A two-year-old girl left to her own devices in a high-rise seems like an unlikely choice for a family film. Yet Vinod Kapri unequivocally states that his second feature, Pihu is about families, marriage and parenthood. Kapri read a newspaper report of a similar incident in Delhi, which spurred him to make Pihu in 2015. A chance meeting with the little girl, Myra Vishwakarma — the sole actor in Kapri’s film — cinched the whole deal. “I knew that even the world’s biggest casting director can’t find a two-year-old actor for me,” says the filmmaker. “I knew her parents and told them that their daughter had something special and had completely blown me over.” But unlike the norm of the actor tuning in to the director it became all about the latter adjusting to his star. “I asked [the parents] permission to spend a few hours everyday with her so that she [could] get familiar with me,” he says. “I would also observe her body language, reactions, likes and dislikes.”
Work and play
Remembering the unusual shooting experience, Kapri says, “Our cameras were trained on her and she was there but throughout the 34 days of shoot, I never said ‘action’ or ‘cut’. We knew that was not the way to go about it.” The crew even brought over all of the girl’s toys, clothes and bedsheets to the apartment where they were shooting to prevent her from feeling uprooted. Kapri had to also change his filmmaking approach and realised that conventional shooting schedules would not apply to this project. “Normally we keep 10-12 hours for [shooting] every day but with Pihu , we were shooting for only one hour everyday. We would shoot for ten minutes then play for the next few hours. We were not sure whether we would get the footage we wanted,” remembers Kapri.
Despite being warned of the film’s premise being a recipe for a commercial disaster, Kapri followed his gut instinct. But he met with rejection several times which made him ask pertinent questions about the way the film industry functions. “I went to a few producers but they were not keen to work with me because the budget of my film was hardly ₹5 crores. They were not confident about the story. It made me realise why films are so costly. Why do people need ₹20 crores to make a film? It’s because they need a big star so that producers would also be confident in investing in the film. Why can’t I make a film without big stars or with a non-actor? Why can’t the story be the superstar?” Eventually, Pihu got both Ronnie Screwvala’s PSVP Pictures and Siddharth Roy Kapur’s Roy Kapur Films on board as producers. The film also opened the Panorama segment of the International Film Festival of India (IFFI), Goa in 2017.
Upon securing a release date, the marketing team appeared to have got a little carried away in promoting the film. Unsuspecting people got a call where they heard a child crying for help. Worried they’d dial back only to hear about the film’s impending release and get a link to its trailer. Many took to social media and called the gimmick ‘inhuman’, ‘disturbing’ and ‘insensitive’. When asked what drove them to design this PR campaign, Kapri was quick to answer, saying, “I’m not a big director and nobody knows my actor either. This film has only one unique thing: its storyline. So the attempt was to reach more people to make them understand what Pihu is all about. When you don’t have a big star or something, you experiment with marketing and getting the word out to people.” Desperate or not, Pihu ’s trailer has managed to garner 7.5 million views on YouTube and has been lauded by industry folks like Amitabh Bachchan, Bhumi Pednekar, Swara Bhasker and Abhishek Kapoor.
This Friday we will know if that translates into more footfalls or not.
