Roshmila Bhattacharya (MUMBAI MIRROR; February 27, 2020)

At the 39th annual Filmfare Awards, Shah Rukh Khan made history, walking home with two Black Ladies. He was adjudged Best Actor for Baazigar in the Popular Awards category and also bagged the Critics’ Award for Best Performance in Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa. For the first time, two Filmfare acting awards went to the same performer. He was understandably ecstatic. “I’m a sportsman, I love awards. I’ve kept every trophy and medal I’ve won, even one for a balloon race from kindergarten,” he exulted when we met, with trademark SRK humour.

According to Shah Rukh, Kundan Shah’s coming-of-age romcom was his first anti-hero film. “Sunil is a failure, he flunks his exams and loses the girl. He lies, cheats and doesn’t bounce home with a silver cup,” he reasoned, but conceded that the character, despite the flaws, was lovable and he could identify with every shot and emotion. “I was thinking of Gauri (his wife) all through, from the time Sunil meets Anna till he proposes to her, only to realise she’s in love with someone else. At one point, I almost hated Deepak Tijori (he played Chris who wins Anna).”

Recently, Suchitra Krishnamoorthi, who played Anna, admitted that she auditioned four times before Kundan finally settled for her and with refreshing candour acknowledged that she was pretty clueless through the making of her first film. “When the song 'Woh Toh Hai Albela' required her to drop a tear on camera, there was a mad scramble for glycerine. But Kundan knew exactly how to extract the right emotions. He told me to imagine that one of my sisters was gone and after that the tears wouldn’t stop flowing,” she laughed, remembering how she’d hang out with Gauri during the long outdoors in Goa, and once, when made to wait four days, cribbed endlessly about wanting to be with her boyfriend. “I was reprimanded and told a heroine didn’t talk about having a boyfriend, definitely not one like Shekhar Kapur,” she recounted, breaking into peals of laughter.

Suchitra agreed that she was probably cast because she looked the part and Kundan would often ask her that apart from showing up on the sets what else could she bring to the role and she’d tartly retort, “I don’t know, you tell me.” Twenty-six years later, she marvelled at how innocent she’d been and how well her director had captured her 19-year-old naivety on screen.

Prod her on her co-star and she remembered Shah Rukh as someone very focussed, regaling everyone on the sets with stories from the sets of his other films. “He would give Kundan two options for every shot, it’s one of his best performances. He went on to become a superstar while I stopped acting and moved on to singing. My first album, ‘Dole Dole’ released after Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa opened on February 25, 1994. I’d wanted to sing for the film too, but those days actresses did not do their own playback,” she rued. Shah Rukh and she continued to bump into each other, as their children were in the same school and she is still overwhelmed by the outpouring of love she gets for the film which the makers wanted to call Albela but couldn’t get the title.

“The film ended after 'Woh To Hai Albela', the second half was just a wrap,” Shah Rukh had explained, adding that the distributors would have loved it if it had ended with him telling Anna after the weddings, “It’s okay, I never loved you” with a brave smile. “Then the mother would have come up, put a hand on my shoulder, nodded understandingly and it would have become another Sagar,” he laughed.

But he was not ready to play the stereotypical sacrificial hero so they toyed with three endings. In the first, he’s standing dejectedly on the bridge after Anna is gone, when a girl walks up and stands beside him. When he asks her disinterestedly what she’s doing there, she tells him that his best friend Yezdi had promised to meet her there at 6 pm. With a gleam in his eyes Sunil tells her, “No, Yezdi won’t be coming at 6 pm but at 7 pm and he’s asked me to take you out for an icecream,” and waltzes off with her.

In another scenario, he goes down in church, walking on all fours—a quirk that never found its way into the film, like the pebble glasses and buck teeth that Shah Rukh had in mind for a podgy Sunil—but for the first time falls flat on his face. The symbolism was too obtuse for the distributors who preferred the third, more commercially viable conclusion, wherein a Juhi Chawla dances into the frame and asks him for directions to the church. He offers to take her along, lugging her bags, when she spots a shooting star and he tells her airly that “yahan toote taare girte rehte hain” even as the two criminals enter the frame to break the third wall assuring the audience that Sunil will be fine. While many saw it as the beginning of a new romance, for the hero himself, Sunil could have got lucky this time… Or maybe not. Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa, that was the title, right?

Neha Maheshwri (BOMBAY TIMES; November 29, 2019)

She has donned multiple hats in showbiz — that of a filmmaker, writer, producer and actor. But the in-conversation session at the ongoing International Film Festival of India (IFFI) started with Farah Khan making it clear that in her head, she is primarily a mother to her three children. Not the one to mince her words, she was her inimitable tongue-in-cheek self during the session. Read on...

‘It’s tough to work with directors who do not have any clarity, but want to interfere’
Farah, who first made her mark as a choreographer before exploring other roles, said that when directors don’t have a clear vision for their songs, it gets difficult for a choreographer. She said, “They will say things like, ‘It’s a college song, with a 40-year-old hero dancing around’, or ‘It’s a wedding track, an item song, abhi aap kuch bhi karo’. But there are also those who have a clear idea of how the song will take the narrative forward, for example, Mani Ratnam, Kundan Shah (Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa), and Mansoor Khan (Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar). Shirish (Kunder, her filmmaker husband) was like that too, with Jaan-E-Mann; he was clear about the songs, maybe not so much about the rest of the movie (laughs!). Then there are those directors who do not have a vision, but do not interfere. It’s easy to work with them. The worst are those who do not have any clarity, but want to interfere.”

