I spot Ritesh Batra from a distance at the protests in Bandra’s Carter Road amphitheatre against the killing of journalist Gauri Lankesh. It is immediately after his return from the Venice Film Festival where his new feature film, a Netflix original, Our Souls at Night , with Hollywood idols Robert Redford and Jane Fonda in the lead, had its world premiere. In a sea of celebrities, visibly proclaiming their popular presence, the filmmaker seemed like a study in contrast, merging with the crowd than trying to stand apart, quietly observing than being observed. This, when there is every reason for him to be in the public gaze. After all, Batra, like actor Irrfan Khan, and director Shekhar Kapoor, is one of India’s rare talent to have found recognition in the West. His international soiree has, perhaps, been the most thriving one for an Indian filmmaker since Kapoor.
He is just as retiring when we meet him few days later in Kitchen Garden, a popular organic café in Bandra. Far from flamboyant, a trifle reticent and distant, he is extremely softspoken amidst the evening crowd. He seems to be the kind of person who would rather let his work talk aloud. The successful man behind the camera is not so much at ease in front of it; the reason why he is thrilled that our photo shoot has been quick and “painless” to make way for the interview.
A common thread
Three feature films is too small a number with which to pigeonhole him. Having said that, it is also hard not to see the common thread of alienation and loneliness running through all of Batra’s movies. The Lunchbox is a simple yet profound story about a wrongly delivered dabba helping two lonesome souls — homemaker Ila (Nimrat Kaur) and eccentric widower Saajan (Irrfan Khan) — find a rare bond and anchor in each other; all through the letters exchanged in the folds of the rotis .
The Sense of an Ending has a recluse at its core — Tony Webster (Jim Broadbent) — who is forced to revisit his past after learning about the suicide of his close friend Adrian. It is about memory and history and their flawed recollections and often contradictory reinventions.
Our Souls At Night
Our Souls at Night is also about unburdening and finding comfort in strangers. The film has its US première in New York on September 27 and releases on September 29 on Netflix and select US theatres. It is about Addie Moore and Louis Waters (Fonda and Redford) who’ve been neighbours for years without quite connecting. What transpires when they do eventually find a link up? All three are bittersweet stories of older people and all are about the extraordinariness in the banal lives of the protagonists.
For love of the book
Would Batra see them together as his “loneliness trilogy”? “I am not so self-absorbed,” he laughs. Yes his latest film is about two lonely people getting together and talking a lot, but he didn’t set out to do it because of that. The reason why he did Our Souls at Night was because it offered an opportunity to work with Redford and Fonda, and that it was an adaptation of Kent Haruf’s last novel, scripted by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber.
Batra has always loved Haruf’s writing and his Benediction has been especially close to his heart. “The beautiful thing about Haruf’s writing is that there is the same world in his novels and also the same characters; the minor character in one could become major in another. So you get to meet the same people again and again,” he says. He found Redford, also one of the producers of the film and the one who came to him with the project, sharing the same deep love for the novel.
Loneliness then is not the key. What Batra has always liked to do as a filmmaker is to find a sort of co-existence and centring of opposite emotions in the same piece or movie; scenes that can be both sad and funny. That’s how he writes and visualises. “That’s my only yardstick for myself; I could have succeeded in that, I may have also failed in that,” he says.
Our Souls at Night , like The Sense of an Ending , has been about directing someone else’s script (his second film was adapted by award-winning playwright Nick Payne from Julian Barnes’ 2011 Booker Prize-winning novel). Till the two came along, he had been working on his own scripts which, in retrospect, he finds much easier to handle. There is also this huge sense of responsibility involved in adapting a great novel to screen, dealing with someone else’s characters. “How far can you move away yet retain the essence of the novel?” he asks rhetorically.
Having said that, he thinks Haruf’s book lends itself more easily to an adaptation than Barnes’, the reason why the film has turned out to be closer to the novel. “It is the trajectory of a relationship. It’s about two characters talking to each other about their past. So it has been all about keeping it moving. The job of a director is to always have a grasp of the tone. So it has been about reining in everything towards one consistent tone,” he says. That, to him, was the real challenge.
