India Masala

Six-step guide to making India’s most expensive film

Tamil filmmaker Shankar’s last project “Sivaji – The Boss” was reported to have a production budget of a billion rupees and his latest “Robot” is being pegged at 1.5 billion rupees, which would make it India’s most expensive film ever.

Starring Rajnikanth and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, “Robot” is set for worldwide release on October 1. Here’s a step-by-step guide to making India’s most expensive film – from director Shankar himself.

BRING IN AN UNKNOWN ENTITY “I had made five films. I thought I should go in for a different film. But how different can you get? Perhaps I could have done something spiritual or about ghosts, something mythological perhaps. Maybe a film on non-living objects would work and what inanimate object could be better than a robot? If the main character is an inanimate object, everything is different, everything is interesting.”

GET THE BIGGEST STAR

“I wanted to do this film in 2000 with Kamal Hassan and Preity Zinta. But our dates didn’t match. Even then, the film had a huge budget. Every time I would take out the script, dust it, make some changes and the dates would remain a problem. When I finished “Sivaji – The Boss”, I told myself I absolutely had to make this film. It was now or never. Once again, it didn’t work out with Kamal sir for some reasons and since I had done “Sivaji” with Rajnikanth, I asked him. He agreed immediately. He told me – ‘if you have confidence in you, I am ready.’”

GET A GOOD PRODUCER “Making this film was like climbing Mount Everest. But I told myself that if I thought like that I would achieve nothing. I told my team that we would take it one day at a time. This was always going to be a big-budget film — the animatronics had never been used in an Indian film, we had a big star in the film and we didn’t want to compromise on anything. We had all the top technicians working on (it). In the beginning, another company was supposed to produce the film but they had financial problems mid-way through. Sun heard about our project and they had confidence in Rajni sir and my team, so they agreed.”

SHOOT A KILLER CLIMAX

Dabangg: Salman Khan is the saviour

At the “Dabangg” screening, someone sitting a few rows behind me would scream hysterically whenever Salman Khan came on screen. She would cheer, shout out encouragement when he was beating up the bad guys and wolf-whistle when he was romancing the heroine.

In the beginning, it was endearing. But then it began to seem contrived, forced and totally unnecessary — just like the film. Unless you are a Salman Khan fan like her, because then you would be able to forgive anything.

This two-hour film looks like it was meant to be a successor to Khan’s 2009 hit “Wanted” and unfortunately, the makers decided to go about doing that in a somewhat calculated manner — ensuring the film looks like it is trying too hard to be “cool”, several times.

The writers try too hard to be clever with the dialogues and the characters seem to go more over the top than they should have. I am not going to talk about the story or screenplay, because I don’t expect that in a film like this, those two aspects would be given much importance anyway. This is a “mass” film you see.

Not that I am critical of such films but directors such as Manmohan Desai or David Dhawan made such films with some amount of abandon, something that is missing in a film that clearly aims to go back to the era of the larger-than-life hero and the coy but virtuous heroine.

Salman Khan is Chulbul “Robinhood” Pandey, an unscrupulous policeman in an Uttar Pradesh village who has no qualms keeping the money he recovers from bank robbers or using his forces to guard his own wedding.

He is bitter towards his stepfather for being partial to his stepbrother Makhanchand (Arbaaz Khan). When his mother passes away and all attempts at a reconciliation fail, Pandey moves out of the house but not before he marries village belle Rajo (debutante Sonakshi Sinha who has absolutely the same expressions when she is getting married and mourning her father).

Peepli Live: Brilliant, nuanced satire

There are a lot of nuances in Anusha Rizvi’s “Peepli Live” that you may not get at once. There will be a comment on the health system in villages or the lack of hygiene but they are so subtle that it may escape the notice of the less attentive viewer.

It will be your loss if you do miss out on these small details because this film thrives on subtlety — something we aren’t too used to as viewers.

To be able to see the (dark) humour in a situation like farmer suicides without actually laughing at the issue is a tough act to pull off and fortunately for her and her audience, Rizvi does it with aplomb.

Omkar Das plays Natha, a down-on-his-luck farmer who can barely manage to feed his family, let alone save his ancestral property due to an upaid loan. When a local politician laughingly advises him to commit suicide so that he can claim compensation from the government, he grudgingly agrees. Egged on by his elder brother Budhia (Raghuveer Yadav), he makes his intentions public and is overheard by a local reporter.

Of course, what follows is nothing short of chaos. Natha’s death becomes a spectacle that is covered incessantly by the blood-thirsty media, exploited by politicians and watched by the nation.

Rizvi makes a biting comment on the aggressive nature of reportage in the country, government apathy and red tape and of course the real issue at hand — farmer suicides.