‘A movie can engage me on different levels, but I don’t expect it to educate me’
Farah has always been unapologetic about the films she makes — typical Bollywood commercial potboilers. And, she doesn’t agree with the notion that commercial movies are brainless entertainers. She said, “I love all kinds of movies. I love some for their thehraav, because my movies lack that. Mine are always energetic; I don’t want people to get bored. A movie can engage me on different levels, but I don’t expect it to educate me, at least not in an overtly preachy manner, because I went to school for that. If it’s a Munna Bhai, it’s great; it’s funny and tongue-in-cheek and is still telling you something at the end. But now there seems to be a pressure ki ‘bolo, bolo, social message do!’ I feel that’s not the primary objective of a film.”

‘Parity will never be achieved if we divide professionals on the basis of their gender’
Farah also said that she doesn’t want to be slotted as ‘the woman director’. She shared, “I don’t like crutches. I genuinely don’t think that a director needs to be seen through the lens of gender. It’s not a gender-specific job. It’s not like an actor or an actress, who can play only male and female characters, respectively. In fact, sometimes they do both as well. So, the gender bias is something that I have rejected since the beginning.”

She added, “I have often been asked to join photo shoots with fellow female directors. But, I would decline the request saying that I would do it if they wanted to do a photo shoot with directors. Don’t slot me. Quite strangely, I find a lot of women directors not only accepting, but also reveling in that (gender specification), which I don’t think should be the case. Because then in the same vein, you talk about gender parity and pay parity. That will never be achieved if we divide professionals on the basis of their gender.”

Talking about parity, isn’t it true that actresses have a shorter shelf-life compared to their male counterparts? “It’s a business module. Big-ticket movies with big heroes tend to get more business and I blame the audience for that. The moment the audience chooses a female-centric movie over a herodriven one and makes it a big hit, that cycle will break,” she replied.

‘In my movies, I make sure that the woman is not there just to romance the hero’
Even though she doesn’t want to be slotted as a ‘woman director’, Farah is clear about the representation of women in her films. She said, “In my movies, I make sure that the woman is not there just to romance the hero. Also, you won’t see vulgarity. There will be song and dance and they will look glamorous and sexy, but it won’t be vulgar.”

Talking about vulgarity, the conversation steered towards item songs, and Farah noted, “In the ‘90s and early ‘2000s, we did a lot of songs which are now slammed for objectifying women. But it was perfectly fine at that time because most people hadn’t realised that it was wrong. Back then, a Tu Cheez Badi Hai Mast Mast or Chane Ke Khet Mein were okay. But, as you grow and learn, you realise that it’s not right. Fortunately, for me, I have never done an obscene or vulgar number. I have done a Munni Badnaam Hui and Sheila Ki Jawani, but they were tongue-in-cheek tracks. Today, we are more conscious and exercise restraint in the lyrics.”

‘I watched La La Land and I was like, what’s the big deal?’
Talking about her dream project, Farah revealed that she would like to make Tom Cruise dance. She also expressed interest in doing an international musical, but a la Bollywood style. “I watched La La Land and I was like, what’s the big deal? Hamari har picture aisi hoti hai and we do it bigger and better. Though it was a lovely movie, the song and dance were comparatively less,” she signed off.

Clockwise from left: Ketan Mehta, Saeed Mirza, Pankaj Parashar, Sudhir Mishra, Amit Khanna, Govind Nihalani, Manmohan Shetty and Vinay Shukla; Kundan Shah (inset)

Sudhir Mishra who met his filmmaker pals for lunch, reveals that middle of the road cinema, FTII and their late friend who made Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro dominated the conversation
Avinash Lohana (MUMBAI MIRROR; August 23, 2019)

Filmmakers Saeed Akhtar Mirza, Sudhir Mishra, Ketan Mehta, Pankaj Parashar, Amit Khanna, Manmohan Shetty, Govind Nihalani and Vinay Shukla met for lunch at a suburban restaurant recently, and Sudhir quipped afterwards, “Hum zinda hain, hum aur filmein banaenge! Anybody have a problem with that?” Soon, Nikkhil Advani, Goldie Behl and Tigmanshu Dhulia were enquiring if they could assist Sudhir and friends. The lunch was Amit’s idea and lasted for three hours. “All of us have worked together. We spoke about films and old times,” Sudhir tells Mirror.

The topics of discussion included their days at Film and Television Institute of India (FTII). “Ketan, Pankaj, Vinay and Saeed studied at the institute and I consider myself an unofficial student as I stayed on the premises with my brother (Sudhanshu) for three years and have worked with many FTII graduates. Even today, I narrate all my scripts to Saeed, Ketan and Amit,” the filmmaker confides.

At another point, Saeed reminded Sudhir that he had fallen off the roof while working on Saeed’s Mohan Joshi Hazir Ho. “Today, you have 20 people for one job, back then, we did everything alone. On Kundan’s (Shah) Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, I was the writer, assistant, peon and even assistant editor. I am not saying that today’s filmmakers aren’t passionate, but we were mad and still are,” Sudhir exclaimes.

He points out that Govind’s Ardh Satya ran for 25 weeks in Mumbai and Om Puri was a star. And Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro ran for 56 weeks in Delhi. “So, when people say that the audience has changed and become more accepting, it is an insult to the audience of the time of Ardh Satya. Today, many middle-of-the-road films are influenced by Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Basu Chatterjee and Basu Bhattacharya; that genre worked then and still does. Independent cinema didn’t begin today, it began with Guru Dutt,” Sudhir asserts.

Kundan Shah, who passed away in 2017, was a big part of the conversation. “All of us remembered him a lot that day. Saeed is writing a book which is a kind of a conversation with Kundan. We worked for three days at a stretch during Jaane... actors slept wherever they could and I’d wake them when they were needed for a shot. Those were the times,” Sudhir concludes.

