Film Impressions

PROFILE: Farooque Shaikh

THE MAN WHO COULD SAY ‘NO’

Last month I sent Farooque Shaikh an impulsive message after watching his latest release Listen Amaya for the second time. It was an uncharacteristic gesture and the idea was merely to compliment his work. Most actors don’t respond to smses from strangers. He did so within minutes––a warm and courteous one in his unique shorthand which I gradually learnt to decipher. Actors also don’t grant interviews to small-time journalists who run obscure websites that few people read (especially if they themselves are technologically challenged and don’t even know how to switch on a computer). Yet I found myself at his house this week and ended up falling in love with the man after a two-and-a-half hour marathon chat about everything and nothing.

INTERVIEW: Umesh Kulkarni (Part 2)

Can you describe your journey to becoming a filmmaker?

I never wanted to be a director and was one exam away from qualifying as a Chartered Accountant. But I was interested in the arts and in architecture. While in college I joined Sumitra Bhave and Sunil Sukhtankar on Doghi, their directorial debut, as they were looking for young boys to assist them with the project. When I saw the film I realised that it was very different from the shooting process and that it involves all the activities that interest me––theatre, literature, dance, music and spaces. 

Sonali Kulkarni and Girish Kulkarni in 'Deool'

INTERVIEW: Umesh Kulkarni (Part 1)

IN SEARCH OF MEANING

At 36 Umesh Vinayak Kulkarni is easily Marathi cinema’s finest contemporary director. Unlike others still resting on their debut successes, he has already helmed three critically acclaimed films––two of them commercial hits––won a National Award for Best Director for Deool this year, taken his work to various international festivals and turned creative producer for two films including Nikhil Mahajan’s forthcoming noir thriller, Pune 52. Kulkarni spoke to Film Impressions about his cinematic influences, social consciousness, penchant for satire and deep-rooted compassion for his environment.

INTERVIEW: Namrata Rao (Part 2)

Continued from Part 1

DD: When you go from working for Dibakar Banerjee to a Yashraj film like Band Baaja Baraat, is there a shift in sensibilities?

NR: Oh yes. There is a huge change. I was coming from LSD where we were about to change the world and all that. With BBB I was wondering what I would do. They had songs and I’d never edited songs before. I decided to take it all as an experience. I like to work with interesting directors because if they are as passionate about making a good film then the story or the genre doesn’t matter. I just went with my gut feeling after Maneesh Sharma narrated the script to me in a very interesting way. I had trouble adjusting only for the first few days.

Namrata Rao on the sets of one of her films

INTERVIEW: Namrata Rao (Part 1)

CUTTING EDGE

Barely into her ‘30s and Namrata Rao is already one of Hindi cinema’s finest editors, successfully straddling both mainstream and off-beat cinema. As she awaits the release of her third film with Dibakar Banerjee, Shanghai, next week, she’s also editing Yash Chopra’s new film with Shah Rukh Khan and Katrina Kaif. She has won awards for Love Sex Aur Dhokha and accolades for Kahaani—in both cases, her astute sense of pace and rhythm enhancing the impact of the narratives. It’s evident in her work, and in the hour-long conversation Deepa Deosthalee and Vikram Phukan had with her, that Rao is passionate about cinema and understands the medium well enough to know that her intuition and skill could well make the difference between a good film and a dud.

INTERVIEW: Gulshan Devaiah

ACTING ON THE EDGE

Gulshan Devaiah’s film career took off over dinner with Kalki Koechlin and Anurag Kashyap. The latter wanted a Kannada-speaking villain for That Girl In Yellow Boots, and this description was the only brief he would give the young man from Bangalore who’d chucked a lucrative career as a designer for brands like MTV and Levi’s to pursue his dream of becoming a film star. Gulshan landed the part and another minor one in Rohan Sippy’s Dum Maaro Dum. Significantly, he got noticed and appreciated for both. But it was Bejoy Nambiar’s Shaitan that set him up for the bigger game and already, a year after his breakthrough performance as KC the drug-addled, volatile youth at the centre of a kidnapping gone awry, he is ready to take the spotlight as leading man of Vivek Agnihotri’s Hate Story. The actor with no roots in Hindi cinema and no formal training shares his journey with FILM IMPRESSIONS.

