Filmmaker Aanand L. Rai and I are having a Gulzar moment in the middle of a feverish Monday afternoon in Andheri. Taking off from the song in Aandhi — ‘Fursat ke raat din’ — we get nostalgic about growing up in a laidback, unhurried Delhi, sleeping under the stars on the terrace, and listening to Hindi filmsongs on the transistor late into the night.
“Those were the days when parents had time to spend with their children, and even if families could barely make ends meet, there was always enough food on the table, even for guests. We have become more formal in our interactions now,” says Rai. According to him, it’s these little joys that he consciously seeks out in the worlds he creates in his stories.
Over the years he has come to be known for bringing alive the Hindi heartland on the big screen — the bylanes of Varanasi, Kanpur, Haridwar, Lucknow, Agra, Amritsar. He has created his own updated, contemporary, colourful version of ‘small town cinema’, parallel to Bollywood’s metro and NRI-centred flicks. “I am a true-to-life location kind of person, someone who wouldn’t have even seen film sets,” he says.
The fursat or leisure he is reminiscing about is entirely missing from his life at the moment. Things couldn’t have been more hectic at Colour Yellow Productions. He is busy wrapping up the shoot and working on the post production of the biggest film of his career, Zero, in which he directs Shah Rukh Khan in the role of a dwarf.
First of sorts
Meanwhile, Rahi Anil Barve’s period horror-fantasy, Tumbbad, which Rai has come on board to present, will be the first Indian film to open Critics’ Week at the next Venice Film Festival. Shortly after, his co-production with Phantom Films, Anurag Kashyap’s Manmarziyaan, will première at Toronto International Film Festival. In the middle of all this, his team is busy looking into the promotion of another production that releases later this month — Mudassar Aziz’s Happy Phirr Bhag Jayegi . The plate couldn’t have been so full in the last few years even for top-of-the heap production houses like Yashraj Films and Dharma.
Spinning around
Rai’s films might be travelling to Venice and Toronto, but the tight schedule at home ( Zero has to hit the theatres around Christmas) makes him unsure if he’ll make it to those cities. He has just returned from a morning shoot at Mehboob, and squeezes out a languid hour for us.
Rai started off as an engineer, but scared of the routinised life, he decided one day to take a dramatic detour into cinema, starting off by assisting his brother Ravi Rai in television ventures. “I was afraid that I would even say ‘I love you’ to someone in a cold and calculated way,” he says about his tech days.
Since 2007, when he made his directorial debut with Strangers, Rai has had a slow and steady rise to fame, with the Tanu Weds Manu franchise and Raanjhanaa being the game changers . The last couple of years, in particular, have turned his studio to one of some reckoning in Bollywood.
An organic process
He calls it an “exciting and challenging roller coaster ride” but one that wasn’t planned. “It has been an organic process. There is a big and diverse slate of films, but what is more important is whether we are getting our creative juices right, whether we are enjoying ourselves,” he says.
It’s not just the festival outings of Newton and Tumbbad that give him a high but that there’s an eager audience and box office potential back home as well, pointing at the possibility of breaking the art versus commerce divide in cinema. These may have been atypical ventures for him to have had a stake in, but he candidly admits that Newton made the same return on investment as the more mainstream Tanu Weds Manu.
It all boils down to stories, each requiring different economics, approaches, treatments, casting and budgeting. A Shubh Mangal Saavdhan demanded Ayushmann Khurana and Bhumi Pednekar just as Zero needed SRK. “More money can at times spoil the tone and tenor of a film,” he says. And, in his book of filmmaking, loyalty to the story is of utmost significance. “I am scared of damaging a story; a story should never go waste,” he says.
Sticking together
Writers then have a special place in what he calls the Colour Yellow Family, which incidentally gets its name from Rai’s favourite colour. Apart from Hitesh Kewalya, Kanika Dhillon, and Amit Masurkar, there is his long-standing writer, collaborator, partner Himanshu Sharma. “We got together very early in life, we’ve been together through trying times. We can’t leave each other now,” says Rai.
There’s something decidedly old-worldly about Rai. He appears to be unfazed and easygoing with success and prosperity. He is contented, a rare achievement these days. “I am still not calculating profits for myself,” he says, “I have a home, family, car and work. As a person with a middle-class upbringing, I couldn’t have asked for more. I might upgrade to a bigger car, but even that will come only with four wheels. An excess of money takes away something vital from you.”
A bonus after all
He attributes this mindset to being the son of teachers. “There is no legacy to live up to. I am not answerable to anyone. Whatever I have achieved is a bonus.” Ask him the formula of his success and he says it’s his honesty with the audience: “It’s my rootedness that is paying off and taking care of me. If I lose my transparency, I will lose it all.”
After more than a decade in Bollywood, he still considers himself a ‘director’, not a ‘filmmaker’. Filmmakers for him are people like Bimal Roy, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Raj Kapoor, K. Asif and Mehboob Khan. “They changed the thought processes of people and society through their films. I haven’t been able to make a difference yet.”
Zero has been long in the making, the stakes are high. It’s been a tough film, one that has taken him outside the middle class, small-town realities he’s dabbled in so far. It’s been about marrying technology to emotions, using VFX in a way that is not apparent to the audience. “I have been like a kid enjoying Disneyland,” he says. It may be his most ambitious venture, but he remains rooted: “ Maine zameen nahin chhodi hai par main uda hoon (I have not abandoned the earth, but I have flown high).”
namrata.joshi@thehindu.co.in