Thirty years ago, the digital space would have been a godsend for Sudhir Mishra, when he was making films like Dharavi, Is Raat Ki Subah Nahin, and Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi. As he makes his web debut with Hostages, he says his best is yet to come
Ekta Mohta (MID-DAY; June 9, 2019)

As film debuts go, no one got a better start than Sudhir Mishra. While an apprentice on Vidhu Vinod Chopra's Sazaye Maut in 1981, he met Kundan Shah, a production manager. Distance can determine friendships in Mumbai, and as luck would have it, Shah lived in Sion, Mishra in Sion Koliwada. Shah first become his drinking buddy, then his writing partner, and then his director. Between several bottles of rum and shared rides on BEST, they wrote Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (1983). "I don't know why anybody would tell a 22-year-old kid to write," Mishra says. "I had not the foggiest notion of writing a script. I had just seen a lot of cinema, vaguely assisted on one film, I knew Hindi and had a background in theatre from Delhi. So, it was just him provoking me. I must have done something because he gave me the credit."

With his silver hair combed into a neat hairstyle, his 6'4 frame stretched on an armchair, while chewing gum and constantly adjusting his crooked glasses over large eyes, Mishra looks like a mad scientist. In a commander's voice, occasionally flashing a blinding smile, he says, "From now on, I'm going to attempt to make another 10 great films. I think I still have a good 15 years left." He hasn't done too bad so far. In the last three decades, he has written and directed Dharavi, Is Raat Ki Subah Nahin, Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi, Khoya Khoya Chand and Yeh Saali Zindagi. Not one of them was a money-spinner, but all of them have a long shelf life. Mishra was making movies for the web, way before the web was born. "I wish it had appeared 20 years ago, because I would have done much more work. The web series world is not dependent on a hit or an immediate recovery. So, you are making a thing that lasts. It's there forever on some web space. It's like a novel on the shelf. Somebody may read A Hundred Years of Solitude today. Some kid will see Breaking Bad many years later, and that's great."

This month, Mishra made his web debut with Hostages, on Hotstar, a thriller with Tisca Chopra and Ronit Roy. An adaptation of an Israeli show, it isn't his best work, but a sort-of Take 1. "I liked the idea of the series and the two main protagonists. I also wanted to get into the web space and understand the grammar, telling a story over 10 episodes. My job was to rewrite and adapt it for the screen here. So, I didn't mimic a shot or how the sound is played. I tried to make it mine in shooting, edit and post. All the adaptation flaws, if any, are mine."

Mishra has fallen for the medium because, "The web series is a kind of long form cinema, with the contours of a novel. Anyway, my films have a novelistic structure. I veer naturally towards the telling of side stories, of minor characters, their beginning and ends, giving them some kind of a life." So, he's currently working on three scripts. Manu Joseph's Serious Men, which he's adapting for Netflix with Nawazuddin Siddiqui as lead, is currently in its 13th draft. For the past year, he's been writing a series called Taang Kiski Hai for Applause Entertainment. "It's a black comedy, [set] in a place that god forgot. It's about four days in the life of a village, where a cut leg is found on the tracks. The town goes a bit haywire." And, for the last three years, along with a team of five writers and a script doctor, he's been shaping a series called The Nawab, The Nautch Girl And The East India Company, a fictional look at "how India was won." He says, "The right stories, you have to allow them to find you. I think this is one that did because I'm interested in history. It's probably the best thing that I've done. After this, they'll remember me as the guy who did [this series]. Till now, they say he's the guy who made Hazaaron."

As the guy who made Hazaaron, Mishra identifies most with Geeta, Chitrangada Singh's character. "I'm not a fixer; I'm not a Naxal. Manu Joseph wrote a piece on me called 'The Collector of Frail Men'. The men in my work are little confused, little weak. They want to die because of their mistakes. I like telling stories about women, because women accept frailty much easier. The struggle inside women, of the necessity of what you have to do, when you are living in a world that doesn't allow you to express yourself. I'm not good at stories that lead you to a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I like to leave stories somewhere in between. Like Hazaaron. At the end of it, you are left holding each other's hand and life continues."

It's a lesson he learnt in his debut film. "In its essence, Jaane Bhi was a deeply pessimistic story. Kundan couldn't give a happy end. The essential message was that innocence is always violated. When people ask, 'Where are you from?' Some people say, 'I'm from a film institute,' but I say, 'I'm from Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro,' because that's where I learned everything. It was a crash course with the best. I sometimes still think about it and say, 'How lucky can you get?'"


Ronit Roy in a scene from Hostages, currently on Hotstar

Khalid Mohamed (MUMBAI MIRROR; October 8, 2017)

Kundan Shah
(1947-2017)

The wall paint was peeling. The ceiling was cracked, the wooden desk was chipped. And the harsh noon sunlight was baking a thin, pajama-striped mattress on a rickety cot. "Imagine that's where Shah Rukh Khan would sleep aaram se during his struggling days," he had said ruefully when I met him last. Venue: his bare but utilitarian office in a bylane off Bandra's Rizvi complex.

Kundan Shah's voice wouldn't go butter-soft on rewinding to the New Wave, which hit its tidal point during the mid-1970s. The riders on the storm were led by the game-changing graduates of the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune.

Unlike some of his comrades-in-cinema — I'm talking of Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani — Kundan wasn't contemptuous of either the masala merchants, or the middle-of-the-roadies. A man who loved the movies, he could never be drawn into a chat, without him dropping the names of Saeed and Aziz Mirza and Vidhu Vinod Chopra.

On that noon when Kundan dropped SRK's name, I went, "Do you have a thing about newbies who turn too big for their boots when they attain stardom?" "No, no, nothing like that," the filmmaker assured me. "I don't have a bug about nostalgia. Shah Rukh has moved on, so has life. Who wants to romanticise the past? We're in another millennium. We've greyed, we have to be mature about the here and now."

