Back in the race

Vidhu Vinod Chopra returns to the director’s chair with “Broken Horses”

Vindhu Vinod Chopra. Photo R.V. Moorthy

For those who watched PK on the first day, the surprise started before CBFC’s certificate because the film came tagged with producer-director Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s first Hollywood feature film. His much awaited directorial venture Broken Horses will release in April 2015. The promo that came attached with the recommendations of James Cameron and Alfonso Cuaron took one back to the masterclass of Chopra at the last month’s Film Bazaar in Panaji where his straight talk impressed many. He said after 3 Idiots it was difficult to challenge himself and working in Hollywood appeared to be the next frontier. “Nobody knew me there. I wrote the script with Abhijat Joshi and when I circulated it in the industry, one day, James Cameron called me and copiously praised the script and asked who has written it. When I said he was talking to the co-writer he was surprised and asked then why didn’t you put your name on it. I said had we put our names nobody would have taken us seriously in the U.S. They would have asked how much these Bollywood guys know about issues on US-Mexican border. I would have been judged and he laughed,” said Chopra who hasn’t directed a film since Eklavya .

With a relatively new Anglo-American cast which include Vincent D’Onofrio, Anton Yelchin, Chris Marquette and Maria Velverde, the film is about the relationship between two brothers, a violinist and a hired mercenary, and is set against the drug war that is rampant around the Mexican border in the US.

Chopra said some big names in Hollywood read the script and found it original but ultimately he decided to work with relatively fresh faces. “In that sense it is a lot like my first film

Khamosh and I have made it with the same rigour.” The only thing, he said, he no longer needed to fear how would he return the money to the producer if the film didn’t work.

“With

Khamosh I had to return 8 lakh rupees to the NFDC before I could make my next film. Today, I am not even concerned if PK doesn’t make money because satellite rights, music rights and other brand endorsements provide the cushion,” reflects the producer of Rajkumar Hirani’s film. Not a snooping producer, Chopra said, “I provide creative inputs at the pre and post production stage but never intervene when the film is being shot, particularly when it is Hirani at the helm. I know only he can make 3 Idiots or PK . I don’t like to create two power centres on the sets. I realized it early during the shooting on Munnabhai when after every shot Sanjay Dutt, instead of going to Hirani, would come to me and ask if he had performed well. I quickly slipped out of the shooting and have never returned to the sets since then.” But not everybody is a Hirani as he discovered recently when he had to intervene and asked for some portions of Wazir to be reshot. Blunt as ever, Chopra said Bejoy Nambiar has a great style sense but has to improve upon his scripting sense. “To make Bachchan reshoot six days of work means a lot but the actor thankfully agreed without making a fuss.”