INTERVIEW: Himman Dhamija (Part 2)

(CONTD FROM PART 1)

HIMMAN DHAMIJA is the cinematographer of films like Chandni Chowk to China and Little Zizou.

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.

So were you ever part of a process where you were able to bring that meaning in?

Yeah, I think so. Because when you look at Boom, funnily enough there is a meaning because it takes you to places which are believable and yet, it is the world inhabited by cut-throat characters, and then if you look at Bluffmaster, then for a world in the future, you’re shooting in the monsoon, which in itself has a subtext that flows in, so it’s about that. All the documentaries that I work upon, I think about how do you crack the grammar, that set-up..

Ok, taking off from that monsoon song sequence, you work on the song’s emotive aspects and more often, the song is just spliced bang into the middle of the action, without being integrated into the texture of the film seamlessly. So sometimes, the musical interlude strikes a discordant note…

Yes, you lose out the more you want do a song montage. A song montage is a short-cut.

So it takes away from what you’ve achieved in that particular moment, when you suddenly segue into a whole bunch of chorus dancers from Vegas?

Absolutely right, and this is very interesting. What happens is when you’ve got song and dance, what is strange is that earlier these interludes moved the story forward, now you have to sell the film based on them, and you’ve to almost think that your audience has attention deficit disorder. I enjoy it, but there are no emotive aspects whatsoever when suddenly, all kinds of people from all over the world land up in the middle of the film, who’ve got nothing to do with it.

Now if you come to Chandni Chowk to China, which is like traditional masala fare. That kind of masala usually had a very strong emotional core, so although those film entertained they also moved you… but the new ones, based on the same formula, for all their flamboyance, missed out on this.

You can do a lot emotionally in these masala films, actually. With that film, we got a situation where Hongkong cinema meets Hindi cinema. Funnily enough, Hongkong cinema of the Drunken Monk era, meets Manmohan Desai, almost the same era actually, but thinking and in terms of your construction of a scenario, you’re actually sitting in that era, but you’re in the world of today.

…and audiences have changed.

Audiences have changed. But what’s interesting is that because you’ve now got an internal register, leave the audience out for a second, there is this kind of triumvirate - the two kinds of cinema and then today’s world, so there is a dissonance in that. But there is a dissonance where today’s world is, because those forms of cinema came about because of the social aspects within which that cinema was to be seen. Now when we bring the audience back in, it’s the audience that shaped that form of cinema. You cannot hark back to that form of cinema without it now being contemporary, if you were to mix Hongkong cinema with Hindi cinema, maybe if you took a look at a film like House of Flying Daggers and the sophistication in that film, or even if you looked at Kungfu Hustle, it’s much more pop, not like Jackie Chan or Drunken Monk, so you cannot have a khichdi of Kungfu Hustle, Drunken Monk and Manmohan Desai, and think that it’s going to taste good. The ingredients themselves are not in the right space, you cannot mix soya sauce and haldi.

Unless you do it in a Tarantino kind of way…

But when Tarantino is doing it his way, he’s not going the Drunken Monk way, he’s going Prison on Fire way. And that’s a far more contemporary film, and nobody even knows about it. Hardly anybody’s seen that, and the whole ear-biting scene, these are straight lifts. But he can do it, because the construction of it is very Hollywood. That’s why it’s very important to know where you’re headed when you have this kind of film.

So again coming back to Chandni Chowk… and the emotional high points borrowed from 70s cinema, is it that it’s just not possible thematically in this time and space? We watched old films too..

…and they still work. Because as soon as the first frame comes up, you’re transported to that time. So that film doesn’t have a problem going that route. Whereas when the first frame of Chandni Chowk.. comes up, and there is this funky music from above, it’s very much 2009.

Looking back, even Bluffmaster was a spoof, and Boom was genre-breaking. So do you choose projects based on that sensibility?

Yeah, is anybody treading new ground? Then they’re interesting to me. 

So conventional films like My Name is Khan with its sweeping locales, that wouldn’t interest you?

I can do it.

But purely as something functional?

Other people can do it better…

So you could still say ‘No’ to A-list work. 

Yes, I could do that. Because at the end of the day, to make a film like MNIK, or even like Kurbaan, you’re talking of something that concerns us in a very very deep way. Our world has changed because somebody’s name is Khan. You cannot take it lightly. You can make it glossy, or whatever you like, but you have to get under the skin to understand, you cannot be superficial.

When you come into a project, and this is hypothetical, that seems to have a lot of promise, maybe, MNIK but helmed by a director that doesn’t bring in any kind of baggage… but it turns out to be more like an NRI romance. Not getting under the skin as you said, but you’ll see the project through. But as a film technician, could you subvert it in some way?

Very difficult. Cannot. That kind of film, which has a huge political resonance, the director has to be on top of it. You can subvert it, but you’ll always be working against something, your subversion in itself is doing the film an injustice. Really, it’s not worth subverting anything actually. Unless the subversion makes sense in the story, it’s actually a planned subversion and the director has to be a part of it.

Moving on to a previous film, Mangal Pandey—The Rising, it involved a different set of people, an art film-maker attempting a big blockbuster with Aamir Khan. Again, a mix of genres… 

...and a mix of acting styles. Well, it did some business, but lost money. It was a period drama, but there was a confusion about what genre we were straddling.

