Guerrilla Tactics

The hunt for the bandit begins. Assistants scurry, watchman Surendra Kumar runs after him, Shimit Amin, director of the under-production Let’s Kill Veerappan, says he didn’t meet the man. ‘‘How tall is this guy?’’ Varma asks.

Minutes later the actor finds himself face-to-face with the man he’s always wanted to meet. Perhaps it’s too much for him to handle, he does the worst thing possible. He dives past the fluorescent green chairs, under the desk and burrows his head into his idol’s feet.

That’s enough to kill the mood. Varma tells him to get up, asks him a curt question about his acting experience, then sends him off to Amin. ‘‘It takes one gesture for me to get turned off,’’ says the director. ‘‘But I’m convinced he can be made to look like Veerappan. He’s got the same bone structure.’’ Babu’s fate now rests on the screen test and on whether he ticks Varma off again.

It’s just another day in the cockpit of an almost parallel world of guerrilla film-making that draws all sorts. The Factory, a 9,600 sq ft wood, brick and metal office in Mumbai’s Versova, is the hub of Varma Corporation and partner K Sera Sera. The plush, very male ground floor is occupied by finance and marketing types. The eight or so directors, all working on a movie, all men in their 30s, camp in the ‘‘galleys’’, as they call the tiny cubicles below.

Everybody’s just a little scared of the 43-year-old’s gruff manner, but that goes with the job. Rohit Jugraj, who’s directing the angry young man tale James, recalls the time Varma quizzed him: ‘‘Why do you work for me? I don’t care whether you’re there or not.’’ Jugraj replied that, among other things, it was because Varma never asked him to get coffee or cared what shirt he wore.

Sourabh Narang, the 31-year-old director of Vaastu Shastra is summoned. ‘‘I’ve announced Chudail,’’ Varma tells him. ‘‘That’s supposed to be the sequel to Vaastu?’’ asks Narang, just back from test driving audience reactions. ‘‘We’ll decide that later,’’ chuckles Varma.

Narang, a Delhi boy who went through St Stephen’s and then Jamia Millia Islamia, has been working here for 11 months. The biggest compliment he received was when Varma told him Vaastu was scarier than Bhoot. ‘‘When people ask if he interferes, I tell them ‘if you work with a man like him, you’d be foolish not to ask what he thinks’.’’

Thanks to the demand for Asian horror post the success of The Ring, Vaastu will soon be distributed in France. In fact, the producer of The Ring wanted to remake Bhoot in Japanese and English. Narang doesn’t know who’s going to direct Chudail, but he doesn’t want to. ‘‘I don’t really like horror. I don’t want to do a scary film again.’’

These days watchman Kumar spends most of his time turning away an assortment of beards (around 70 every day) who show up outside the glass door that’s open 24/7. All of them want to be Veerappan.

Varma is not known for his diplomatic skills and, over the years, he’s told a lot of actors he doesn’t like their face. ‘‘It’s the ultimate rejection,’’ he says. ‘‘You can take ‘I don’t like your ideas’ or ‘I don’t like your talent’, but there’s nothing you can do if someone tells you they don’t like your face.’’

It must be difficult when Everyman comes knocking. After all, Varma loves real people, beauty no bar. Every paanwallah knows that if he ever wants to make it in Bollywood, Varma is his best bet.

And so they track him everywhere. For the last eight months his first SMS every morning is a greeting or a cheesy quotation from Neelam. When he drives to work, there’s a man waiting to wave at him outside his home. A guy from the nearby ICICI bank, who stands in front of his office every day, recently broke down and sobbed so hard that Kumar had to hug him. There are other regulars who have been greeting Varma from across the street for the last three to four years. He never acknowledges any of them. ‘‘Why give them unnecessary hope?” he asks. ‘‘I get at least 150 SMSes a day, mostly from unknowns.’’