No two ways about it. Kundan's Kabhi Hanh Kabhi Naa (1994) remains one of Shah Rukh Khan's most spontaneously larkish acts. Yet, the writer-director is enshrined in the film lover's memory across generations with the coffee-black comedy Jaane Bhi Bo Yaaro (1983) — much like Ramesh Sippy has been tattooed with Sholay. To that, Kundan had balked, "You're embarrassing me. In fact, I was surprised by the success of my first film, the toughest critics of the time had praised Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro lavishly. Yeah, I'm always being asked about its sequel. I'm sure Naseer (Naseeruddin Shah) would never say no to me. But Ravi Baswani has gone. Still who knows, some day, it could happen."

It didn't because, perhaps, Kundan was constrained to take on projects which weren't in the same league at all.

"I've to keep myself busy," he'd retorted. "I made a film for peanuts for a TV channel. It was based on the true-life mass suicide committed by sisters of a small town. The channel just junked it."

Open to offers from the dream merchants, Kundan had helmed Kya Kehna! (2000), featuring Preity Zinta as an about-to-be single mother. It echoed the plot of My-heart-is-beating Julie and quite inadvertently was a precursor to Hollywood's Juno.

Whenever I brought up Kya Kehna!, the friend in him would scowl, "That wasn't made for the critics. And whether you like it or not, it earned big money for the producer at least."

He'd avoid any dredging up of the hopelessly cliched romcom Hum To Mohabbat Karega (2000) or the shelved Luveria. "Let's all just make movies, yaar. And to each his or her style and aesthetics," he would plead.

That noon interview — on video camera with Kundan — extended for a couple of hours. It was for a documentary I was making on Shyam Benegal. The section revolving around the parallel cinema movement, unfortunately, couldn't be included since the documentary had become too lengthy for comfort in its final edit. Kundan had agreed that the New Wave did lose its impact when the rule-breakers, including himself, had answered Doordarshan's call for TV serials. There was a drift away from big screen cinema. Unmistakably, though, Nukkad and Wagle Ki Duniya bear Kundan's early rebel-with- a-cause signature. The video interview done, Kundan with his customary courtesy saw me off to the taxi stand. A Rizvi college student stopped him for an autograph, saying that he'd seen Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro a hundred times over.

To that my friend had laughed out loud, "At least this moment wasn't caught on camera. 'Bye."

Kundan Shah, who died of a heart attack in Mumbai yesterday morning at the age of 70, made 10 films in a career spanning three decades. But his life and work was almost entirely defined by one film, the 1983 cult favourite Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, considered by many to be the greatest Hindi comedy of all time. No filmmaker has since come close to achieving the perfect mix of burlesque, camp, irony, satire, and slapstick achieved by Shah and his bunch of young and relatively inexperienced cast of actors and technicians. In this rerun of a piece published a decade ago in Man's World magazine, Jerry Pinto puts together an oral history of the making of the film that nearly never got made
Jerry Pinto (MUMBAI MIRROR; October 8, 2017)

In 1983, a film was made by a young director, straight out of the Film and Television Institute of India (hereinafter the Institute). It was not a funny film in the ordinary sense of the word. We had had many funny films. Some of them were pure slapstick, some started as comic and then went on to become tragic, some were physical comedy, some were lifts. But there had been nothing like Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro before this.

Come to think of it, there's been nothing like Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro after it.

The story? It begins with two photographers, and get a load off those two names, Vinod Chopra (Naseeruddin Shah) and Sudhir Mishra (Ravi Baswani) who set up a photo studio. They don't have any clients but they have faith in themselves and in their anthem, 'Hum honge kaamyaab ek din'. Then one day, Shobha Singh (Bhakti Barve) the editor of Khabardaar, an investigative magazine, walks into their shop-front with an assignment. She wants to uncover the corruption of a builder Tarneja (Pankaj Kapur) who has been bribing Commissioner D'Mello (Satish Shah) to get his tenders passed. Tarneja is the kind of builder who does not mind mixing concrete with sand. He does not mind if people die. He only minds if they smell.

In the course of pursuing Tarneja for photographic evidence, they happen on a murder in progress. This is a bow to Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up (1966), so the park in which they discover the body is called Antonioni Park. It's about as clever a way of acknowledging a reference as any. The script seems to have been like a huge vacuum-cleaner scooping up everything that came along, from the borrowed suits in which the two photographers inaugurate their store to contemporary references such as the bridge collapse that starts off the climax, which acknowledged the collapse of a bridge at Byculla in central Mumbai, a bridge that fell before it had been completed. And when it is almost done, you can see the film's socialist heart in the moment when at a press conference with Tarneja, a reporter asks a question that is almost a speech. There are lines in the film that acquired cult status, as did the film. When D'Mello comes back from a study tour of America, he notes how advanced that country is. "Wahaan peene ka paani alagh, gutter ka paani alagh," (There drinking water flows separately from sewage) he says and everyone nods, suitably impressed. And there is a demented sequence in which he is told that Americans get half their thrills from eating and half from throwing away some food. The 'thoda khao, thoda pheko' sequence is a comment on the waste-makers of America and a nice piece of slapstick since Sudhir is hanging around outside the window and wants some of the cake that Vinod is guzzling— how I am enjoying writing this — with Commissioner D'Mello. But the set piece — and what everyone remembers most vividly — is the chase with D'Mello's body and the ensuing commotion in the disruption of a mythological play.

AN IDEA IS BORN

Kundan Shah, Director, Story writer

I have never been close to comedy in my life. At my Gujarati school in Aden, we were shown some Chaplin films but if I had to spend my money and buy a film ticket it would have been for an action film or a drama. But I read indiscriminately, anything I could lay my hands on. I read what might be called pulp and when I came to college in Mumbai and met a senior who was well-known for his reading, I began to borrow the classics from him. But I read those as pulp as well. I read Dostoyevsky and Balzac like they were novels by James Hadley Chase. I did not see any difference. They were all telling stories, gripping human stories. Those were the influences with which I went into the Institute.