The best part is, she makes all these points in the funniest way possible. You will find yourself laughing hard most of the time in the film, but there is a very serious thought there so don’t forget to dwell on that as well. Shyam Benegal’s “Well Done Abba” also tried a similar theme but this one is much more successful.

from Photographers Blog:

Come, fall in love

I first encountered the 52-year-old Maratha Mandir movie theater while I was on one of my walks to explore Mumbai. Being new to the city, I do this often. It was just a casual walk down the lanes of the city when I saw a huge billboard promoting a film outside the cinema. The billboard proudly advertised it as the longest-playing film in Indian history.

The film "Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge" (The Big Hearted Will Take the Bride), starring Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan, is a simple romantic film shot in Europe and India, where a boy meets a girl and falls in love with her - girl is about to get married in India - boy takes the journey from Europe to India to win her over.

I still remember when the film was released in 1995, it became an instant hit amongst the youth. Fifteen years down the line it’s unthinkable that people still love to watch it and in a cinema to boot!

At Maratha Mandir, it was the watchman who first told me that DDLJ, as the film is popularly known, still runs to a full house in the 1000-plus-seats cinema. I, of course, didn’t believe him until I met Manoj Desai, the cinema’s executive director. He invited me to watch the film, promising it would answer all my questions. He asked his manager to reserve a seat for me, as on Sundays the film is usually sold out. He said it was the first time in the history of Maratha Mandir he was allowing someone to shoot inside the ‘heart’ of the theater --- the projection room.

On the day of my shoot, I arrived an hour before the ticket window was to open…and there was already a long line waiting to get inside. There were young men, old men, women, children...all equally keen to catch a glimpse of the iconic Bollywood film.

IHLS: I hate boring love stories

At one point in Punit Malhotra’s “I Hate Luv Storys” one of the characters tells another to just follow all the clichés and go for it. That could well have been Malhotra’s motto while making this run-of-the-mill love story that drags on for what seems like forever.

Malhotra seems to take every single cliché you can think of and insert that into his film – while pretending that this is a different love story. Boy who is commitment phobic – check; girl who has an overdose of pink in her bedroom and believes in love at first sight – check; Hate turns to love – check; Boring boyfriend – check. IHLS is definitely not big on the originality factor and you know how it is going to end. You just wish the journey to the end was pleasanter.

Imran Khan plays Jay, a young man who doesn’t believe in love stories and cringes at the slightest hint of mush but ends up assisting a maverick director who only makes love stories. Forced to work with art director Simran on a film, he pooh-poohs her ideas of romantic and ideal love and her “perfect” relationship with her boyfriend, appropriately named Raj (Sameer Dattani).

You don’t really need me to tell you how it goes from here. Jay and Simran spend time together, fall in love, one of them realises it, the other doesn’t and so most of the film is spent trying to get through situations that wouldn’t have been necessary if only the duo had had a heart-to-heart chat with each other.

Along the way, there are a lot of really inane dialogues (“Women are like buses, if one leaves another one comes along, but ultimately there is only one bus which can take you home”), some awkward acting and a lot of rich, pretty people and palatial homes. In fact some of the best lines in the film are not spoken, but printed on the t-shirts that Jay’s friend wears.

Malhotra spoofs movies like “Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge” and “Dil to Pagal Hai” and “Dil Chahta Hai“, but fails to rise to the standard that made these films the cult films that they are. The direction is amateurish and the pace of the film could have been shortened considerably without hurting the plot. There are some moments that make you laugh in the first half but the second half just goes downhill. By the time the climax rolls in you don’t care what happens to the two protagonists.

Imran Khan tries to make the best of his role and succeeds to a large extent but Sonam Kapoor is stuck with such a one-dimensional role she can hardly do much. Simran it seems has nothing else in her life except for the idea of love, and a great taste in clothes.

Paathshala: Punished for three hours

If any real-life kids went to the school shown in Milind Ukey’s “Paathshaala”, you can be sure they would hardly get any studying done. Instead they would be busy dancing, singing, ogling at teachers, romancing and participating in reality TV shows.

The teachers in this school aren’t any better — they also sing, dance, wear inappropriate clothes and generally do everything but the things you are expected to do in a school.

Director Ukey may have wanted to make a film on the ills of the education system (like “3 Idiots”, “Taare Zameen Par”) but instead manages to make a manual on “how not to make a film”.

“Paathshaala” starts off with the principal of a boarding school, Aditya Sahai (Nana Patekar), calling his staff and telling them the school would be undergoing some changes in order to “progress”.

These changes include the students giving up studies and participating in reality TV shows so that the school gets publicity (Yes, really).

They also involve the kids being made to participate in auditions for TV ads and cruel directors who want the kids to get hurt and cry so that they will get higher TRPs. Where do they come up with such things?

