It has been a welcome trend in the Hindi film industry: established, new wave auteurs providing a platform to fresh, unorthodox voices. Kanu Behl is one such uncommon talent, the first young director that the much-admired and influential filmmaker Dibakar Banerjee has chosen to back as producer. A product of Kolkata’s Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute (SRFTI), Kanu assisted Dibakar in Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! and Love Sex aur Dhokha , also co-writing the latter.
Dibakar joined hands with Yash Raj Films (YRF) to co-produce Kanu’s first feature film Titli — one of the most talked-about projects at the Works in Progress Lab at NFDC Film Bazaar 2013. Premiering at Cannes last year, the film finally hits Indian theatres on October 30. On the eve of the film’s release, the mentor and his protégé speak about each other, their personal and professional equation, and their artistic synergy.
Dibakar Banerjee on Kanu Behl
I am a documentary junkie. I met Kanu the first time when he came to my house to deliver a documentary made by Shyamal Karmakar, one of the editors of Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! (OLLO) and head of editing at SRFTI, Kolkata. At that time I didn’t know that Kanu was one of his star students, with two documentaries already to his credit and looking for work in Mumbai. I also didn’t know that Kanu intended to meet me and the errand was a fortuitous excuse which, true to his style, he did not reveal then.
I have learnt to mistrust first impressions. It’s the second impression that reveals the truth. Once you get to know Kanu even mildly, you know right away that he has a burning desire to make films and also a well-measured contempt for the average and the middling. For me, this means there’s no waste of time and one can get down to business immediately. Also, I noticed that he knew more about world cinema than I did (not that I know much). His insights into various cinema movements and film recommendation opened my windows further. Also, his knowledge of Bollywood, the 90s films he grew up on, is a very interesting balance to his world cinema leanings. He contributed a few resolutely filmy dialogues for OLLO which I could never have thought of.
The main reasons for having him on as an assistant were that he was there, wanted to work with us and he came dirt cheap. Also, he was from SRFTI and was one of Shyamal’s bright boys. I have a lot of respect for the documentary movement that has sprung from the micro incubator of SRFTI. The other reason was that he was totally into “film-making” and not “film-faffing”. Also, my producer was happy with him because culturally and aesthetically we were similar and that made things really smooth and fun.
He was an AD on OLLO but quickly morphed into my creative and thematic support. He was the one who led the mutiny in the ranks when I was about to cast Rakhi Sawant for Dolly’s role. Richa Chaddha was the fruit of a last desperate round of casting, just days before the actual shoot.
To be honest I didn’t quite pick Titli . It was Kanu who picked me as the producer. Titli , as a script from the NFDC Film Script Lab, was one of the most sought after Indie scripts of 2013. At various points, many producers, including YRF (before my association with them), wanted to produce it. I was at first involved only creatively because I was fascinated by the script and the characters. What grabbed me was the fact that it said many profound things in layers, without the characters and the milieu sounding pretentious or arty. It’s one of the simplest films I have seen in terms of its vocabulary: Simple and strong yet truly deep. I was involved fairly intrusively in the scripting and the edit with Kanu’s permission. Also, I’m intimately working with YRF on the marketing, which is interesting because I don’t think either of us have had to make such little money stretch so long. We probably had the smallest marketing budget in the Indian film history.
Not just me, people like Anurag Kashyap, Kiran Rao, Umesh Kulkarni, Vishal Bhardwaj and many more are producing films because we alone cannot make all the good films and there are more brilliant films being unmade than made, languishing in musty PG digs in Malad or Guwahati. The next wave that will take Indian cinema a notch higher will come through the producers. We have financers, presenters, distributors but very few real producers whose main task should be to nurture, help, support a creative vision from birth to release, while fending off the vultures. Once we have more of those who truly understand this task, the need for amateurs like me will vanish. And that will be great for the industry.
Kanu Behl on Dibakar Banerjee
I first met Dibakar in a small garage in Bandra, in what used to be the office of his company, Freshwater Films. OLLO was in its early stages. We kind of hit it off immediately. I recommended documentary filmmaker Viktor Kossakovsky to him, and he tripped on him.
What struck me was the calm he seemed to bring to everything around him. The shooting style was completely opposite to what I had been exposed to. I remember telling myself: “Hang on, you don’t really need screaming and chaos to make a film.” Later, of course, I saw closely the sheer discipline and rigour that went into making Dibakar who he is. The will to go on tirelessly in the service of the film and to not stop even when you feel you’ve discovered the best shot or edit or sound effect — the joy in keeping on pushing yourself creatively is infectious.
I had been doing documentaries for three years and liked Khosla Ka Ghosla a lot. When Dibakar told me about OLLO , I was excited and immediately wanted to be a part of it. Right after the film he told me about Love Sex aur Dhokha (LSD) and what he intended to do with it. I thought that if we manage to get it right, it would be unlike anything anyone has done before in India. And I was all for it. More than anything else though, what kept me on was the fact that we were a great team — Dibakar, Urmi Juvekar, Namrata Rao, Priya Sreedharan, Vandana Kataria.
I could have got the money for my first film from a lot of places. But I knew from the beginning that for the kind of sensitive material I had, I would need someone who understood cinema and wasn’t just looking at it as another film. And, who better than Dibakar? After years of association, I knew that with him it’s always about the film and nothing else. And that’s the cinema ethic I believe in too.
He knew about Titli from pretty early on. There were lots of people who had read the screenplay and wanted to do it. But as I discovered the film more and more, I was increasingly sure that it needed a producer with courage. Fortunately, almost simultaneously, YRF and Dibakar Banerji Productions (DBP) came together and I got YRF (who had anyway wanted to do the film) too.
Dibakar is a director’s producer, because he himself is a director. I think that while being the co-producer of Titli , Dibakar was trying to give me the working conditions he himself would want as a director. Whether it was a crucial session on the script or while finishing the edit, his experience as a filmmaker helped cut out the fat. Other than that, the most important I would say, have been the conversations, unrelated to Titli , that we’ve had over the years. They have helped nurture my voice.
