chance starring her brother Farhan Akhtar in the lead, 39 year-old Zoya Akhtar was having problems with a camera operator who was constantly turning to Farhan for instructions. After this happened twice, Zoya took him aside and told him she is the director of the film. ‘If you can adjust to that, it’s great. If not, we can’t work together.’ She told him.
Flustered, the cameraman said, ‘No, no, you are like my sister.’ Zoya said: ‘I’m not your sister, I’m your director. Can you handle it?’ The man did as he was told. Recently, the London-based Anu Menon, while on break from domestic duties and in between playing momma to her young daughter, made London Paris New York, a transcontinental love story featuring Ali Zafar and Aditi Rao Hydari.
A Brave New Order
The new directors are not waiting for the past to tell them anything. Time was when movie moguls like Subhash Ghai, Ramesh Sippy, Raj Kanwar and Rajiv Rai struck gold with all they touched. Along the way, some faded while some changed with the times–or are at least trying to–like Sanjay Leela Bhansali and Rajkumar Santoshi. But this is clearly the age of out-of-the-box makers who are only mirroring the society they represent. The difference is scripts now are realistic and believable. “This change was inevitable. How long will the public be stuck in the 1990s? Times have changed and films have to change with that,” says Anurag Kashyap.
Exactly when did this change of guard happen? Why now? Post-liberalisation, public tastes have changed and become more urbanised. The largest segment of movie-going India resides mostly in cities and likes multiplexes. Formula films work better in rural centres. City audiences earn more, and usually keep aside a weekly entertainment budget. Actor Irrfan Khan says the audience has moved away from formulas. “They are exercising their option to choose films they would like to see. Earlier, a particular formula or trend worked and filmmakers blindly followed replicating it. Now, filmmakers are putting effort in finding new stories —and newer ways of telling it.”
The rise of RGV
The formula that Irrfan refers to was most visible in the 70s. It was also the era in which Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Basu Chatterjee invented a new kind of cinema that reached out to both the thinking public and the masses. The real change began with the emergence of Aditya Chopra, Sooraj Barjatya and Karan Johar. They bolstered the genre of candyfloss romance and their films’ success in the diasporic markets gave rise to Brand Global Bollywood. This brought in the big bucks.
Then there was Ram Gopal Varma.
RGV’s camera combed the urban underbelly and excavated material that was radical.
He made his own rules, mounted a production house by the name of Factory. He has introduced talent by the truck-load. Agent Vinod director Sriram Raghavan who was one of his protégés, sums it best: “If Ramu hadn’t started this process, I doubt whether today’s filmmakers would be making the kind of films they are getting to make.”
Then came the other wave from small town India–Anurag Kashyap, Imtiaz Ali and Vishal Bhardwaj. Producer-distributor Sunil Bohra who rescued films like Shaitan and Tanu Weds Manu says the real game-changer was Anurag. “His Dev.D did everything in a new way – the writing was cynical, the casting, unsuspecting and its music gave voice to the feelings of today’s youth. Dev.D took the process started by Ramu a step further; it combined slickness with noir elements.”
Siddharth Roy Kapur rewinds to the day Anurag narrated the idea of Dev.D to a room full of executives from UTV. “People either fell in love with it or they hated it as the worst script ever.” The other ground-breaker, Dibakar Banerjee’s Khosla Ka Ghosla, did the rounds of various studios, and was passed up, until it landed at UTV.
Ironically, Anurag’s first film, Paanch, is yet to be released. This is in spite of the maker of Black Friday(2005) and Dev.D perched high on the Bollywood power list. He gave breaks to Bejoy Nambiar in Shaitan and Vikramaditya Motwane in Udaan. Anurag and Vikramaditya have launched their own label, Phantom, with the purpose of nurturing new talent. Anurag is now launching Ribhu Dasgupta, a young Bengali director in Michael, starring Naseeruddin Shah. “I see the industry in a new light,” says Ribhu, “This is a perfect moment for perfect expression, without any fear of being reprimanded as stereotypical – or too experimental.”
The industry’s confidence in the young is at an all-time high. Small budgets and big hits are catching on as cinema gets corporatised in tinsel town. Eight out of 10 films made by newcomers have produced results. Their legion is rising. Maneesh and Habib are Yash Raj Films products where they stay under the foster-care of Aditya Chopra. If Vidhu Vinod Chopra hadn’t spotted the potential in Raju Hirani, Munna Bhai MBBS and Lage Raho Munna Bhai may never have been made. Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions keeps introducing new directors. So are the Bhatts, who always have a line-up of new names ready. Likewise, UTV’s doors are open to youngsters. “The process for us really begins with the story idea itself. Then, of course we evaluate the filmmaker’s vision and his way of telling the story. We are always on the lookout,” says Siddharth Roy Kapur.
As Akshat Verma, the writer of Delhi Belly, points out, it all boils down to business: “Your idea is good only if it has some financial worth.” But the kahaani doesn’t just end there. Sujoy Ghosh says he still lives off his mother. But his alma mater is modern India.
