PART-3: THE PASSIONATE GAMBLERS
After that I consciously decided to work at the grass root. Instead of pursuing big banners, big names & so called big players, I thought, I rather should invest my energy with unknown directors & filmmakers who in their eagerness to get noticed in the over crowded, glamorous hub of tinsel town were more open & willing to experiment and had the energy & drive to swim against the current.
Now to be in such a club had its limitations. Debutants seldom get decent budgets to work on, the number of shooting days given to them are quite less and later on, since their projects doesn’t have Shah Rukh Khan they face a world of difficulties to get their films released. Victor (Vijay Krishn Acharya) has been a glorious exception, what he got for Tashan, even Adi Chopra dint had for his debut. But see what Victor did with that, he made life difficult for the debutants to follow.
I got associated with an energetic assistant director from the camp of the great man, I mentioned in my earlier post. Initially my appreciation of this assistant director was only coz he was the only one I knew then who’d refused the great man on his face to start his independent career from his factory premise.
The young AD showed me the notes he had made for his debut film. I was very impressed as the idea he was toying with, could really be made into a different kind of film. We worked hard to sell the idea through and luckily found a producer too. Only much later I realized that this young guy was actually trying to copy an English film. But I continued as I thought, at least he was trying to offer some new story to the Hindi audience. He smartly duped me in his second film too where he made me work on a script copied from a Korean film. Jolted a bit this time, I continued as again he was trying to introduce a different kind of narrative to our films. Both the films are almost ready for release right now but are lying in cans for different reasons.
First one stalled cause the producer who had spend less than a crore on the making of the film turned greedy, bloated his film budget on papers and approached the market asking for a price which was more than thrice the actual cost of the film. As a result our hard work gone in vain due to the delay caused by producer’s silly attitude. But it taught us many a valuable lessons on the short comings of such individual producers- they tend to look at films as a dhanda to make fast bucks which jeopardizes many promising careers.
Luckily second one had a sensible guy behind producer’s desk. Its here I met Irfan Kamal, the creative producer of my friend’s second film. I found him passionate about the film he chose to produce. He took the film to Bangkok, gave the director the best he could, in terms of locations, freedom to shoot, stock and choice of actors. But finally by the time the principal shooting got over, one of its actors, Irfan Khan became a star. From 15 odd lakhs his price, according to him scales up to 3 crores. Bangkok Blues, that’s what the film is called, started looking to this Khan as a small project not worthy of release. He started shying away from finishing the dubbing of the film. The film is completed since over a year now and the crew is still awaiting for Irfan Khan to find time to dub for it. That’s another pitfall of working with an independent producer; they can be easily taken hostage by any so-called star worth any penny for any damn illogical reason in the world. What a shame!
Despite this Irfan Kamal, who once wanted to make his debut with a love story starring Salman Khan & Deepika Padukone decided to make Thanks Maa when he felt that the time for it has arrived. A Salman Khan starrer would have been a safer bet any day than an expensive film starring street kids but the man chose to go with the later.
That’s my answer to the question I raised 2 posts ago. What does it take to conceive a film without Shah Rukh Khan? The answer is, it takes lot of passion, power of conviction and a strong love for good cinema.
Lot of troubles we faced during the making of Thanks Maa. I’ll brief you about them in my subsequent posts.
Let us all see what fate this step of defiance against the prevailing norms shall met.
May God bless Irfan Kamal and film makers like him who doesn’t fret on hearing an original idea but jump to take gamble on their lives to make it a reality.
I’ll tell you about the birth of a screenplay in my next post.
Vishal
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