Shiladitya Bora, CEO, Drishyam Films, (middle) Sudhish Kamath, director and Manish Mundra, promoter, Drishyam Films
Eleven co-directors of X: Past Is Present claim not paid by Drishyam Films, producer mulls legal action instead
Shaheen Parkar (MID-DAY; August 14, 2016)

The collaborative feature film, X: Past Is Present, with 11 directors on board, has been billed as a singularly unique experiment in filmmaking. However, it has now run into troubled waters.

The filmmakers — Abhinav Shiv Tiwari, Anu Menon, Nalan Kumarasamy, Hemant Gaba, Pratim D Gupta, Q, Raja Sen, Rajshree Ojha, Sandeep Mohan, Sudhish Kamath and Suparn Verma — claim they are still awaiting their dues from producer Manish Mundra of Drishyam Films. The banner's projects include the recent award-winning Punjabi film Chauthi Koot as well as Neeraj Ghaywan’s Masaan (2015).

Kamath argued, “It is a betrayal on many levels. We have given them adequate time. We were operating on good faith, but realised that they [the producers] are not making any efforts to sell the film or censor it for TV. They just wanted to get rid of it. We are all co-producers and we were experimenting with a different kind of cinema being made by people from different parts of the country. I recently mailed Manish Mundra saying that it’s okay not to pay me, but he should at least pay the others. To which he replied, ‘You are a real pain in the a***!’ After that he disappeared. What is so shameless when directors and writers ask for money? The master and slave mentality of the producers need to change.”

However, Shiladitya Bora, CEO, Drishyam Films, argued, “Kamath had signed a contract with us which clearly states everything. All the allegations are baseless. We are planning legal action. We have provided the contracts to our lawyers. They are working on it and we will get a clearer picture next week. We do not want to comment about the tweets because then there will be no end [to this mud-slinging]. We have done more than what was needed; there was no default. We can provide all documents.”

Earlier this week, Kamath took to Twitter to vent ire over the non-payment of fee. He posted a series of telling tweets which read: “Drishyam Films has infringed upon the copyright of the original authors & does not have the authorisation from us to distribute the film. All channels and networks distributing XPast isPresent are infringing upon the copyright of 11 writer directors who haven’t yet been paid. We did put in money as coproducers but the terms kept changing because Mr Manish Mundra wanted solo producer credit.”

Rajat Kapoor, Anshuman Jha, Radhika Apte and Swara Bhaskar feature in the film.

How the drama unfolded

X: Past Is Present released in November 2015 after doing the rounds of various film festivals. The idea to make the film took shape in 2013. Sudhish Kamath approached the other 10 filmmakers and got the project got rolling. Early this week, he claimed that the directors were not paid by Drishyam Films and anyone dealing with the project on any platform amounted to copyright infringement.

What happens when multiple directors direct different parts of the same film? Sudhish Kamath, one of the 11, tells us
Ananya Ghosh (MID-DAY; November 15, 2015)

Multiple directors collaborating on one film is nothing new. While New York Stories had Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola directing three separate NYC-themed segments, closer home, Bombay Talkies had Anurag Kashyap, Dibakar Banerjee, Zoya Akhtar and Karan Johar working on stories rooted in the Maximum City. However, X: Past is Present, claims to be different. It has 11 directors, working on one continuous narrative instead of individual shorts.

It started as an experiment at The Goa Project, a annual multi-disciplinary conference, but soon became a full- blown film. “On one hand, you have Rajashree Ojha of Aisha fame, Suparn Verma who did Aatma and Nalan Kumaraswamy who does Tamil commercial films; on the other, you have Qaushiq Mukherjee aka Q, known for his genre-defying movies. The idea was to bring filmmakers from opposite ends of the spectrum with disparate styles of storytelling. We wanted to bridge the gap between the two kinds of cinema that exist in India today,” says Sudhish Kamath, who has directed the holding story of the film.

“It is hard to believe but I once saw Q dancing to Kajra re at an after-party. If such a hardcore anti-Bollywood guy can enjoy a mainstream item number, although he will deny it if you ask him, then anything can happen! That incident gave me the conviction that this ‘absurd’ idea might actually work,” laughs Kamath. He reveals that Q is doing a version of Devdas in his segment, “But, of course with a twist,” he says, adding however, that directors and their individual scripts will not be identified.

The plot revolves around a director attending a film festival where he meets a mysterious girl. She reminds him of his former girlfriend, rather, girlfriends. “Each director deals with the memory of a girlfriend and each woman represents a different genre — comedy, romedy, horror, drama, conversation, dramedy, erotica and so on. Just as memories, these don’t have clear beginnings or endings and one often collapses into the other; each story has an echo in another. The stories are all interlinked,” explains Kamath, who has directed the ‘thread story’.

Each of the 11 directors was given a few parameters to follow while weaving their stories. “There is a constant and a variable. The constant is what keeps the film together while the variables are the ‘X’ factors each director brings through their stories,” says Kamath.

The more difficult task was that of the editor’s who had to stitch all patchworks into one fabric. “We approached National Award- winning film editor A Sreekar Prasad. However, there was a technical issue in the software used. So, instead, he marked the edits. Then we got Vijay Prabakaran, who edited it and then compared the notes and once all the boxes were ticked off, we sent it to Sreekar sir, who okayed it with a few more cuts,” reveals Kamath of the 105-minute film that is slated for a November-end release.