Breaking the ice
US actor Robert Redford (L) and actress Jane Fonda pose with director Ritesh Batra during the photocall of the movie "Our Souls at Night" presented out of competition during the 74th Venice Film Festival on September 1, 2017 at Venice Lido. Jane Fonda and Robert Redford will be honored with Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement at the 74th Venice International Film Festival on Sept. 1 at the Palazzo del Cinema. After the awards ceremony, the festival will screen the world premiere of Netflix film Our Souls at Night by Ritesh Batra, starring Fonda and Redford / AFP PHOTO / Tiziana FABI
Fonda, 79, recently described 38-year-old Batra as “calm, dignified and masterful as a director”. Was it daunting working with legends like her and Redford, 81, who reunite on screen in his film after The Chase (1966), Barefoot in the Park (1967) and The Electric Horseman (1979)? Both Redford and Fonda bring a sense of history and as a filmmaker he had to be mindful of that. “We wanted to make this with a lot of dignity, especially given the careers they have been through over 50 years,” he says. Batra could also bring a lot of himself to the movie. “While making the film, I thought a lot about my granddad, who was very dignified,” he recollects.
It did intimidate him initially to work with the duo. “We got a week together in a room. Just the three of us rehearsing. That just took away all of that [fear]. You then stop thinking of the idea or the image; just these two actors you are in deep collaboration with,” he says. He appreciates them for their great ideas, professionalism and understanding of the medium, their openness and spirit of collaboration. “They are aware of the overall puzzle [that is the film] that they are a part of,” he says. The two actors have been great friends personally, have known each other for long. The challenge for them then was to pretend initially, in their on-screen roles, that they didn’t know each other; and then gradually build on the rapport and understanding.
Was it any different directing Broadbent or Redford from Khan or Fonda from Kaur? Not quite, he says, as actors are similar everywhere and as involved with their work. But they are all very different people too. “Some of them are more aware of the unique dance between the actor and the camera,” he says.
The fast track to Hollywood
A Mumbai boy, Batra went for further studies to the USA in the late 90s, worked in Deloitte as a consultant and then gave it all up to chase his filmmaking dreams. He started off by writing and directing shorts, the most well-acclaimed of them being an Arab language short Café Regular, Cairo . The Lunchbox came to him while making a documentary on the lunchbox delivery system in Mumbai. The critically acclaimed hit was nominated at the BAFTA and won the Toronto Film Critics Association Award for Best First Feature Film in 2014. It premièred at the Cannes Critics Week 2013 and won Rail d’Or (Grand Golden Rail) and was one of the highest earning foreign films in the U.S. in 2014. It’s the universal appeal and global success of his first feature film that paved the way for A Sense of an Ending that had its world premiere at the Palm Springs International Film Festival in January this year. After the very English The Sense of An Ending , Our Souls at Night , exposed Batra to the “well oiled” Hollywood machinery and the concomitant scale of working.
“Don’t fight technology”
Having made a Netflix original movie, he is happy that technology has opened up many more platforms for good content. “For so many years, we kept talking about how distribution needs to be revolutionised,” he says. Now it’s happening. For him, the so-called threat to the big screen experience is not coming from the digital modes so much as the traffic snarls, parking issues and expensive popcorn that make the audience stay put at home. “The onus is on us to patronise cinema more,” he says, across all platforms. The old and the new modes have to co-exist. He thinks it’s pointless to fight technology. How much you engage with it is your decision, he says, showing me his ‘non-smart’ Samsung mobile that he uses just to text or make calls: “You can keep your mind free, engage with the world, look out of the car window.”
Filmmaking for him is an intense exercise, everywhere. In India, the budgets get smaller and it’s harder logistically to get around. But, for his next, Photograph , Batra is back in the country and will be filming his own original script later this year. Having travelled, lived and worked around the world, does he see himself as an Indian or a global filmmaker? Who is not global these days, he shoots back. “People are eating global cuisine, they are global foodies,” he points to the diners around. For him, it’s important to make films in India, to tell stories of where he is from. It’s an exciting time to be working in India. Having said that, he is willing to make a film anywhere, so long as it is possible to do that on his own terms. The Batra adage is simple: “I will take whatever life offers.”
Photo By: Rajneesh Londhe, Location Courtesy: Kitchen Garden Bandra
