Sit With Hitlist: Vikram, et al

At age 25 Vikramaditya Motwane was set to direct Amitabh Bachchan for his debut film Bombay Talkies Itrsquos about a great filmmaker making his return to the sets after years And what all had changed about Hindi cinema including stardom in the interim Bachchan was going to play this aged director mdash think of him as Hrishikesh Mukherjee who was alive then he saysThe star in the movie Irsquom guessing would have been an arrogant prick type Motwane found it impossible to cast a lead actor for this part Which is why the film never got made Until then Motwane had extensively assisted Sanjay Leela Bhansali Which firstly explains the access to BachchanWe only wondered about it because of the title Bombay Talkies Which is what his latest series on Amazon Prime Video Jubilee is modelled on Namely Himanshu Rairsquos Prosenjit Chatterjee stateoftheart film studio in the 1940s along with Devika Rani Aditi Rao Hydari down in Malad in BombayAnd which once had in its payroll stars like Ashok Kumar Aparshakti Khurana Raj Kapoor Sidhant Gupta Dilip Kumar Madhubalahellip All these characters have been heavily fictionalised of course And Jubilee itself has no relation to that Bachchan scriptItrsquos actually a mammoth exercise in worldbuilding without the filmmaker getting overawed by it mdash sticking to drama and storytelling still While so classical in its production design and shottaking it isnrsquot placed wholly inside a filmy bubble either So many such filmsseries consciously tend to be mdash including the best ones like The Offer on the making of The Godfather or Mank on Citizen KaneIt isnrsquot full of the usual exaggerations that naturally come with surveying showbiz either mdash take the best film on contemporary Bollywood Luck By Chance for instanceJubilee captures the real world around it equally Whether that be the bloody Partition or the Cold War Once you buy into this world mdash and it takes a while perhaps fourth episode onwards mdash we know no other Indian series that progressively gets better with every minute It may even age better with timeAlso itrsquos to do with the dialogue Compare it to Mira Nairrsquos A Suitable Boy from the same timesetting It sounds so coy because theyrsquore too obsessed with the period Motwane says ldquoWe wanted the language to be accessible The language may not be completely correct to the period But itrsquos not incorrectStills from Udaan 2010ldquoNo one can point out and say people neednrsquot speak like that In fact somebodyrsquos criticism which was actually funny was lsquoGaaliyaan uss waqt kab hoti thi When did people use expletives so muchrsquo Gaaliyaan picture mein nahi hoti thi Actors didnrsquot abuse on screenldquoThat doesnrsquot mean people in real life werenrsquot abusing Of course they wererdquo For all its grandiose scale and sharp layered storytelling you come off Jubilee exhaling ldquoMadan Kumar behnrdquo Isnrsquot itMotwane recalls the idea really took off in 2016 ldquoWhat if we did our own definitive story of the Indian film industry from the rsquo40s and rsquo50s onwards mdash the behindthescenes the producers directors actors press all that sort of stuff coming togetherldquoThis could be a season or multiple seasons Atul Sabharwal wrote a cracking pilot Amazon loved it and suddenly we were off in the racesrdquo It took seven years to see the light because Motwane got busy with Sacred Games for Netflix shortly thereafterIf Jubilee does go through multiple seasons leading up to Bombay cinema late rsquo90s onwards as well there will be few filmmakers more qualified to relive the times than MotwaneBhavesh Joshi Superhero 2018On one end is Bhansali who he was the chief handyman for on Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam 1999 and Devdas 2002 that he represented at Cannes along with the director At the other end is filmmaker Anurag Kashyap who hersquos partnered with since the unreleased Paanch There arenrsquot more separate filmy worlds that you could belong to simultaneously in BombayBhansali and Motwanersquos mother once ran an advertising production house together He first met Kashyap on the sets of Deepa Mehtarsquos Water where his job as the ldquowranglerrdquo was to ensure the procrastinator Kashyap as all writers are delivers dialogues on time mdash not an easy taskldquoAnuragrsquos wife editor Arti Bajaj his exwife now was with me at XIC Xavier Institute of Communications when we were doing a film production course in 199495 Anurag had done the same course a year before that He says I met him then I have no recollection of thisrdquoAlso few directors own a CV as varied as Motwanersquos mdash so far as filmmaking departments go What all has he been credited for Letrsquos start Sound design ldquoYes for Devdas and Paanchrdquo ChoreographyldquoDirected songs for Paanch For Water as well Well choreography is a broad term Because there was no dancing in Water Deepa wanted me to help her with songs because she felt I had a better music senserdquo Acquired from Bhansali onersquos guessingOkay cinematography ldquoShort films Shaanu Taxi Midnight Lost and Foundrdquo How about acting ldquoActing in cameos in certain places which I am not very proud ofrdquo Like Kashyaprsquos No