Showing posts with label Anand Gandhi interview. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anand Gandhi interview. Show all posts
Sushant Singh Rajput and I discussed a lot of ideas that he wanted to be a part of-Anand Gandhi
8:31 AM
The filmmaker talks to BT about his bond with the late actor
Rachana Dubey (BOMBAY TIMES; June 18, 2020)
Filmmaker Anand Gandhi, known for his critically appreciated projects like Ship Of Theseus and Tumbbad, was looking forward to collaborating with Sushant Singh Rajput. The actor’s sudden death by suicide has left him shattered. Talking to BT about their plans to work together, Anand said, “Sushant was always extremely enthusiastic about working with me, and I really started liking him. I never saw any of his films. I liked him a lot as a person and what he was. I liked him for his pursuit, for his enquiry and his ideas. I thought those need to reflect in the characters he plays. I don’t make a film till I feel it is absolutely necessary to make one. And that is why people who want to work with me end up having to wait for too long. Over the last three months, we had discussed a lot of ideas that he wanted to be a part of, including Emergence. He loved that story very deeply, it was something that he kept bringing up. He told his assistants, managers and friends constantly that he wants to make it happen. Everyone wanted us to work together. I would have been delighted to actually turn our aspirations into something more concrete, into something that everyone could hold on to and look at.”Anand and Sushant first met in Goa in 2017. Recalling that meeting, the filmmaker said, “I was walking out of a hotel in Goa, where we were both keynote speakers for an event by International Film Festival of India (IFFI). I met him on the steps, outside the hotel. He walked up to me and introduced himself and we started talking right there, and it lasted three hours. We talked about a million things, and exchanged so many ideas. He brought his lens of physics to all my frameworks of cognitive biology. And we shared ideas on possibilities, on the future of life, humanity and pretty much everything. He would draw diagrams on a piece of paper and I would show him the connection that I would see in the systems he would illustrate. That was our first meeting.”
Earlier on Wednesday, the filmmaker had shared an emotional post about his association and equation with Sushant. In his long tribute, Anand had talked about the kind of person Sushant was, and his friendship with the late actor. He wrote, “Sushant was made of flesh, blood and ideas. He played with ideas just like a child plays with toys, and for the same reasons — to discover, to invent and to learn. The distinction between success and failure didn’t matter much to him, because both lead to the same outcomes — discovery, invention and learning. If it did, it was only to the extent of arriving at places nobody else before did, so roads can be paved for the next in line. That’s what brought us together — our desire to create infrastructure and institution for those who sought them, but found no joy in the ones that already existed...”
Irrfan Khan would have been in my next film-Anand Gandhi
8:18 AM
Anand Gandhi to kickstart the big-budget project in 2021 with a Hollywood studio; the script revolves around a pandemic
Ankita Chaurasia (MUMBAI MIRROR; May 6, 2020)
Stock scenes of Indians praying in front of the Taj Mahal for redemption in superhero and apocalyptic films, like Independence Day and Armageddon, irked a 15-year-old Anand Gandhi so much that he vowed to change the narrative. For the last five years, the filmmaker has been developing a script that revolves around four frontline women scientists, superheroes in their own way, fighting a contagion. Titled Emergence, it explores the impact of microbiomes on the psyche.“The idea came while working on Ship Of Theseus that tried to answer whether free will exists. I was intrigued to learn that microbiomes (bacteria in our body) play a significant role in our behaviour,” says Anand, whose next film Tumbbad was about how greed can possess and transform a person, much like a pathogen. “With Emergence, I’m taking the parasite-host relationship further.” He cites a parasitic fungus, Ophiocordyceps Unilateralis, that takes over an ant’s body, controls its mind and turns it into a puppet to perpetuate. Trying to focus more on science than fiction, Anand has roped in epidemiologist Larry Brilliant as Executive Producer, and host-parasite relationship scientist Shelley Adamo as advisor. “Larry spearheaded the team that eradicated smallpox and controlled polio.
Like a detective, he figures out the epicentre of a pandemic and calculates the R-naught of the contagion, which is a measure of how many people it can infect,” Anand says, adding that with Adamo’s advice, he has created a fictional microbe, which is a prion.
