Whether it was Lata Mangeshkar’s voice warbling ‘ Maar Diya Jaye’ or film composer Gustavo Santaolalla’s haunting strings, director Hardik Mehta always had music playing on his set for Kaamyaab . “See? I always keep a speaker with me,” he laughs, pointing to the portable speaker sitting between us as we chat about his latest film.
His debut feature Kaamyaab releases in theatres this week, after having travelled the festival circuit and premiering at the Busan International Film Festival. The dramedy revolves around Sanjay Mishra’s Sudheer, a 65-year-old has-been side-actor who tries his hand at acting again when he realises he needs one more role to complete a neat filmography of 500 performances. For Mehta, the film is a tribute of sorts to those recognisable faces, popular in the 80s and 90s, whose stories hovered in the margins of the hero’s tale. “I thought why don’t I tell a story about these faces I have grown up seeing?” says the director, “[From] Bob Christo who would be a foreign smuggler [to] Razak Khan [who would appear] chewing paan.”
Delving into the evident typecasting these “character actors” face, Mehta says that in an effort to not waste film reels and save up takes for the lead actors, side-actors would be cast based on characteristics or dialogues that made them popular – reducing the number of takes they would need to get their scene right. “For comedy they would cast Mehmood or Mukri, and if [they wanted] a drunkard, they would call Keshto Mukherjee,” he says. While Kaamyaab offers a light-hearted treatment of these actors’ place in mainstream Hindi cinema, didn’t the director encounter threads of resentment in these stories? He admits that the story came to him a few years ago when he saw Ramesh Goyal on a BEST bus. “He was [with] Aamir Khan in Sarfarosh (1999), [and here] he was fighting with the conductor?” says Mehta, finding the image surreal. During his research for the script, the director spent time with numerous actors including Birbal, Manmauji and the late Viju Khote. But something Goyal mentioned stayed with the director, “He said, “arre hum toh kaamyaabi ke kinaare hi reh gaye, yaar (I got stranded on the banks of success, friend).”
Memories of cinema
Although the film’s title is inspired by this forlorn sentiment and the nostalgia of similar 80s Urdu titles, Kaamyaab also declares the actors’ success – being indelible parts of audience’s memories of Hindi cinema. It’s this reminiscence that weaves itself into Mehta’s treatment of the narrative. “[The film] is about the memory of mainstream cinema – the connection between the grammar of Hindi cinema, and its audience,” says Mehta, explaining that the homage to “character artistes” borrows the same language that carved their space in mainstream cinema – from typical music to visuals that were shorthand for emotions and plot points.
Mehta’s love for Bollywood is obvious. But he sought out his love for filmmaking after leaving his work as a dairy technologist for Amul in Surat to become a copywriter. Mehta’s stint as a copywriter made him realise that his love for arts – from photography to music and writing – came together in cinema. “Training as a filmmaker is being interested in other arts,” says the director. Though he went on to make the award-winning documentary short Amdavad ma Famous (2015) and the Amit Sial and Khushboo Upadhyay-starrer The Affair (2017), pursuing filmmaking seemed risky. Everyone around him was buying a car, going to the USA, and settling down. “But I had to take it up,” says the director before chuckling, “so that one day they will all comment on my Facebook saying, ‘Shah Rukh Khan is presenting your film?’”
Shifting tides
Mehta’s directorial process of offering music and photography to draw out performances has found its way on the sets of his next too – the horror-comedy starring Rajkummar Rao and Janhvi Kapoor Rooh Afza . For the cast and crew, he plays the eerie soundtracks of Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and Shape of Water (2017). Mehta has also co-written the True Detective -style noir cop drama Patal Lok which is an Amazon series.
Considering that Kaamyaab’s trailer had settled on the YouTube trending page when it was released, I ask Mehta, if he feels the tide has shifted. That is, are character artistes finally getting their due? “I don’t know,” he replies pensively, “Everyone watches everything on YouTube. [And though] I can’t expect a number [of viewers] like Baaghi 3 , I’m happy [they release] on the same day. It’s a sign – while Baaghi 3 is your hero, the important sidekick is Kaamyaab .”