I wrote my first dialogue, which was supposed to be a very important moment, a seminal moment, something that would decide, they say, what kind of filmmaker you would make and it failed miserably. So I sat down to analyse why I had failed. And the day I failed that dialogue test, I began preparing for my diploma film. For one and a half year, I worked on it until I was ready to look at what I had done. And I discovered that what I had written was a comedy. Bonga, my diploma film, helped me find myself. I believe every director makes a single film, makes it again and again. Guru Dutt made a film about a tortured poet in Pyaasa, a tortured film director in Kaagaz ke Phool, a tortured woman in Saahib Bibi aur Ghulam. And I think I made Bonga again and again. Bonga was not about corruption; it was about life. The story is irrelevant. I believe the less the story, the better the film. As part of the course, we were also supposed to write the script of a feature film. It was not compulsory but I decided to do it anyway. All these play an important part in the making of Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro.

At that time, I was writing a film based on One Wonderful Sunday by Akira Kurosawa. I hadn't seen the film but I had heard about it. It was supposed to be about a Sunday that a young couple who are also broke spend together. So I thought I'd do my own spin on it. My wife was out of town and I was visited by a friend who had come from Hyderabad. He was part of a collective of Institute students who had gone there, determined to make films cheap, make the right kind of films as a collective effort. They did make some films but the community was collapsing and two of them, an editor and a director, were left behind. They had gone into business as industrial photographers and the editor was better at photography so he was ordering the director around, making him hold the reflector. He told me all these stories in the night he was here, and we laughed endlessly. He told me how they used their studio to try and patao girls...

The next morning I woke up and I began writing the script with this basic idea in mind. I threw out most of his stories. I just kept the basic outline. At that time, the Film Finance Corporation announced a script competition so I put in the script that I had written at the Institute because it was ready. That won the third prize, after Massey Sahib and Godaam and part of the deal was that prize winning scripts would be financed by NFDC. Now I had no intention of making that film so I told them I would need to make it in 35mm. They said I couldn't have that kind of money, only enough for 16mm. So I said I would give them another script and I began to write Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro furiously. They said that it would have to go through the committee again but I was willing to take my chances rather than make a film I didn't want to. And the script committee approved the script and I had the money and I was ready to go.

Sudhir Mishra, screenplay writer, also played an uncredited reporter

The film would never have been made if NFDC had not produced it. It was a time of independence for NFDC. There were people like Shyam Benegal and Aravindan on the board and they passed a whole bunch of projects that would have frightened the babus. In the early 1980s, no Indian producer would have touched the project. They would not have been able to conceive of it, they would not have been able to translate that script in their heads into a film.

KS: I wrote the film with a certain kind of anger. I had been the secretary of my building and the water pipe and the sewage pipe ran side by side. There was a leak in the sewage pipe which was gushing out in a stream. I tried to get the cement necessary for the repairs but that was the time cement was controlled.

"We are drinking sewage water," I told the man in charge of cement. "So is everyone in Bombay," he said. And that was how the 'gutter ka paani alagh' lines got written.

THE CASTING

KS: Casting took some time. Naseer was fixed. He knew me and he had agreed to do my film. He was shooting in Pune when he called me to meet him. I thought he wanted to back out but instead he said, "I will give you 45 days. I'm willing to play whatever role you want me to." I had seen Ravi Baswani in Sai Paranjpe's Chashme Buddoor and I knew I wanted him. Vijay Tendulkar told me when he saw the film, "He's the key. He's holding it together."

SM: Casting the role of Shobha Singh gave Kundan nightmares. Most of the women in parallel cinema refused it. Even Bhakti Barwe who eventually did the role, refused to dub for it. So Anita Kanwar dubbed her voice eventually.

KS: Casting Shobha was the difficult part. Deepti agreed but she was busy. I went to see Bhakti Barve in Hands Up, a Marathi play. There was a moment in it where she's taking vengeance on someone, and she has to turn to the villain and laugh, turn away from him and cry, turn back and laugh...and I knew I had my actor. I knew she didn't have comic potential. I knew she had problems. She was asthmatic and how many times could I tell these guys to stop smoking? And then she didn't want to dub, I think because she was a stage performer and was afraid of messing up. But Anita Kanwar was a godsend.

PREPARATION

Pankaj Kapur, played Tarneja

I remember going for story sessions with Kundan, to try and get a hold on my character. Inevitably, he would end up doing accounts, so that wasn't much help. But then he was working on a budget that would make a shoestring look sumptuous and I understood, we all understood, that he was committed to making the film and to getting it finished. But that meant we didn't get much of a chance to discuss my character in great depth. For instance, I was 27 at the time and was supposed to play a 45 year old. On the morning of the shoot, it was discovered that I did not have a costume so Renu and I rushed to a store nearby and bought me a silk kurta and a pair of spectacles to age me.

Ravi Baswani, played Vinod Chopra

There are any number of little details that go into the making of comedy. In Chashme Buddoor, for instance, I suggested to Sai that my character should have a lighter that never lights. "Who will notice?" she said. "I don't care if no one notices," I said. "I will know my character better. He's the kind of guy whose lighter never lights." Later, it became useful because there was a moment when he looks for a match and finds the insecticide and jumps to the conclusion that Farooque's character is going to commit suicide. In Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro too, there were little things like that. In the last sequence, I run in chased by Dushasan. Then Dushasan chases me back. Then I run in wearing his costume. Then he runs in wearing a kachcha. Then I run in carrying my sword with Dushasan's kachcha on its tip. In the madness of that scene, you might not even see it, but for me, it's an additional little moment. Before working with any director, at that time, I tried to do my homework. I knew that Sai Paranjpe for instance needs her handbag if she needs to think. I knew that Prahlad Kakkar screams a lot. I went to story sessions just to see what Kundan would be like. And I went and saw his diploma film, Bonga to get into his mind. I discovered that he was a director who would need actors who could translate his ideas for him. I also found that he shouted a lot. Not that he meant anything by it but he shouted. Our sound engineer told me that the maximum wastage of footage was on Kundan saying, "Cut-cut-cut-cut-cut-cut-cut." So where does one cut?