A new anti-hero: Gulshan Devaiah

INTERVIEW: Bejoy Nambiar

MAN OF THE MOMENT

You liken Bejoy Nambiar’s debut film Shaitan to Amores Perros in terms of its existential sweep and he smiles self-consciously, “I’m humbled by the comparison.” It’s not the first time Bejoy has found himself in august company. As an absolute novice, he convinced Mohanlal to come to Mumbai to act in his first short film Reflections (2005). Just eight minutes long, it’s a compelling narrative with enough drama and visual finesses to have persuaded Mani Ratnam to hire him as an assistant on Guru and later get him to line produce his flawed epic, Raavan. Clichéd as it sounds Bejoy describes his stint with Ratnam as “being at university. The sheer scale and intricacies of his vision are astounding.” From there to getting Anurag Kashyap to produce Shaitan, was an arduous, but rewarding journey. The debutant fondly recalls all the heartache and meticulous planning that went into Shaitan, arguably 2011’s best film so far.

Nambiar: This year's breakout director

CONVERSATION: The Actors of AMEN

KARAN MEHRA IN CONVERSATION WITH JITIN GULATI

Amen, by Judhajit Bagchi and Ranadeep Bhattacharyya, is a short film that has grown to become a festival favorite in the few months since its release. The two leading men of the film have a fun conversation with each other about how they approached playing gay in the film.

(Jitin Gulati in italics)

KARAN MEHRA: What I know about Jitin was that he worked in banking, but he left his job to come to Bombay and pursue acting. He's been doing a lot of ads, he has a good physique, but now he has a broken leg..

JITIN GULATI: (Smiles) Don't give too much information...

Well, you can pay me back. Then he did a short film called Atonement. He does it the Al Pacino way, role mein poora ghus ke... very very strict in terms of lines, the mood, the feel of the whole page. He'd done a lot of homework for Amen from what I remember and he had met the writer and cinematographer  much before I came in, but sorry to say, he did a f*ck-all job! (Laughs)

PROFILE: Cinematographer Manoj Lobo

REAL CAN BE BEAUTIFUL

One of the hallmarks of Abbas Tyrewala’s directorial debut Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na was the believability of its characters and situations. The Arabian Sea shot across from the Bandra reclamation was just like it is in real life, a dark moody colour. The skies weren’t a saturated blue. Poetry was made out of cement mixers (which were likened to snoring ogres). There WAS a pretty cast, but not a designer one, like in recent films like Aisha. “Of course, at the beginning some of the actors did have a problem with them not looking glamorous because they want that,” says Manoj Lobo, director of photography of the film, and of Mr Tyrewala’s next, Jhootha Hi Sahi, currently in theatres. The brief he had received from his director was to keep things real. This sat pretty with his own sensibilities, “The only thing I told Abbas at that time was that real could be beautiful without being cosmetic.”

INTERVIEW: Cinematographer Himman Dhamija (Part 2)

(CONTD FROM PART 1)

Let’s look at Raavan… it’s always talked about in terms of its beautiful cinematography, although the film was slammed.

The problem is people don’t know, or aren’t confident about judging. In fact, Raavan is a typical case, because you’ve got Santosh Sivan doing it, so it’s already branded. We’re a very brand conscious society.

So really we’ve have to look at a film as a whole product… rather than single out Sivan’s work.

Definitely. If you wear an Adidas sneaker, just because of an Adidas logo there, you may make some people feel that it’s really good. So before buying it, you wouldn’t take a good hard look at it. So in a film like Raavan, it figures that good cinema is not about looking beautiful and stunning, it’s more about emotively where it is going. At the end of the day, if a film is not working emotively for whatever reason, there’s something that the DP  is not doing right. He’s also a part of it. Which is what I was talking about, the expectation of you in this country is to provide good-looking images, and not meaningful images.