He’s the good guy

Stands to reason. Motwane has spent the past several years of his life nurturing a dream he had in 2003. That dream became real only early this year when his debut feature Udaan released. The coming of age of a 17-year-old boy who has serious daddy issues (and that daddy being someone you have to tiptoe past,a parental monster never seen in Hindi cinema before,given that all fathers have to be either benign or despots) instantly captured hearts and minds,a twin space very tough to conquer.

Motwane will never forget how hard it’s been,even though he now has Udaan out of his system,and his second script is nearly done. When he took his idea to friend and compatriot Anurag Kashyap,he met with complete conviction that this was a film that needed to be made. But the question was: who would fund it?

Kashyap was struggling with the same problems,which seem intractable when you’re sitting on an idea and there’s no one to green-light it. Motwane hawked it to several parties,but the net result was the same. My film was about a father and his son,and no girls,he says. No one wanted to touch it. In 2009,he turned full circle,back to Kashyap,who by now was in a very different place,and able to play provider. Without Anurag,Udaan wouldn’t have got the release and attention it got,he says. This kind of film gets about 25 prints if it’s lucky,we got over 200.

All films,I’m constantly told by seasoned industry hands,come with their destiny wrapped in their reels. Some come out,banners flying,on plan. Some moulder away,never to see the light of day. But the ones that make the journey,traversing a rocky,uncertain path,ah now,those are the ones that have been steadfastly hand-held,and those are the ones which turn out to be,mostly,complete sparklers.

Behind the clutch of films that broke through Bollywood this year,there’s been not just the director whose story and vision it is. There’s also been that elusive creature who helped the film cross the arc of idea from execution to exhibition — the producer. He,or,in rare instances,she,has the magic wand to conjure up the finances and smoothen things for a newbie learning to negotiate the bewildering by-lanes of filmdom. Without this really-hard-to-find person,films of a certain sort,of the kind that rely upon distinctive voice and filled-in characters,would probably never get made.

It took Anusha Rizvi six years to go from an exploratory email to Aamir Khan to a theatrical release for her state-of-the-nation film Peepli [Live. Three years of those six were spent waiting for Khan,she says. If he had said no,we would have looked for other producers,but he asked us to wait. While you are waiting,you never really know how long it will take. It’s always,please hang on for three months,then three months more. It was a bad time for Rizvi and her husband and co-director Mahmood Farooqui (he also cast the film,the primary reason for Peepli [Live to have created the kind of impact that it has: there is no mismatch between the actor and the character,a trait conspicuously missing from mainstream Hindi cinema),as they shuttled back and forth between Delhi and Mumbai. In the worst case scenario,she says,we would have made the film on video.

Peepli is a fictional village,but it is as real as reel can get. The story of a marginal farmer being driven to suicide is not a feel-good proposition. It may have got made without Khan,and that’s now merely conjecture,but it wouldn’t have gone as far as it did without the superstar’s active promotion on all available platforms. These days,no film gets anywhere without distribution,and on that score,both Aamir Khan Productions and UTV have done a good job.

I haven’t really achieved hindsight,says Rizvi,because I’m still wondering how to take this film to people who frequent smaller centres and single-screen theatres,who need to participate in this debate about how we live,which is at the heart of it. She’s even reluctant to call herself a filmmaker,because her thing is not to make any old film,except something like Peepli [Live,which needed to be made.

And which,without the rise of the informed and involved producer,would never have got made.

shubhra.gupta@expressindia.com