The script seems eerily prescient, now that a pandemic has brought the world to a standstill. “I started writing it five years ago, with the working title 2020. My script predicted the rise of right-wing politics, storage crisis for scientific data, paleomicrobe releasing from thawing of the Arctic and behavioral changes brought on by a pandemic. But there was so much research required that by 2017, the office joked that the film would have to be re-titled 2025,” Anand laughs, pointing out that futurists Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom, in their 2008 survey, had predicted a 60 per cent chance of over a million dying from a pandemic in this century. “The social implications and subsequent changes in the human species are a part of the narrative.” Has the outbreak changed his life? “I’m too privileged to complain. Besides, my team has been working out of our Goa office since two years.”
Anand is putting out video interviews, the latest one with Irrfan Khan, whom he met soon after Maqbool released. “My short film, Right Here Right Now, came around the same time. We drove to Pune once, and became friends over the years. That video is cathartic,” he says, adding that they had an unspoken pact that Irrfan would be in all his projects. “We explored possibility of his presence in Tumbbad before the final script and schedule changed things. He’d have been in Emergence too. I wish I had created something with him.”
Now, Anand will rework his script slightly as there is no need to define a contagion anymore. He plans to take Emergence on the floors next year. “The idea is not to make the first but the most well-researched film about a pandemic. It will be a big-budget project, we are collaborating with an American studio,” he says. How does he plan to shoot it amid restrictions? “A pandemic is the flipside of global mobility, but it won’t stop air travel. After studying the challenges, every industry will make its own social and physical rule-book to work around the situation, till a vaccine and a cure are found,” he concludes.
Sanity has finally prevailed-Anand Gandhi on passing of film on Arvind Kejriwal
2:50 PM
Anand Gandhi (MID-DAY; August 25, 2017)
Culture is the sieve of the civilization in which we put data, wisdom and epiphanies of the past, and the present, to distill solutions for the future. We can't solve our problems as a society if we censor speech and discourage open sharing of truths. In a community that's increasingly polarised between those who want to learn, and those who want to avoid witnessing the truth, odds are stacked against the lonely truth seeker, the documentary filmmaker. That is exactly what makes the achievement of filmmakers Khushboo Ranka and Vinay Shukla, directors of the political documentary, An Insignificant Man, inspiring.Khushboo and Vinay wanted to make a documentary about the democratic process because they wanted to know how our democracy works, and record the tryst between idealism and pragmatism, intention and hypocrisy, and integrity and compromise. They wanted to render the veils around political parties permeable, so that we could witness what is going on inside.
Of the three political parties they requested access to, only one agreed to let them in with cameras. That was the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). For a year, the cameras rarely missed a beat, rolling through meetings, campaign planning sessions, rallies, strategy discussions, back offices, arguments, fallouts, in their homes, and even while they travelled. Always a fly on the wall, observant, yet distant.
The material they collected was overwhelming. This made the community that supported the producing of the documentary in a highly successful crowdfunding campaign, a bit restless. But, their trust in the filmmakers never faltered. Khushboo and Vinay found support from a truth seeking audience, from both sides of the political spectrum — left and right.
One day, I was invited to a screening of An Insignificant Man (AIM). What I saw, left me enthralled. I cannot think of another film that shows us real politicians, doing politics. It doesn't patronise the viewer with a pedantic voiceover, but instead, allows him to witness an incredible moment in Indian politics.
I have seen Khushboo and Vinay struggle as first-time filmmakers in India. The contrast of their journey in India and internationally, could not be more stark. The film won fund awards from Sundance, Busan, IDFA and BritDoc. Toronto International Film Festival invited AIM for its world premiere. Festivals, awards, accolades, standing ovations and nuanced critiques unraveled. We started gearing up to show the film to the part of the world, we call home.
Enter, Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC). In his astute wisdom, the former CBFC chief (Pahlaj Nihalani) decided, quite arbitrarily, that a piece of journalistic document needs "permission" from its political subjects. Also, in a dire misreading of his position, he thought it prudent to defend the Congress and the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) from their names being taken in the film. He would rather a documentary invent fictitious names like Mogambo and Dogaraj for politicians, perhaps.
After having waited for months outside the chief's office, and then being thrown out, Khushboo and Vinay chose to approach the Film Certification Appellate Tribunal (FCAT). The FCAT judgment is out, and sanity has finally prevailed. The judgment says that a demand for a No Objection Certificate is "wholly unsustainable and not permissible at law."
It's dangerous that the Censor Board can act in an illegal way. Consequences are only meant for filmmakers, who are testing the small mercies of freedom. With the recent reconstitution of the Board, things look hopeful. As long as dialogue is not threatened by violence, and discourse is not silenced by censorship, there is always hope for a better future.