Vanraj Bhatia, music director

I was the default music director for the whole of the parallel cinema industry. It was a mistake I made and I regret it. I suppose I got typecast. They were all supposed to take me along with them once they hit the big time but none of them did. And the ones who did, like Vinod Chopra, forgot. I believed in them, these Institute guys who would come over, tell me their stories and drink my bar dry. I believed in their dreams and I did everything I could to help them along. I remember when they shot the scenes in the lift outside the building under construction, it was somewhere in the vicinity. So they all trooped over and asked for tea. I told them I could not give them all tea and that I had had my lunch and drove them out again.

Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro was a comedy, I was told. That was fine. Music for comedy can be dreadful if it is used in the way it is used in cartoon films. But Kundan told me that he did not expect me to do any Mickey Mousing for the film. But then there were these endless scenes like the coffin scene where I was expected to compose an endless melody to go with it. He did not want any songs, he said. They all said that in those days. If they had songs, they were in the background. They were very foolish. They were wannabes who were full of half-digested Bresson and Goddard and since their New Wave gods did not use songs, how could they?

RB: Naseer and I had worked together. We sat down to talk about what we were going to do. I told him, "All these guys are going to do something because this is their big shot. Let's not do anything. Let's play it straight." He agreed. That didn't mean we didn't think things through or respond to the moment, but we played it straight and I think it worked.

THE SHOOT

Naseeruddin Shah, played Vinod Chopra

The shoot was the worst I have ever had, the worst. There was no money for anything. It was April and May when we were shooting and it was hot as hell. And throughout there was always the feeling that this film was not going to get made, but also the feeling that we had to do something to get it done.

Vidhu Vinod Chopra, Production Controller, also plays Dushasan

I ended up playing Dushasan in the Mahabharat scene at the end because it was that kind of film. I wanted to pay the actor Rs 500. He wanted Rs 1000. I couldn't afford him, so I did the role myself. Being production controller was a mad job. Once, I remember asking Kundan Shah what time I should ask the buses to come to take the crew from the Madh Island shoot where we were doing the 'kuch khao, kuch pheko' scene. He said he was starting at seven am and would be done by five. I decided to give him a buffer and add five hours. I called the buses by ten. Do you know when we knocked off?10 am the next morning. At one point, I remember seeing Kundan with his eye fixed on the viewfinder in the camera. He stayed there a very long time. So I went up and shook him and found he had fallen asleep on the camera!

NS: I had just got married around that time. I remember telling Ratna [his wife] that I would be late. I wasn't late that night, oh no, I came home the next night. And that was only because Ratna got really worried and called NFDC. They told her we were shooting at their guest house and she turned up there with food. I think she had a picture of the entire cast and crew as sleeping beauties. Something had gone wrong with the magazine and it had been taken out to repair and everyone fell asleep almost where they were standing.

SM: I think most of the actors didn't have faith in the film. They had all been trained in Mr Benegal's kind of cinema. But they were also helping Kundan whom they knew in different ways, and whom they liked despite the fact that he carried a briefcase and an umbrella instead of wearing the kurta and carrying the jhola of a radical. All the actors were sceptical of the film at some level but there wasn't much else they could do. In 1982, what was there?

NS: I didn't believe the film would work. I thought we were making the stupidest film ever. I remember once I told Kundan, 'You're thinking in animation!'

SM: I think the film might have been much much better if the actors had been willing to trust in comedy. The film is the worse for the actors not understanding the grace of nonsense. Comedy of this kind is a gentle lament. Their idea of comedy was Moliere as performed in the National School of Drama in Delhi. This lack of understanding meant that they kept trying to get out of the nonsense and return to their realist framework. In a comedy, you should never step out of the mode in which you are. I think if the actors had allowed it, Kundan would have made a much better film. Though I think Satish Shah understood it.

RB: I went on the sets and Kundan was banging his head on the wall. He didn't want to shoot the telephone sequence. "How will anyone accept that two people are talking to each other on two extensions of the same telephone in the same room?" he asked. I said, "Don't worry, this is comedy. They will accept it."

SM: The shoot was chaotic. I remember the sequence at Madh Island which was shot at a stretch for four days without a break. Naseer would go away and fall asleep and come back for his shot. And the food was ghastly. There was roti daal and aalu baingan for breakfast and there was roti, daal and baingan aalu for lunch. And since Kundan was Gujarati, there was sugar in the daal!

RB: When we were executing the sequence with Satish Shah as the corpse, I gave him my personal guarantee that we would not let him fall so he could go limp. In that sequence, the in-joke was that the expression on the corpse changed from one moment to the other. He was looking down when we're up among the lights, he's looking up when we enter the auditorium, he's coy as Draupadi and so on. You don't get it the first time but you may on the second viewing and that will add to the pleasure of it. And even if you don't know you're making a legend—and we didn't know it—you have to assume that any film you do should make people want to come back the second time.

PK: On another location visit, Renu (Saluja) and he and I went off to see a building under construction. There was a lift, a small one, about four feet by two feet. No, it wasn't a lift, it was a glorified bucket. Up we went in it and since it had one side open to the air and the sea and the sky, I froze. But not Kundan. "We will shoot in this," he announced. Now, I knew the scene was one which had Neena Gupta, Satish Shah, me, my assistant and it would have to have the cameraman and the focus puller and perhaps Kundan himself all in it. Luckily when we returned to terra firma, I noticed a much larger lift and pointed it out.