As you can imagine, “Paathshaala” is an incoherent mess of a film which takes a serious issue and manages to run it to the ground.

Road, Movie: This trip is boring

A road trip epitomises my idea of a good time and so does watching a great film. A combination of the two on celluloid is an exciting proposition.

Add to the fact that you have two young, promising actors — Abhay Deol and Tannishtha Chatterjee — and “Road, Movie”  had a lot going for it.

An hour-and-a-half later, I walked out of the theatre disappointed with the film. A lot of people would call “Road, Movie” a “festival film” but I dispute that point because I have seen a lot of good films at festivals.

This one was shot beautifully and had some good dialogues, but on the whole I was bored out of my mind.

Abhay Deol plays Vishnu, a small town boy who longs for a better life. To escape his father’s hair oil business, he takes up the job of talking an ancient truck (that doubles up as a travelling cinema) to a far-off town.

On his journey there, he meets a motley group of characters, including a smart talking urchin, an old truck mechanic (Satish Kaushik) and a gypsy (Tannishtha Chatterjee).

The trio have to face not only the difficulties of negotiating the arid landscape of Rajasthan, with no roads and a scarcity of water, but also each other’s egos and characteristics before they reach their destinations.

Atithi Tum Kab Jaoge: Contrived comedy

A moustache. That was the basis for one of the best comedies of Indian cinema — Hrishikesh Mukherjee‘s “Golmaal” — made in the 1970s.

There were no overly dramatic situations, no comedians, no toilet humour and yet, there was so much laughter in that film.

Since then, many a filmmaker has tried to capture that elusive charm of Mukherjee’s cinema, naming their films after his, borrowing concepts, but few have come close.

Perhaps these filmmakers forget the cardinal rule of laughter — it doesn’t work if you try too hard.

Laughter must be found in daily situations, it cannot be forced on the characters or the audience by contrived situations, something that Mukherjee seemed to know instinctively.

Ashwni Dhir, the director of “Atithi Tum Kab Jaoge” falls in the same trap. He takes what could have been a potentially humorous situation — the arrival of an unwanted guest and the havoc he wreaks on a nuclear family of three — and turns it into a contrived comedy that uses liberal doses of crass toilet humour and not a single good comedy scene.

Ajay Devgn plays Punit, a film writer who lives with his wife Munmun and their son Ayush in a typical Mumbai apartment. Their lives are thrown in a tizzy when a man who claims to be a distant relative of Punit lands up at their doorstep and doesn’t seem to want to leave. The couple try every trick in the book to get rid of Lambodar chacha (Paresh Rawal), but don’t succeed.

A year at the movies

At the beginning of the last week of every year I head to my neighbourhood DVD store to follow a long-standing tradition of mine.  I review my favourite films of the year and then buy DVD’s of those films.

This year my shopping list had only two names – Zoya Akhtar’s “Luck by Chance” and Vishal Bhardwaj’s “Kaminey”.

That, to me, is a sign of the “draught” that Bollywood faced this year.

Good films were few and far between, hardly any movies hit the box-office bulls-eye.

To make matters worse, there were three months of no movies at all due to a stand-off between producers and multiplex owners on revenue sharing.

But to me, the biggest blip in Bollywood’s chart this year was the sheer number of “bad” films. Whether it was “Chandni Chowk to China” or “Blue” or “Main Aur Mrs Khanna”, there were too many films which were mediocre.

There were just too many film-makers who concentrated on peripherals like the lead actors’ wardrobe or a flashy item song and forgot to insert some heart into their films. We forgot that movies are all about the heart.

All the Best: Adding that Diwali sparkle

Watching three films in the space of 18 hours isn’t easy, especially when the first two are films like “Blue” and “Main Aur Mrs Khanna“.

When I settled into my seat to watch Rohit Shetty’s “All the Best”, I was really hoping for some laughs. Thankfully, I got my share of them.

This film starring Ajay Devgn, Sanjay Dutt, Fardeen Khan and Bipasha Basu doesn’t pretend to be anything but a madcap entertainer and because of that, delivers on most counts.

The jokes aren’t too highbrow, there are plenty of them and all the actors seem to be having fun doing the film, which comes across on screen.

I was especially struck by the difference in Sanjay Dutt, who puts in such a lacklustre performance in “Blue”, but seems to be enjoying himself in this film.

The story itself isn’t much. Prem (Ajay Devgn) and Veer (Fardeen) are friends who live in Goa and benefit from Veer’s elder brother Dharam (Sanjay Dutt), a millionaire in Africa who sends him “pocket money” every month.

Dharam thinks Veer is married to Vidya (Mugdha Godse), when in fact he isn’t.