Smoking 2007 ldquoYeah everybody sees me in No Smokingrdquo Whatrsquos left production design ldquoNo I donrsquot like that partrdquoYet in terms of capturing the fuller gamut of Bollywood his most uncanny credit might well be as the writer of a film by director Vivek Agnihotri titled Dhan Dhana Dhan Goal 2007No seriously how did that happenldquoSo UTV was producing this film Vivek had approached them He said he had this story idea about football He wanted a really good writer They called up Anurag who said he doesnrsquot know anything about football But he knows this guy who knows everything about football So they approached me I have loved this game since I was eight years old I said let me write you an original script insteadrdquo What they gave him a DVD to rip ldquoSomething like thatrdquo Something like that as inThe music for Jubilee was composed by Amit Trivedi and Kausar Munir wrote the lyricsldquoSo well I wrote the script But the film that got made was not exactly the way that Anurag and me to put it mildly kind of wanted I liked the time though Beggars canrsquot be choosers We got paid for the work and that was more important than anything else I still believe the original script of mine is one of the best things I have writtenrdquoMotwanersquos first script to be made into a film after Bombay Talkies got aborted of course was the nearmasterpiece comingofage Udaan 2010 that went straight to Cannes in the prestigious Un Certain Regard section where he was competing against among others Jean Luc Goddard ldquoThat was really trippyrdquoItrsquos set in Jamshedpur now in Jharkhand about a boy who finishes school with ambitions in arts and poetry but is forced into the mundane by a disciplinarian father who brooks no dissentItrsquos almost the opposite of Motwanersquos own life since he was actually driven into the media world because his mother needed help with a TV show she was producing for teenagers He was a teenager then chilling all day in the Mithibai College canteenLootera is Vikramaditya Motwanersquos second film after UdaanWhat did he even know of a strict boardingschool or smalltown life let alone the Tata Steel township Jamshedpur to get it so right with Udaan we wonder Motwane says Udaan was originally set in Nashik in his head because thatrsquos a similarly industrial smalltown he knew since his father owns an audioequipment factory thereldquoThey live in nice little bungalows The town is very organised So I wrote it as a generic place in fact Because I knew that world I could not write in Nashik Itrsquod be too close to home And I didnrsquot want it to be that So I wrote it like a Ghaziabad or Faridabad kinda setup mdash outskirts of Delhi where the family lives The boy sneaks out comes into Delhiproper to party and stuffrdquoAnd then he handed the script to director Imtiaz Ali ldquoImtiaz read the script and hersquos like lsquoYou know what just take a train go stay with my family in Jamshedpur Have a look I am reading this and I can see those streetsrsquo I was going to cast Imtiazrsquos younger brother Sajid in the lead at that time This was 2005ldquoSajid and I hopped on to a train went to Jamshedpur spent four to five days with his family saw the place mdash this was perfect I moved the film to Jamshedpur The film finally got made in 2009 which is also great because by then the viewership had changed audiences had changed In 2005 multiplexes were still not what they were by 2010 when we did the film with UTV with a 225screen release which is a big deal for a small filmrdquoA still from Sacred GamesKashyap produced Udaan post the commercial success of DevD 2009 This also means the original lead actor Imtiazrsquos brother Sajid would have passed his teenage by then Young Rajat Barmecha was brought in for the Holden Caulfied type protagonist The homework Motwane gave him was ldquothe literature Irsquod read growing up movies Irsquod watched mdash 400 Blows Richard Pricersquos books and a lot of things that come into Catcher in the RyehelliprdquoThe directorial career that Motwane scripted for himself after Udaan is indisputably marked by a range thatrsquos hard to match mdash going from a period piece Lootera to superhero Bhavesh Joshi Superhero a oneman survivor drama set in a building suggesting the dystopia of cities Trapped to the ultimate Mumbaimafia sweepingepic Sacred Games that he was the showrunner for mdash first Indian to hold that title in case Limca Book of Records is interested in listingThe leaps are so wide that it piques your interest to know what inspired each film since none suggest selfexpression alone Firstly where the heck did AK vs AK 2020 come from mdash a meta movie that firstly defies genre about a director and actor playing themselves The director turns rogue kidnaps the actorrsquos daughter to film in realtime what happens next WutldquoItrsquos just such a great oneline idea Which is what excites you most As a young filmmaker you fight the fact that the idea of your film should be encapsulated into one single line As you grow older you realise that one single line is what drives you forward Writer Avinash Sampat whorsquos now become a good friend of mine sent the script to us Hersquod written it for Aamir Khan first I was sure Aamir is