On the day of the shoot, we all got into the lift, almost everyone on the set seemed eager for a ride. I kept saying, "No, maybe there are too many people" but the owner had assured Kundan that he took building material up by the tonne so we all got in. And we began to rise...until we came to about the sixth floor. Then we stopped. Kundan leant out and kept shouting to the lift operator. "Take us up," he would shout and the lift operator would look left. "Or take us down," he would shout and the lift operator would look right. Finally, he shouted, "Take us close to the building." The lift operator did so and then I tried to tell everyone to get off slowly, not to panic, but there was a stampede. That meant as people jumped off, the rest of us who were inside the lift would swing out into the air. It was the grace of all the gods that no one got hurt. Later, the lift operator told us that the chain had begun to fray and moving us up or down would have caused it to break. But no one seemed to be bothered about this. When scary things happened on this shoot, people just ignored them. I have never worked with a team so hell-bent on getting the job done.

POST PRODUCTION

NS: Do you know that Anupam Kher acted in Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro? He was playing a character called Disco Killer. He was supposed to be a gunman who had been hired to bump us off but a gunman who kept on missing. His entire track was eliminated. I don't know how Renu Saluja did it, but she did it. There was enough to make another hour or so of film.

SM: Renu Saluja's role in making the film what it is cannot be underestimated. First of all, she took a three and a half hour film and cut it down. Kundan and Renu practically rescripted the film in the editing room. I know this for a fact, it was one of her favourite films. I sat through the editing and I enjoyed it immensely. It was like going to some kind of master class. If you look at the last sequence, that famous Mahabharata sequence, that's her work, it's a rhythm that she gives to the whole of it, the way in which she keeps the whole thing moving while never calling attention to the editing. It was a magnificent feat because it meant that for the first time an editor was achieving that rare and mystical thing: comic timing. It was only when we saw the first cut, that the actors realised what they had done. They had worked on a legend. They absolutely loved the film from then on.

THE RELEASE

SM: It was very badly released. I remember going to Baadal cinema in Mahim, and finding that there wasn't even a hoarding outside the cinema to announce that it was playing inside.

KS: It was very badly released. That's NFDC. But without them the film would never have been made. No one would have understood the script. No one would have taken the chance. But it has found its audience. It finds them still.

AFTERWARDS

RB: What a let-down Bhakti was. Speak no evil of the dead and all that but she was terrible. And what a boon it was that she didn't want to do the dubbing or wasn't interested enough or whatever. I don't care. Anita Kanwar reinvented the character entirely with her voice. That's the only thing that works for me in Bhakti's performance.

PK: Frankly speaking, I wasn't very satisfied with that performance. I know it worked but it was a little too stylised. I was supposed to be playing the role Om (Puri) eventually played. But I don't regret it because it was a wonderful time. There was such passion and such purity, such commitment to the cause of cinema, such a wonderful feeling. I thought I would not experience that again until I did Maqbool with Vishal Bhardwaj and once again, I felt I was back making cinema.

NS: For someone who spent the entire shooting schedule despairing of the kind of film we were making, I was proved wrong. I would never have guessed that generations of young people would still be watching it 20 years later...

KS: I believe that every director has a curtain in front of him, between his thoughts and the film he thinks he is going to make and the film he does make. The film he does make is a shadow play. Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro is a shadow of the film I wanted to make. And all the rest have been shadows of Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro.

SM: There are people who ask me 'When are you going to make another Hazaaron Khwaahishein Aisi?' and I feel like saying, 'Never'. Because I made Hazaaron Khwaahishein Aisi. There isn't another one hiding in me. If Kundan never made another Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, it was because there wasn't another one in him.

RB: I should have died after that film. I might have become the James Dean of India, a legend. Kya actor tha, they would have said, just two films and then he died.... But that didn't happen. Anyway, jaane bhi do, yaaron

(By arrangement with Man's World)

Avijit Ghosh (THE TIMES OF INDIA; October 8, 2017)

A deliciously wicked Naseeruddin Shah on what gets his creative juices flowing, what Hindi cinema lacks today and why he’s not signing more films these days
Roshmila Bhattacharya (MUMBAI MIRROR; September 21, 2017)

From Macbeth to Titus Andronicus it’s been a long journey with the Bard. Has the interpretation of Shakespeare’s plays changed for you as an actor?
Everybody feels that Shakespeare has only recently been discovered by the Hindi film industry. That’s not true. Even before Vishal Bhardwaj’s Maqbool (an adaptation of Macbeth), Omkara (Othello) and Haider (Hamlet) there were versions of Hamlet by Sohrab Modi and Kishore Sahu. Then, there are all the clichés we’ve borrowed. Shakespeare in Hindi cinema is not new, adaptations per se are, for which Vishal can take the credit.

Shakespeare’s plays lend themselves wonderfully to popular Hindi cinema because like our film writers, he too was writing for particular actors and companies with the intention to entertain. I don’t think he dreamt that 400 years after his death, his plays would still be performed in languages across the world. It is testimony to his powerful story-telling. Commercial Hindi cinema is also about stories. It’s immaterial how well or how badly the film is made, if the story is good, it will grab the audience’s interest.

What was it about Titus Andronicus that made you agree to do an adaptation?
Let me start by saying that the film, The Hungry, is far less gory than the play. Titus Andronicus was Shakespeare’s first play and you can see him trying to find his feet as a playwright in this blood-drenched story. In the film, the violence is implied and that works for it in a powerful way. I thoroughly enjoyed playing this despicable, hateful person. It is so boring to play the good guy. Luckily, I haven’t had to play too many. I’d rather play the deliciously wicked subedar in Mirch Masala or the don in Bombay Boys, one of my favourite performances. Tathagat Ahuja in The Hungry is, on the surface, refined and cultured but has this blood lust that can’t be satisfied. Fortunately, my mum is no more. She’d have hated to see me in these roles.

