Vidya Balan is a character-driven actress: Sujoy Ghosh

                            

Sujoy Ghosh tells Dhamini Ratnam why it was necessary to shoot his latest release, Kahaaniduring Durga Puja, and why this film was even tougher to make than his first

There's not much known about Sujoy Ghosh, the 46-year-old director of Kahaani, which hit the screens on March 9. Which is strange, since he works in the suburban neighbourhood of Bandra in Mumbai, where everybody knows your name, what you do for a living, and, even, what you ate for dinner the previous night. Yet, we don't know that Ghosh was born in Kolkata in 1966 and moved to England when he was 13. We also don't know that he trained as an engineer, and later, attained a management degree, before returning to India. What we certainly don't know is that he left his job as head of the media division of Reuters, South Asia, in 1999, because he wrote a script and wanted to make it into a film. We could however, make an informed guess about his mother's reaction to that, and we wouldn't be too far off the mark. 


"Like everybody in Mumbai, I had a script. I went around with it for a couple of years and faced rejection. My mother gave up on me, but she's a good sort," says Ghosh, whose first film Jhankaar Beats, opened to a dream run, in 2003. 


His next two films, however, didn't. Both, Home Delivery (2005) and Aladin (2009) were - in the director's words - "disasters", which explains why Ghosh, who isn't formally trained in filmmaking and learnt his art watching Satyajit Ray's films, believes his struggle for Kahaani beats Jhankaar's. 


Excerpts from an interview: Yours was a dream debut, but your last two films didn't do too well... I wanted to tell Aladin's story differently. I wanted to make a film with the message that there is no magic lamp. The format I chose was new and I thought we could push the envelope with the technical expertise that we have in our industry. The kind of visual effects I had in Aladin and, now in Kahaani, are on par with global standards. But Aladin went zip, and to deal with its dismal failure, I began to write another script - Kahaani. That was in 2009. But the last thing anyone wanted me to do was make a thriller with a pregnant woman. 


You were offered a three-film deal with Yash Raj Films around that time. What happened to that? I chickened out. Yash Raj is very clear about deals, and you can't wriggle out after signing the dotted line. But Adi (Aditya Chopra) was a great believer in Kahaani, and contributed a lot to its script. I guess you could call me commitment-phobic. 


You've been committed to work with Vidya Balan for a long time, and she's one of the few actresses in the industry, who's comfortable with making changes to her body. Is that why you picked her to play the character of a pregnant woman? No, I simply wanted to work with her. She's a character-driven actress. If she agrees to portray, say, a ramp model, she'll do whatever her character demands. Vidya is also the most fearless woman you'll meet. When I'd tell her during shoot, "Please go walk amidst the crowd," she'd go. The ease with which she did so, helped her blend in. The people on the streets didn't realise a film shoot was going on, till they saw the camera. She isn't the sort of actor, who comes with an entourage. She would arrive in an MUV, do her make-up and change in the car, and step out. No taam-jhaam. 


Kolkata is not the first city that comes to mind, when you think about crime. But your film is as much about Vidya as it is about a city and its streets. Absolutely, Vidya is the second character in the film. When I wrote this thriller, I knew that the city would play an important role and the only two Indian cities I know well are Mumbai and Kolkata. I chose the latter, because it is the most unassuming city to set a crime in. I needed to shoot the film during Durga Puja. That's one time when all of Kolkata thinks like one and everybody's on the same frequency - happy, buying clothes, planning holidays, praying to Ma. The movie is the story of one woman pitted against this mass, the only sad soul in the midst of happy people. That made Vidya's character stand out. 


Do you always write your own scripts? Yes, I am not a trained director. I have to know my characters well in order to depict them on screen. Of course, that's not a valid excuse. Soon, I will jump into unknown territory. I have got the rights to Aranyer Din Ratri (a book by Sunil Gangopadhyay, which was made into a film by Satyajit Ray in 1970) and I will write a screenplay with that book. I'm not touching the film; I know I'll get slaughtered. 


Ray said the same thing when he wrote about making films on Tagore's stories. Is this a Bengali cultural taboo - to not allow past greats to be touched? (Laughs) There are certain things you don't touch. You can better a person - I'm not talking about Ray here, but a fellow director. But if I have any respect for him, I won't do that. I have grown up on Ray's films and books. I have learnt filmmaking watching his films. I don't think those films should be touched. 


Does Kahaani bear any traces of Ray? In Aranyer, the camera never leaves the inside of the car, whenever the protagonists are travelling. That's because Ray wanted the viewer to be a passenger. I've flicked that idea for Kahaani.The story (Vidya Balan plays a woman who comes from London to search for her missing husband in Kolkata) demanded that I follow Vidya. 


We made up our minds that we would not tell her when to move. So, you'll see Vidya getting up, and the camera following her after a beat. That ad-hoc quality adds to the uncertainty of whether she's going to find her husband. 


You have a lot riding on Kahaani. The good news is that there's a lot of interest around Vidya right now. What do you expect out of the film? I expect people to come and watch the film, which I know they'll do, purely because of Vidya. But that increases the pressure on me, because the film has to speak for itself. And it gets worse, since people have entrusted faith in me. I am hoping that when people leave the theatres, they deposit some more faith in me, and not lose it altogether, because the worst thing you can do is f*** around with someone's faith.