never gonna do it so letrsquos not even tryldquoThere is Akshay Kumar who we did approach and it was a very interesting meeting mdash I mean he didnrsquot sort of outrightly say lsquoGet out of my officersquo but it was close enough For a while I was making it with Shahid Kapoor which kind of happened and then it didnrsquot The actor AKs kept changing The director AK that is Anurag Kashyap was a constant Hersquos a fantastic actorrdquoWell Kashyap says he sucks at acting ldquoI think he is fab In fact everybody on the AK set was talking about Anil Kapoor I think Anurag especially in the last scene is incredible You actually tear up when shit happens to himrdquoOkay how about Lootera Itrsquos practically a Bengali film ldquoPractically And that part is all Satyajit Ray I wanted to do a thriller with a love story in it as opposed to a tragic love story Our first trailer got it right And then there became a problem with the pitching to the audience People were expecting to watch this epic love story And they probably went lsquoHang on a second this is not thatrsquordquoAlso ReadSharmila Tagore Yash was a live wire full of Punjabi endearmentsMaybe because he plays with such diverse subjects mdashyou sense that probably puts Motwane in a more objective position to judge his own work in hindsight mdash most think of their films as so much like their heartrsquos outpouring that itrsquos hard to discuss it with them without fawning over with delight Consider Motwanersquos take on Bhavesh Joshi Superhero 2018While he loves the film the way it is immensely he says ldquoIrsquove never said this publicly but I think Bhavesh should have been a woman As in Sikursquos character should have been female Firstly the world thinks therersquos a guy who turns out to be a girl When she unmasks you go lsquoWhat the fldquoAlso then the film is not about a friend saving a friend in terms of the Ashish Verma character He is actually deeply in love with the female superhero but has never been able to tell her that The conflict is way deeper The layers get more interesting toordquoAs for reasons for smoothly jumping styles and genres where each Motwane movie is unrecognisable from the other mdash unlike a subtle or strong voicestyle that laces through most auteurs think Bhansali Kashyap mdash the impetus is quite simpleldquoItrsquos the excitement of trying something new So Jubilee is exciting because it is something I have never done before mdash a classical style of storytelling 10 playback songs and all that stuff mdash the fact of telling a specific story in the form that is most suited to it I feel that the film is always the boss I am notrdquoMotwane says his forthcoming film is titled Control Itrsquos a lsquocomputergeneratedrsquo movie flitting between screens centred on an Instagram influencer ldquoAgain it is a cyber thriller it is new I get excited by it And you learn Every film is an audition for the next one having learnt from the last onerdquo That said surely if one looks deep enough theyrsquoll be able to spot a personal threadTake Jubilee for that matter Consider a character called Jotwani a film businessman who shows up in it Itrsquos unclear exactly what he does in the movies Maybe there is some association with working with sound or audio equipment Thatrsquos precisely what his paternal family dealt withIf you go through any archival footage of public rallies of politicians from the rsquo50s or preindependence vintage the most common brandname yoursquoll notice is Chicago Radio thatrsquos attached to the microphoneThat company was started by Motwanersquos great grandfather His grandfather thereafter also once produced a film ldquoIt was called Andolan in 1949 with young Kishore Kumar in the lead It was a film about the freedom struggle It didnrsquot do well which is why nobody in the family talks about it Because I think the family lost a lot of money on itrdquoYou also see the Sindhi refugee camp in Jubilee Given his own Sindhi lineage we wonder if there is a personal history to it as well ldquoSo my family didnrsquot have to make their way during Partition We were already here from the 1930sldquoThe business was already set up But for a while my family house in Khar was a refugee camp I have seen photographs People were also demarcated into tents in gardenarea or permanent structures depending on the social status of the refugeesrdquoMotwane says he learnt of his familyrsquos film lineage only much after he became a filmmaker ldquoNobody tells me anything Now Irsquom the family archivistrdquo Hersquos named his production company Andolan after his grandfatherrsquos maiden and only productionAK vs AK and Jubilee are Andolan productions Of course the more famous production company hersquos been associated with is Phantom Films which shut down following allegations of negligence dealing with a sexual harassment case against one of the partners Vikas Bahl in 2017 Prior to that it was a company rolling out quality films after anotherWe recall an interview about Phantom where Motwane compared it to Pixar in terms of credibility and ambition ldquoVery ambitious PeakPhantom was something else Eventually we would have all perhaps gone our own ways anyway Maybe running our own companies under the