“I don’t have a Hrithik Roshan, Ranbir Kapoor or a Deepika Padukone in my film. The romance is not a grand, cinematic one. So I realised the characters have to be relatable,” says director Ajay Bhuyan, the man behind Amit Sahni ki List . Bhuyan previously made the Telugu films Houseful and Dhada . Houseful got him noticed, while Dhada pleased neither critics nor the audience. There are many reasons for Dhada’s failure, admits Bhuyan, and says Amit Sahni ki List is the first film that has shaped up the way he wanted.
Barely months after the release of Dhada, he was signed to direct Amit Sahni … “My producer hadn’t watched Dhada and was not going to judge me by that film. My Hindi and English are way better than my Telugu and within five minutes of the meeting, I was on board,” says Bhuyan. The project already had a bound script. Bhuyan read the script, loved it in parts and suggested changes for the others. “I explained where I felt the script was lacking. I worked on it along with my writer for a month and then, Vir also pitched in,” says Bhuyan.
Actors Vir Das and Vega Tamotia had also been signed for the project before Bhuyan. “During our interaction, I realised that Vir and I were in the same space — we had similar tastes in cinema, music and comedy. When the basic structure of the script was in place and Vir wanted to co-write it with me, I was game. But I told him that if I didn’t like his inputs, I’d be forthright about it.”
Bhuyan also watched nearly 100 other romantic comedies to see what how he could make his film different, visually. He was also aware of the trap many Indian romantic comedies fell into, finally towing the line of melodrama. “Most Indian rom-coms are written from the girl’s point of view. Amit Sahni … tells the story from a guy’s point of view,” says Bhuyan.
Vir das plays an investment banker with an obsessive compulsive disorder, who draws up a list of things he looks forward to in his woman. “All the points in the list are qualities I noticed in people around me, of course we exaggerated for comedy. If someone wants his life partner also to be a cricket fan, we extended it to being a fan of Sachin,” says Bhuyan.
Bhuyan and team shot the film in 33 days, primarily in Mumbai and a few scenes in Lonavala (for a bungee jumping sequence). Bhuyan feels Amit Sahni … is a throwback to the comedies of Basu Chatterjee and Amol Palekar. Two months of pre-shoot workshop and some fine tuning later, Bhuyan was confident that the film steered clear of clichés. “Each time there was something melodramatic, Vir and I offset it with something funny. I hope the result is there for everyone to see. The humour is not loud; it’s Woody Allen-esque.”
Bhuyan is toying with a couple of scripts, deciding on which one he’d be directing next. He is open to directing a Telugu film, though not immediately. “I am not cut out to make masala films. At this point, I feel Hindi cinema offers more freedom for storytelling,” he says.
Bhuyan went to IIT, Delhi, and IIM, Bangalore, worked in Singapore to earn enough to fund a film course in New York. “When I was seven or eight, I knew I wanted to be part of cinema and told my parents. They said I could do what I wanted once I finished studies,” he says. Arriving in cinema after a circuitous route, he’s here for a long haul.