Virtual Reality will happen like an explosion-Anand Gandhi
10:20 AM
Anand Gandhi on his upcoming projects that ponder the varied possibilities of immersive mediums in films, branding and advertising
Kunal Guha (MUMBAI MIRROR; July 12, 2015)
"You can see a barren landscape and you will be able to imagine trees on it, or buildings. And you can edit anything you want with just a sway of your hands. It's like the whole world is digital,“ says director Anand Gandhi on the endless possibilities of virtual and augmented reality, his present preoccupation. The Ship of Theseus filmmaker who recently completed filming his fantasy-horror, Tumbad, has set up a studio in Yari Road to produce content for virtual reality.
Gandhi remembers being first drawn to VR in the mid-90s when he would feast on science fiction novels by Asimov and Philip Take. “Never quite imagined that it would be experienced so soon,“ he smiles.
Last January, when Gandhi was touring the US for 45 days, delivering lectures at universities such as Stanford and MIT, he was also invited to talk at Daqri, a pioneering company in the field of augmented reality. While the 34-year-old filmmaker was ill-prepared for the talk, he decided to have a more free-flowing exchange with the creative head of the studio. “My academic curiosity lies in the idea of ideas and how culture evolves and how culture inherits the characteristics of genes and biology,“ says the director who managed to impress his Daqri audience with his views on the 'evolution of awe'. “Since we're trying to experience 'awe' through these mediums and new myth-making and storytelling devices, we need to question, what is its evolutionary function and why did 'awe' come to exist in the first place,“ he says, adding that, in hindsight, he felt his talk on the need to be astonished was a bit too long and “boring“. “Some of it is interesting, but a lot of it was just meandering,“ he laughs.
Gandhi's visit to the Daqri studio in Los Angeles also exposed him to developments in the field of augmented reality (AR) and he was in love. “You have a flat magazine and when you take your smartphone or tabloid over it, you will see a holographic image emerge. If you turn your device over it, it'll continue to exist on the plain. It creates an illusion by augmenting a new reality over your reality,“ he says, while his eyes light up with excitement. Gandhi's visit to the studio exposed him to AR's application in industrial, surgical, media, storytelling and several other fields. He knew this was the future and wanted to jump right into it. But when he returned in March last year, he was just about to begin work on Tumbad, which posed a “distraction“. But after wrapping it up in May this year, he decided to return to his dream by setting up Recyclewala Labs along with Sohum Shah, a production outfit solely dedicated to produce content for brands, events, commercials, fiction and non-fiction narratives, and even short films, all using the medium of virtual reality (VR). “The possibilities of immersive interactive content are endless - various vantage points, subjective and objective experiences, all sorts of things.Imagine being in the comfort of your home and watching a cricket match from the from the middle of the field. Your turn your head left and your will see Dhoni at the wicket, you turn right and you will see Johnson bowling to him,“ says Gandhi who feels that he hasn't even begun scratching the surface of his dream.
Gandhi sees VR as an evolution, but believes it will co-exist with existing mediums. “TV never replaced the radio and films never replaced literature. Invention of one medium doesn't replace the precedent medium,“ says Gandhi. He dreams of creating a space where neuroscientists can work with synthetic biologists and painters together on a project. Presently in the stage of trying to determine the duration of content that people will be comfortable watching before feeling dizzy, Gandhi feels every new innovation takes time to be accepted. “In the 90s, post Dogma, many filmmakers began using handheld cameras and people would come out of the theatre feeling dizzy. But now the style has become common since people are acquainted with it. You don't even notice it in films,“ he says.
Producing VR content, apart from being more expensive than regular film content is also challenging. “One of the critical and most basic challenges is that one cannot be around the camera as it is looking in every direction to capture a 360 by 180 perspective of the environment,“ says Gandhi. To tackle this, he creates production design elements into the narrative or scene that allow him and his crew a place to go and hide. If the crew becomes visible for whatever reason, they can “always be wiped off in post production“. For more intensive “composing challenges“, Gandhi isn't bothered as he has advisors from MIT and NID on call to brainstorm on solutions.
Gandhi's head of media, Zain has been researching on the space for over a year and the team plan to venture into every avenue of VR, including designing and manufacturing VR goggles. “We're creating the whole ecosystem. VR will happen like an explosion and I can predict that within 10 months, every person in this country who owns a smartphone above Rs 15,000 will own a Google Cardboard," he says of Google's virtual reality goggles.
The first trailers of Gandhi's VR work will surface around the end of August.
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