So it’s a confusion that may come from the directorial vision but then seeps into your work, for instance?

Well if there is confusion at the top, it’s going to come right through because you’re always dealing with their confusion. It wasn’t successful, but as a film it’s still a landmark in terms of many things. Our period dramas are very tacky traditionally. This was tacky too, but the ‘very’ label at least  went off. Went from ‘very tacky’ to ‘tacky’. The second thing was performance, the pitch of the performances needed to be toned down, because we had a very large English cast, of actually good actors. How often have you had that in Indian cinema?

Kind of following from the Lagaan scenario, and Lagaan had a measure of international exposure…

…but no international audience. Mangal Pandey had a bigger audience.

But there was a sense that they were now trying to showcase Bollywood to the world, as loud and bombastic, for e.g. the opening credits began with this very loud A R Rahman refrain. And the over-saturation of colors was a part of this hard sell. How do you deal with that, working with this concept of the big bawdy Bollywood epic? In Boom still, the palette was still muted… but was Mangal Pandey a leap of faith?

Yes, the palette is different. It was very real in Boom. In a film like Mangal Pandey, the production designer is critical because they basically have to build the canvas so have to really really be thick with the production designer. And to build a canvas like that and of that time, you need really solid research which I feel Mangal Pandey lacked. As a result, parts of it seemed like a modern Hindi film, and some of it harked back…

He seemed to want to make it in a contemporary idiom.

In which case, then what you should do is, take the same thing, forget about the period, and send it into the future. You can do it, nobody’s stopping you, it would be far more interesting. Then you can do what you like. Here we were sitting in nowhere land.

Maybe you would have enjoyed making the film with an art film aesthetic. Art film has now, of course, devolved into multiplex cinema…

I’ve worked in Little Zizou.

A film that tried to capture the Parsi ethos…

Again, I feel the script was better than the film.

Of course, it was script-writer Sooni Taraporevala’s first film as director. And we know that she’s been associated with film-making of some pedigree. Here you are creating a world, within contemporary Bombay, but with its own suburban flavor, situating it in a Parsi colony that seems almost insulated from the world outside, in terms of people, their behavior, their clothes...

Well I was narrated the script and I loved it. It was a script about a microcosm, which talked about what was happening in the world. Fundamentalism is very much up and running, insularity is being encouraged.

But in a way, if you do visit a Parsi colony, it’s still very much integrated in the bustling urban ethos of Bombay, and the microcosm created by this film was almost metaphorical, almost like a Pleasantville kind of situation... 

Yes. But what I found interesting was that this was a script that actually said something about the state of the world, which is what all films should do. At the end of the day you should actually go home thinking you’re part of it, and Little Zizou actually was a wonderful script about how insularity was coming in, how we look at the ‘other’, and to actually put it in a Parsi environment, which is the ‘other’ because they’re so strong in maintaining their identity, and within that identify, we were creating more identities, and a kind of divergence between the two faiths, one modern and the other fanatical and closed. At that level, the potential subtext that a film could deliver can be amazing.

A subtext which is important. Whereas in the film, caricatures abounded and the interior world of the people wasn't really coming through… specially in the characters played by Sohrab Ardeshir and Shernaz Patel. How do you help in terms of the footage you provide to the editing table?

Simple things, pauses. But a DP can only be as good as his director. You cannot supersede him, and also you should not because if that is the case, then you should be a director.

And would you want to?

I’ll never be a director. I don’t have it in me. So, if somebody’s trying to be a director you support them in the best possible fashion. The support may come by challenging them, by kicking their ass, or supporting them just by saying ‘Yes’ to everything.

There may have been creative satisfaction with the film though, and your vision is very much there, because you’ve framed the shots. But the end-product...

Well, again with Little Zizou it was a different story. Every language has to be learnt and as a script-writer, Sooni has evolved by writing so many. As a director she has to learn the language. It just so happens that we’re in a country which allows you to make a feature when you’re not yet fluent with the language. But that was the beauty of the film. Other film-makers are far more fluent because they had that much more time to practice their craft.

But they don’t necessarily use their fluency to give us better films. Little Zizou, despite its shortcomings, still comes with the tag of being good quality cinema.

Well it does and it doesn’t. Little Zizou doesn’t stand up in the international arena at all. If it lost money, it should have. Because that kind of film should have been able to make it. On paper, it was absolutely brilliant. Now, Sooni’s been to film school for directing, it’s a very intensive film school. Somebody wanted to pay crores for her to go to film school, then hats off to that. And that was part of whatever little the film made made so that hasn’t cost anyone any money. And there is a film out there, which is reasonable, ok. The script is still very good, you can make it again.

It just misses out on being compelling.

It’s like if you had a preacher, and if they do that every day of their lives, then even if you were a non-believer you’ll pay attention. That preacher will do something to you.

Finally, what are you working on next?

Well, I’m ready to work on a feature again, I took a year and a half off. I haven’t signed anything yet, though. I’m reading scripts.

Coming up next on Film Impressions, a profile of Manoj Lobo, cinematographer of Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na.