umbrella of Phantom as the larger studio It was an unfortunate end to what was a good journeyldquoInterestingly enough I actually met Tanmay Bhat and Rohan Joshi and we were talking about how peakAIB and peakPhantom happened at the same time Some great stuff went downrdquo The comedy collective All India Bakchod similar to Phantom folded up following a MeToo stormIs there anything that Motwane thinks they could have done differently over the workplace sexual harassment issue ldquoExternally we could have handled it better But again this is in hindsight If yoursquore going through something you havenrsquot before you may not know how to handle it From a professional empathetic and personal point of view mdash I am saying all three mdash we could have done betterrdquoWhile this is obviously the first time Motwane has been on Sit with Hitlist our longform conversational series it does occur to me that hersquos regularly mentioned in chats with other guests With Kashyap of courseThe last one was with actor Abhay Deol As it turns out Motwane and Deol were buddies in school ldquoHe used to invite us over to his house to watch moviesrdquo Isnrsquot that a close enough Bollywood connection for someone who claims to have grown up far removed from showbiz in general with no practical understanding or ambition to enter films as suchldquoBut itrsquos a movie starrsquos house ya That way Abhishek Bachchan used to be in my school Jamnabai Narsee for a couple of years His cousin Namrata is a close friend I have been to Abhishekrsquos birthday parties in Madh Island where Amitabh Bachchan made an appearance This is peakBachchan in 1984 You are seeing the hero of your dreams standing in front of youldquoHersquod come off the set wearing boots We heroworshipped him and Irsquod gone to Dharmendrarsquos house to watch movies There used to be a badminton court Maybe itrsquos still there We were like wow Dharmendra plays baddy hererdquoAs for Abhay ldquoItrsquos when he returned from LA that we became close Because when he came back we shared an interest in the same kind of music and movies We were hanging together and writing some stuff togetherldquoWe worked together on the script of DevD and on a couple of things before that I was actually in the room when Imtiaz Ali narrated to him Socha Na Tha his debut film So yeah that historical moment happened in my presence We have tried a couple of times to work together and then it just has never happened and then we have sort of given uprdquoThe other time Motwane figured similarly in conversation was with Saif Ali Khan who was rather salty we have to say He wholly trashed the second season of Sacred Games altogether mdash speaking about how a friend and him had popped a champagne to catch it together at home A little later they just shut off the frickinrsquo TV Rather harshldquoBut thatrsquos Saif You canrsquot hold a grudge against things he says He speaks his mind That is exactly the way he is I totally love him for that You can say things back to him and he will take it He respects that We respect himrdquoThat said Sacred Games season one S01 that Motwane put together for Netflix based on Vikram Chandrarsquos tome of the same name was incredibly received While Netflix seldom shares its viewership numbers they were quick to point out that two out of three viewers of Sacred Games came from outside India mdash making it truly the first Indian global showWhat one noticed was the sheer audacity of the characters Again the worldbuilding And just the use of uninhibited uncensored visuals language grime grit and the madness of Nawazuddin Siddiquirsquos Gaitonde opposite the vulnerability of Saifrsquos Ali Khanrsquos SartajAnd then whatever happened to Sacred Games in the second season mdash the thriller lost its sheen veering into spaces so separate from the first For all the criticism its way it was hardly the ghastly season it was made out to be Just not close enough to the firstMotwane admits ldquoI think what happened with Sacred Games is that on S01 we had the luxury of time Once Netflix said okay fine we are going to do it mdash we got about a year to write the stuff before starting shoot I just wanted to do it without any assistance I wanted to create a writersrsquo room come together make it without having to say lsquoOh letrsquos get some firangi to come in and guide us on how to do this because wersquove never done it beforersquoldquoWhat happened on S02 was that we had to turn it around in 12 months So while I was almost in the middle of shooting S01 there is already the idea that you have to start to work on what to do with S02ldquoWhile I was on postproduction the writing was actually happening By the time Irsquom free to be able to get far deeper into the writing of S02 itrsquos too late for me to make my presence feltAlso ReadKareena Kapoor Khan turns photographer for hubby Saif Ali Khan enjoys a romantic evening with himldquoIn the way that I wanted to make it felt Which is not to say therersquos anything wrong with the writing Itrsquos just that okay itrsquos not mine It has gone in a different way from what I would have donerdquo Time Motwane says is what he had the luxury of with Jubilee 2023 seven years As with Udaan of course 2010 five years