Shekhar Kapur is holding forth on his favourite topic — the rise and rise of Asian filmmaking. For years now, he has been reiterating that the new voices in cinema are going to emerge from the world’s largest and most populous continent. He even wrote in Time magazine almost a decade ago that when Spider-Man 6 takes off his mask, he will probably be Chinese or Indian and he will swing not in New York, but in Shanghai or Mumbai.
For Kapur, Western civilisation appears to have plateaued and Asia is where all the turmoil and conflict is being unleashed. “When civilisations are in a flux, they begin to collide and fractures start to show and through those fractures come new, rebellious stories,” he says.
It’s one of the reasons why the 72-year-old Indian chartered-accountant-turned-actor-filmmaker has now attended the International Film Festival and Awards at Macao two years in a row — as head of the jury in 2016 and as ambassador in 2017.
The festival is his window to new Asian filmmakers and their latest work. He finds a kindred spirit in them and is quick to point out the quintessential difference between Asian and Western story-telling: “In Asia, we accept the unreasonable much quicker. The mythical is part of our genetic make-up. Western philosophies are about the dominance of the individual. If you talk to Chinese, Indian, Japanese people, and say, ‘I am stronger than my destiny,’ they will say, ‘you will learn.’ There’s a fundamental philosophical difference.”
Kapur may not have worshipped at temples, read the religious texts or studied the Vedas, but admits being instinctively drawn to this line of thought — of the mythical and the mundane living together.
He is interacting informally with a group of international journalists, an odd Indian, yours truly included. If he loves to talk, the scribes seem to love to hear him talk. Kapur makes good copy, even if a very repetitive one of late.
Just like Bollywood
Settling down with a coffee, he seems intent on continuing to address the West and the Western mindset about Asians, as he goes about deliberately invoking Bollywood, arranged marriages, and curry culture, playing on and simultaneously undermining all that the West may find peculiar about us.
“Can I give you some good news?” he suddenly turns to me. “There’s an Indian restaurant right across the road. I went there yesterday. I was walking down the street and I smelt Indian food. That’s the great thing about Indian food, you can smell it a mile away. I just followed my nose.”
A long story follows, about bumping into a young Indian honeymooning couple there. How their marriage was initially arranged by their respective families, how they then fell in love during courtship. But, as luck would have it, soon the families fell apart and then the two had to fight to get married. “Like it happens in Bollywood films,” Kapur smiles.
Kapur had asked the couple how well they had known each other before marriage. “We are only just getting to know each other,” the duo had replied. “I have always been against arranged marriages … [But] there was this look of wonder and hope and enquiry,” he laughs crinkle-eyed. Nephew of Dev Anand, he can turn the charm on just like his uncle. He can talk shop and hold attention even when he has nothing to say.
After directing the much-loved Masoom (1983) and Mr. India (1987), Kapur caught international attention with the gritty Bandit Queen (1994).He catapulted to success in the West with Elizabeth (1998)that, unlike Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility (1995), wasn’t British enough, thinks Kapur.
“That’s the first time I realised how Indian I was. As an artiste, you interpret stories from your own self, who you are,” he says, recounting an incident when Sir Richard Attenborough and Cate Blanchett called a scene too melodramatic. “Isn’t life melodramatic,” he asks rhetorically and then goes on: “I am a melodramatic person. After 10 years of making Elizabeth , I realised the Bollywood influences on it — the colours, conflicts, it looked very Indian and I suspect that is why it succeeded. It came through an Asian heart.”
Chinese dreams
Would he work as well in a Chinese set-up as he did in Elizabeth , I ask him. “I am trying very hard. I want to make a film in China. I am working on a film that I am not allowed to talk about. It is too sensitive at this moment, too many people are gunning for it,” he says.
As a boy, he devoured the free comic books that used to come from China. He confesses having been fascinated by the country: “Not the China we have now — the world leader in technology, the most prosperous nation in the world, the fastest-growing nation — but underlying that, that mythic China.”
Someone in the group mentions Little Dragon , his proposed Bruce Lee biopic in collaboration with Lee’s daughter Shannon. He would rather not elaborate on it. “It’s still very much a work in progress,” he says. “It carries huge responsibility, all the fans in the world are excited for the true Bruce Lee movie.”
He took it on, he says, because he was fascinated with Lee, the idea that a man who was the greatest martial arts expert of all time was now suddenly being accepted as a major philosopher. “He thought that fighting was an act of supreme intimacy, of giving in,” says Kapur. Later, in a quiet corner, he tells me he would rather not talk about the Lee film at all. He is superstitious about it. Paani , his take on the water wars, was much mentioned in the media almost a decade ago but has still not taken off. It is now with Yash Raj Films. Will it ever get made? “I really want to make it. I think it’s more relevant now. Ten years ago, no one was willing to believe there would be a water problem,” he says.
Lost in Kubrick
He is a raconteur, and jumps from one recollection to another in a very stream-of-consciousness way. He is talking about Macao’s overpowering architecture when he shifts to film scripts — the best leave room for interpretation, he says. “The spaces the film doesn’t explore, in those spaces is born your imagination. Each time you watch a film, you fill the spaces with who you are at that time.”
He talks of how he gets lost in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) each time he visits it. It’s a film he has spent “a lifetime” trying to understand. “I saw it as a kid and I didn’t understand anything, and yet I was fascinated. I still want to know what he [Kubrick] was thinking when he made that film. What was in his mind?” It compelled, provoked, triggered something. “The spaces that he (Kubrick) left have been there for me to fill for the rest of my life.”
He would like to return to India to ride the new wave but he certainly won’t do a sequel to Mr. India . “You can’t repeat yourself. You need to find new things, new horizons to find the new you,” he says. No wonder he is excited about directing his maiden stage musical. About the tragic first ascent of the Matterhorn, the eponymous production is like an opera, he says. Authored by Michael Kunze with music composed by Albert Hammond, it will be in German, a language Kapur doesn’t speak. It opened at Switzerland’s Theatre St. Gallen on February 17.
It’s these switches, between ideas and mediums, embracing new challenges and adventures that makes life exciting for Kapur. “That’s why I am in this business. It keeps you alive, makes you move outside of your self. If you keep sitting deep within yourself, you will keep making the same film and the same product again and again.”