What makes you accept a film today? Is money the incentive?
If it states something I believe in, I’d happily be a part of it irrespective of the length of the role or the money. I accepted The Hungry not because it’s Shakespeare but because the script had the same kind of chilling effect on me as when I heard about the Chadda brothers shooting each other or Indrani Mukherjea strangling her daughter (Sheena Bora). I spent the first 30 years of my life in small towns like Aligarh, Meerut, Ajmer and Nainital. I’ve seen such landlords who live like kings and for whom there’s a different set of rules. This script evoked that world.

What excites me about acting is that you can live so many imaginary lives. But I’m getting bored with movies now. Apart from The Hungry, I’ve done one-scene appearances in Neeraj Pandey’s Aiyaary and Ravi Jadhav’s Marathi film Nude. There’s also a Gujarati film, Dha (Idiot), in which I play a small part of a jaadugar.

In a recent interview you said a Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (JBDY) remake is no longer relevant. Is there a film that would lend itself to a remake or a sequel?
JBDY could lend itself to a sequel but it’d have to be a completely different film. A sequel wouldn’t be possible as Ravi (Baswani), Om (Puri) and Bhakti (Barve) are dead and the others have turned fat, lazy and prosperous, including director Kundan Shah. Also, the scale of corruption has magnified since the bridge collapsed and a cop accepted a bribe of an atthani. Today, you’ll have to take away a few lakhs to make Kundan worried. After the film released, some income tax officers I met asked me to urge Kundan to make a film on the IT department. I suggested it, he didn’t act on it. But the times are crying out for films that reflect the truth of what’s happening.

You could direct it yourself?
I’m not technically equipped to direct and don’t have the inclination to learn new techniques at this stage. I’d rather direct on stage where I’m more at home, open to re-examining my work, changing, adding and subtracting from it.

Today with the audience spoilt for choice, what will bring them to the theatres?
Well, any old film with 10 stars will no longer work. They never did but the industry persisted with them as they brought in big bucks. Now we have to strive towards “special occasion films” which are entertaining and made with conviction. Films like Masaan, Dum Laga Ke Haisha, Kaun Kitne Paani Mein, Nil Battey Sannata and Lipstick Under My Burkha. These filmmakers are not sitting in an air-conditioned room and posing as bleeding heart liberals, they are making films on subjects that concern them and touch their lives. This ‘movement’ beats that of the ’70s, which had a lot of pretentious filmmakers who turned out to be hypocrites. The success of films like Toilet - Ek Prem Katha and Lipstick... over the monstrous Mubarakans is a sign that content is working.

Your daughter, Heeba, is working with Majid Majidi while son Vivaan is inclined towards commercial cinema. You discuss films with them?
Yeah, we talk cinema, theatre and literature, but they don’t ask and I don’t advise them on their choices. They may make some mistakes, but I’ve had my share too. Heeba got Mango Souffle, Poorna and even Majidi’s film on her own steam. I’m proud of it. Vivaan doesn’t have much of a choice, he does whatever comes to him. He’d be happy to do a serious film too but so far he’s only got the intended blockbusters like 7 Khoon Maaf and Happy New Year which didn’t quite bust the box office. He’s happy working.

From the current crop, has any actor caught your eye?
Rajkummar Rao and Nawazuddin (Siddiqui) are getting their due. Then, there’s Kalki (Koechlin) and Konkona (Sen Sharma) who are not new but are among our finest actors. This generation of actors is leagues ahead of mine. At Rajkummar’s age, I couldn’t have delivered the kind of performances he has done in films like Trapped. We have directors, investors and a skillful bunch of actors. What we lack are writers and stories.

Should films like The Hungry and Waiting that have a story to tell get a wider release than the monstrous Mubarakans?
With a film like Mubarakan the audience knows exactly what they are in for while with a Waiting they are taking a chance, so I don’t forsee big releases for niche films. As it is, the film industry is pretty resentful of a Lipstick’s success. We should just be content that these movies are getting made and will survive to be seen a 100 years later along with the Mubarakans. Then, people can judge.

Deepali Singh (DNA; September 7, 2017)

It’s been 34 years since Kundan Shah’s Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron released, but the cult classic remains one of Bollywood’s most-loved films of all times. Some of the most talented actors to grace the big screen, including Naseeruddin Shah, Ravi Baswani, Om Puri, Pankaj Kapur, Satish Shah, Bhakti Barve, Satish Kaushik and Neena Gupta, were part of the cast. In fact, a lot of people, when asked which film they would like to see a remake or sequel of, mention the satirical drama.

‘Corruption level is higher’
Naseer, who played the photographer Vinod in the film, wishes that nobody remakes it. “It won’t be relevant today,” he reasons, “The corruption level is much higher. Now losing an athhani to a policeman is not a big deal, now you have to give him 100 bucks.”

So much has changed
The actor reveals that director Kundan (Shah) did try writing a script, but it didn’t work and then Ravi (Baswani) passed away, so that was the end of the story. “That script (of the original film) came straight from Kundan’s heart, out of his guts. Now, he is an ageing, complacent producer. I don’t think he feels that urge. That hunger at that time was something else. And in all of us. Now we’re all old and fat. Half of us are dead. Bharti, Om, Ravi...” he says.

A tough act to follow
What if another filmmaker attempts it? “Sure, I would encourage him, but it’s a tough act to follow. Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron just happened,” he avers.

Role call
Though it would be tough to see anyone reprising those iconic roles, Naseer says that there are some actors, who can attempt them. “Like this young man, Rajkummar Rao is fantastic. Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Vijay Raaz and Manoj Bajpayee, who has not got his due. There are some superb actors, but you need a great script,” he signs off.

BT reached out to two of Om Puri’s colleagues who recently worked with him
Rachana Dubey (BOMBAY TIMES; January 7, 2017)