These days, he rarely finds the time to watch movies. Yet he’s acquired a DVD of Mughal-E-Azam, and seen part of the classic that released on the same day as his Naach. ‘‘The people who are saying it’s brilliant saw it 10 years ago. It’s going to be a disaster,’’ he predicts.

Not for him is the thrill of seeing Madhubala in colour. He rarely lives in retro mode. ‘‘Your data constantly keep getting updated,’’ says Varma, and for a second he sounds like the civil engineer he once was.

His take on Veer-Zaara, the other biggie that released last Friday, is that Yash Chopra may have made a mistake. Instead of sticking to a candyfloss crowd-puller, he picked an epic that might have been better suited to a technophile like Sanjay Leela Bhansali.

For RGV, a movie is like a mood, a conversation. ‘‘I conceal the philosophy under the narrative,’’ he laughs. ‘‘If you get it, great.’’

Philosophy aside, ask him why women always stick their butts out in his movies, and he says it’s because he likes butts. ‘‘I like aggressive women. I hate cute and bubbly girls. You’ll never see them in my films,’’ he adds.

He’s in a good mood today. Anshumaan Swami calls and Varma tells him, ‘‘I don’t plan my life like corporates. Drop in any time.’’ The CEO of Applause Entertainment, the film-making arm of the Birla group, wants Varma to make Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Chakri, or JD Chakravarthy, is hanging out in the corridor. It takes a second to recognise the 32-year-old who was Satya in the 1998 ballbuster. He’s shaved his head for the upcoming D, supposedly the prequel to the 2002 hit, Company.

Chakri’s been with Varma since his first movie Shiva (1990), but says he still hasn’t figured out the director. ‘‘But he knows me inside out.’’ Now Chakri wants to direct an adventure; he’s got two scripts and is waiting for the go ahead.

In the galleys, Shimit Amin looks pensive. Veerappan is everywhere—a book about the bandit lies on the desk, there’s a clipping of him on the wall, he’s in the faces of all the hopefuls at the ongoing auditions, and he’s certainly got prime space in Amin’s head. ‘‘Once it gets inside you, it just stays with you,’’ says the 35-year-old who’s got an unkempt look going these days. ‘‘It’s too much of an effort to shave, and I keep forgetting to cut my hair.’’

The movie will be shot deep within Mumbai’s Sanjay Gandhi National Park and Medha, in Maharashtra. Amin knows it’s going to be tough to find a Veerappan. They’ve tried everything—one day his team even stuck a moustache and fatigues on the wardrobe man Chandru. The likeness was amazing but, of course, Chandru can’t act. The director, whose first film Ab Tak Chappan got rave reviews, doesn’t seem as excited as Varma about Babu,the morning’s catch.

He says the best part about The Factory is that its inhabitants think movies all the time. Varma, says Amin, is unpredictable. ‘‘He keeps you on your toes.’’

Upstairs, Veerappan doesn’t occupy centrestage. Here, movies are ‘‘software’’, there is talk of tie-ups with Sahara, UTV, multiplexes, you name it. There are plans to set up distribution offices across India. Chandrashekar Varma, a cousin who once ran an audio company in the South, is now the head of business development here. ‘‘The Factory moves at breakneck speed. You have to keep up with Ramu,’’ says the 29-year-old.

Ask Jugraj. The ebullient director once chased Varma’s car and asked him to take a look at a film he had made. Soon after, he was assisting the director on Bhoot.

Sitting in the reception, the MBBS graduate recounts how, about a year ago, when operations had just shifted to the Versova office, Varma once strolled over to a group of people and began: ‘‘I have story ideas, I have films, but I don’t have directors…’’ That’s how Jugraj got James, and a chance to try his hand at ‘‘guerrilla film-making’’.

Just then Varma walks up and raises an eyebrow. ‘‘Trying to get the dirt on me, eh?’’ As if he cares. Jugraj remembers the time when he found a piece of paper with a single sentence scrawled in Varma’s handwriting: Mujhe kaunsa sau saal jeena hai.