Huge, cool, incredible: these are the adjectives that slip out of filmmaker Qaushiq Mukherjee, better known as Q, on the fact that his new feature film, Brahman Naman , will unspool online on July 7 as the first Asian original from Netflix. “It puts it on the top of the heap,” says Q. The film will be available in 192 countries worldwide on the same day and in 20-odd languages. Earlier this year, the film was shown in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition section at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival.
In the midst of a thunderstorm, after an informal illustrated talk on Netflix and other online distribution platforms at Gunpowder restaurant in Assagao, Goa (that is now his home) Q spoke extensively to The Hindu. Edited excerpts from the interview:
Do platforms like Netflix help in skirting censorship in any way?
That question is best answered by Netflix. The best distributor is the one who takes up your film as their own and then deals with whatever has to be dealt with. And it’s not your problem. Your problem is making the film, and they shall get it shown the way you intended to. This is the crux of the matter. Censorship, authoritarianism or bureaucracy, regimental mindsets or public morality: these are factors that play in the domain of public distribution. Netflix as an institution or company, which is investing itself in this format, is working with its legal team on all these issues. It is being dealt with in a much more professional way than an individual filmmaker or smaller production house can.
What about self-censorship?
Everyone is doing it. It is such a relief to think that I don’t have to do it any more. We have been fighting to have that voice and still make a living without the so-called commercial transactions. How do we survive and sustain? It’s been open-ended. We have been lucky that we have had some European distributors. Now it’s a different story. Now we are not looking at small pockets.
Also, earlier you could take your film to the world but could not get an audience here perhaps…
Exactly. We were missing out on the sub-continental audience who are in excess of a million I would say, who are really eager for this content but cannot have it.
Now to the film, did the idea of Brahman Naman come from [the writer] Naman (Ramachandran)?
Actually [producer] Steve [Barron] and Naman developed it together. Naman never thought of writing this shit. Steve was here with Naman on another project. They were getting drunk and Naman was telling him all these stories. Steve went back to London and called Naman and told him that he had been thinking about them. So Naman started writing, Steve started developing it with him and at that point they thought Steve would direct it. Then Steve saw Gandu at the London film festival and said that I should direct it. When I joined I could help in the process of making it a shooting script. I could add the physical comedy bits. I could come up with the transitions which could work in terms of my way of showing this world. That’s what they wanted.
You have been talking a lot about the breakdown of narrative in cinema but to me Brahman Naman seems to be your most narrative-oriented film. Did you feel that you were going completely against your grain as a filmmaker?
You have to understand one thing: that I was a nobody. If I didn’t make films like Gandu and Tasher Desh nobody would take me seriously. In order to make your presence felt you need to do something which is completely out of bounds. Then swiftly I got to the next level after Tasher Desh . I was accused of not being able to tell a story and all this while I had been claiming that telling a story is the least important thing in cinema. I don’t consider it to be a big part of it. However, there are great stories told on cinema as well. I am a big fan of that, I am not against that. All I was saying was that right now is to do my own thing. I did it for six years. And then I took this decision that we will move on to the next level.
Brahman Naman is a comedy. Comedy is a straight narrative. It has to flow straight in order for you to get the joke. When have you last seen a cross-narrative comedy? Comedy has to flow in terms of time and continuity. The genre asked for it and I delivered. It was perhaps the easiest film to make because we, our little group of bandits, were not on our own finally.
I was struck by how Shashank [Arora, who plays Naman] is so much like Naman. Did he spend a lot of time with him?
I told him, “Naman, you will have to live this life for three months.” We got the crew first and then the actors. For one month in Mysore, five weeks almost, there were two houses and we all lived there and shared rooms. There was no personal space, exactly like the 80s [of the film]. No mobile or Internet. We had VHS. We were watching films like that. We were totally getting into that mode. Everyone did that. And Naman was after all our protagonist. To get Shashank [Arora], Tanmay [Dhanania] and Chaitanya [Varad] and company out of their own personae, who are the millenials with no clue about what that was [about], and to get them to this; it was so nice. I was happy to see it all looked so effortless. We worked on the speech. Most of them didn’t know the words in the script. The lingo was so different; people don’t talk like that anymore. The words that are being used are fundamental to the humour and these guys didn’t know those words. Cataclysmic: they don’t know what it means.
You were asking me if I hated the guys…
The idea was to hate the idea of Naman. That was our intent. But at the same time he is super sweet. You can’t help but think that “oh man, this guy is so stunted.” His circumstances make him like this because he has no other way. But he is a good guy. He is obnoxious but nice, he is nice obnoxious. I like that. I am myself considered to be a nice aadmi . Human beings are essentially flawed, otherwise we will be angels.
It’s interesting how you are looking at this ritualistic, conservative Brahmanical world and putting the tadka of sex in it…
My deep political motivation is to [disrupt] the status quo. It is being followed by every artiste in the world and not just filmmakers. Artistes like Ai Wei Wei or a Banksy kind of a phenomenon or a Badal Sarcar kind of a person who was always trying to destabilise the status quo. That’s the job. There’s no more to it. Opposition is not going to govern policies, it is going to critique. My job is not to follow rules but to break them. The gamut of thinkers who harvest change, that is all that they concern themselves with.
So cinema has to be subversive and not just aesthetic. You have been doing that, taking potshots with sex (and pornography) as a tool perhaps. The shock has a reason, isn’t it?
Shock cinema and theatre is a very old form. That is why mentioned Badal Sarcar and [Nagasi] Oshima. It has been developed over years of practise and the idea of human existence. The idea of time is non-linear and I could completely start believing in that logic. Time is fragmented everywhere. The opening chapter, preface of the Mahabharata lays out virtual dimension of time from an oriental point of view, not an occidental, logical point of view. But a layered, universal, complex way. I believe that it’s the universal governing principle.
Opposition is not going to govern policies, it is going to critique. My job is not to follow rules but to break them. The gamut of thinkers who harvest change, that is all that they concern themselves with.
