The germ of the idea for Dhanak came from Nagesh Kukunoor’s friend. “He was to make an ad for a courier company about a blind boy and his sister and how the courier company helps them,” shares the filmmaker, settling down to talk after ordering Irani chai. The commercial didn’t happen but the idea resonated with Nagesh and stayed with him. He woke up one morning thinking of a young girl walking across a dessert holding her brother’s hand, an image we now see in many of Dhanak ’s posters. “The desert was not my friend’s idea. It was mine. I have this tendency to think of Rajasthan when I think of a rural landscape,” he says.
Nagesh asked his friend if he could develop the idea into a film, the friend was more than willing and Nagesh sat down to write. “ Dhanak is a throwback to a time when we could trust people a little more. It’s the India I grew up in, where parents didn’t have reasons to be suspicious of letting their children meet strangers,” he says.
Instead of the idea of a courier company reaching out to help, Nagesh imagined a sister going to great lengths for her brother. The first draft was written within a month. “I usually give myself 30 days to write the first draft. Either it gets done or I abandon the idea and return to it later,” he says. Two more drafts followed and the first person he showed it to was friend and producer Elahe Hiptoola. “Earlier I would share my scripts with my friends in the US. We all had this American, loosely speaking, way of writing scripts. I would ask their feedback. Having spent more time in India, I drifted in my style of writing,” he says.
Elahe, says Nagesh, gives him a feedback like a member of the audience would after watching the film. “Unlike fellow filmmakers who would analyse it technically or say which scene doesn’t gel where, her reaction is visceral. I listen to her and quite a few times have made changes,” he says.
We ask him about his fondness for Rajasthan and Nagesh quips, “I can’t say why but I am drawn to the drama of that landscape. Rajasthan, unlike other places, becomes a character in the film and you can set a film there only if a story lends itself to it. I could imagine a brother and sister lost in a desert and not in an urban setup. The result is stunning.”
After Rockford , he had vouched not to work with children. He says he “lucked out” in finding the right actors to play Chottu and Pari and feels “It’s a million times easier to work with child actors than adults. I don’t have children myself but these kids weren’t fussy at all. I didn’t have any trouble dealing with them.”
He talks about the writing process, where he had to understand the mindset of an eight and 10 year old. “Writing is an organic process. I sit in front of a computer and write. I don’t have notes. I know that I draw from my past and from what I observe when I write. For instance, I remembered looking after my younger brother in boarding school. And the days when I had walked to school in Hyderabad, it was with my sister. All these added to the writing.”
When Duckbill approached him for the novelisation of Dhanak , he knew he would have “the bragging rights to say that this is the first Indian film, probably, to be turned into a novel. I love reading books so I was keen to see how she (Anushka Ravishankar) would write it. In a way, someone novelising my film would be like tampering with my material, but I was curious. And I was happy reading her work. I could hear Pari and Chottu’s thoughts,” he says.
What’s next? He has finished shooting a film, he says, and then throws up his hands to indicate he won’t reveal further.
