Amit V. Masurkar, director of Newton , India’s official entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 90th Academy Awards, was bitten by the film bug while studying engineering at the Manipal Institute of Technology. He got hooked to cinema from across the world at the illegal video parlours outside the campus. Masurkar dropped out of the course, and his film journey began.
Why Newton?
Why call it Newton ? It was the first question we asked Masurkar in January on hearing about his sophomore film having its world première in the Forum section of the Berlin International Film Festival. It came to him through a Facebook friend request from a small town guy called Newton Mishra, he told us in an interview at the production house Drishyam Films’ office. As it turned out, the protagonist happened to be just as curious a person as the influential scientist Isaac Newton, also proud of where he came from and what he was doing. Set in a day in a polling booth in Chhattisgarh, it is about a government clerk, Newton, trying to conduct free and fair elections in a Maoist-infested area. “The three acts of the script parallel Newton’s laws of inertia, momentum and equal and opposite reaction,” Masurkar said.
What has been the reaction?
Since that first conversation Newton has become a buzzword of sorts, not just amassing critical acclaim but running to packed houses, shocking for the film’s independent than mainstream cinema spirit. Starting off as the underdog it beat the other heavyweight releases of the week — Bhoomi and Haseena Parker — at their own box office game. The international outing has been just as successful. It has travelled to 40-50 film festivals, including Tribeca, won the International Federation of Art Cinemas (CICAE) award in Berlinale’s Forum segment and bagged the jury prize for Best Film at the Hong Kong International Film Festival. Now that the allegations of it being inspired from the Iranian film — Babak Payami’s Secret Ballot — have also been laid to rest, it is getting ready for the Oscars race.
What is his film background?
With Newton , its 36-year-old director too has come a long way. Growing up in a middle class family in Mumbai’s Mahim suburb, Masurkar attended DG Ruparel College and went on to pursue engineering before dropping out.
The big break came as the staff writer of the TV show, The Great Indian Comedy Show . Odd jobs in films kept coming. Having written many film scripts that reached nowhere, he plunged into his début film with friends for help and support. He stuck to his comfort zone — the familiar world of film strugglers in the Yari Road-Versova area in Mumbai — for the slacker comedy Sulemani Keeda (2013).
Does he make political films?
With Newton , which he described to us as “dramedy with dry and observational humour,” Masurkar has gone into an alien, unseen space, rife with politics and violence. It is a highly political film but one which doesn’t deal with any leader, party or ideology. It came to him while reading the Preamble to the Indian Constitution.
“It gives you goose flesh, you feel uplifted while reading it but what is practised is different. There is this huge disparity,” he says, between the written word and acting on it. According to him, the film was born out of the need to focus on the disenfranchised in a country that prides itself on being the world’s largest democracy.
He wanted to question it by focussing on the frenzy of elections, by zooming in on the spectacle and the one day when the common man in India matters the most.
How did he prepare for it?
It required him to read a lot, travel, do on-ground research. He, along with co-writer Mayank Tewari, met activists, officers, lawyers and voters. Newton was shot in 37 days in and around Dalli Rajhara, a cosmopolitan mining township of the Bhilai Steel Plant, surrounded by tribal villages on the outskirts. Though the lead roles are played by well-known actors like Rajkummar Rao, Pankaj Tripathi, Raghuvir Yadav, Anjali Patil and Sanjay Mishra, Masurkar also used local first-time actors from theatre groups like IPTA Raipur and Raigarh, Gond actors and non-actors — villagers, local government officers and even paramilitary officers — to bring a touch of authenticity. For someone who always wanted to shoot in a jungle, ever since he saw Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath Of God (1972), Newton also marks a tryst with Dandakaranya.
