PROFILE / FILM

Jump Cut 01 January 2013

Unscripted encounters with

Dibakar Banerjee JAI ARJUN SINGH

NATASHA HEMRAJANI FOR THE CARAVAN

MIDWAY THROUGH Dibakar Banerjee’s 2008 film Oye Lucky! Lucky

Oye!, someone asks Baangali, sidekick to the film’s protagonist, “Tu sach
mein Baangali hai (Are you really Bengali)?” We have heard this amiable
rogue addressed thus many times already and not thought much about it,
perhaps taking for granted that he is a Bengali raised in the film’s West
Delhi setting. But no, he mumbles sheepishly—he got this nickname
because his father was once arrested in Kolkata.

It’s a chuckle-out-loud moment—unless you miss it, which you might

well do during a casual first viewing; the lines are spoken offhandedly,
not lingered on, and the shot is framed in such a way that the two men
are on the right edge of the screen while the rakish thief Lucky—our
focus of attention—is on the left, glancing about nervously for cops. But
the scene captures one of the defining features of Banerjee’s cinema: a
delicacy of touch, where dialogue is allowed to be the tip of an iceberg,
suggesting a whole world behind a character without thickly underlining
it. In another scene in Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, Lucky’s future girlfriend
disapproves of the short-skirted schoolgirls in a café—“Hamaare school
mein salwar kameez pehente thhe (We wore salwar-kameez in school)”—
and he gives her his trademark cocky grin and says, “Tabhi toh jal rahi ho
(That’s why you’re jealous).” It is a small but significant moment from a
filmmaker whose work is often about the nature of aspiration in a many-
layered society, and about the impulse to look at other people, wondering
what it might be like to live their lives—along with the fear of crossing
over to the other side.

Over the course of four films in seven years, Banerjee has become widely
recognised as one of our most original directors—a poster boy for the so-
called Indie movement, though a better formulation for his work might
be personal cinema, since he has laboured very near the mainstream.
Four features is not a very large sample size, but consider the
progression: from the relatively simple-minded morality tale Khosla ka
Ghosla (still his most popular film among middlebrow audiences who
aren’t too invested in edgy cinema) to the more nuanced Oye Lucky!
Lucky Oye! (a colourful but savage indictment of the same middle class
that was idealised in the first film) to the formal departure of Love, Sex
aur Dhokha (three intersecting stories about honour killings, sexual
exploitation and media voyeurism told through handheld cameras and
CCTV footage) and finally to last year’s Shanghai, a dark, stifling work
about a country trying to emulate the First World while pretending that
its poor don’t exist.
A stylistic leap for Banerjee, Shanghai, about a country blindly emulating the First World, has
been his darkest film. COURTESY DIBAKAR BANERJEE

In look and tone, these films are vastly different from each other. Love,
Sex aur Dhokha is so different from anything else directed by Banerjee (or
most other Indian directors) that it would be unfair to use it to make the
point, so instead watch a few minutes of Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! and a few
minutes of Shanghai back to back: both films are clear-sighted about
social hierarchies, and insightful about the hegemony of the privileged
over the powerless, but the former is bright, colourful and driven by an
energetic music score, while the latter is full of portentous silences and
may give you the impression that the entire reel of film was dipped into
the river Styx. What all of his films have in common, though, is the mark
of a tremendously disciplined and well-organised helmsman; this is
apparent in the way every element—from script and music to set design
and cinematography—comes together, each informing the whole.
Watching a Banerjee film, you rarely get the sense of an erratic genius
scratching all over his drawing pad (something that occasionally happens
with the work of his great contemporary Anurag Kashyap, with whom
his name is frequently clubbed). This is not an unequivocally good thing
in principle: art can be stifled by too much control; good cinema needs
breathing space and has often been a product of serendipitous little
moments. But in a career with no major missteps so far, Banerjee has
succeeded in maintaining the balance.
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VIGNETTES FROM HIS FILMS were running through my head when I

met Banerjee in his office, occupying a floor of a building in Mumbai’s
Lalbagh Industrial Estate, not far from his house in Sewri. The floor is
spacious and well-ventilated, with randy pigeons occasionally fluttering
in through the windows and having to be shooed out because the fans
are on. The sections that pass for his cubicle and conference room have
glass doors and walls, which means there are no private spaces. Two
shelves of books—mainly graphic novels and old Bengali publications—
line a wall. “This building was a 150-year-old Portuguese prayer-house,”
he said. “You’ll never get this sort of property in Andheri or Film City. In
Bombay it’s like luxury.”
Banerjee at his office in Lalbagh, Mumbai. Although he has made only four films, he has
become widely recognised as one of Hindi cinema’s most original directors. PRASHANT
NADKAR / INDIAN EXPRESS ARCHIVE

As we were speaking, a flippant thought hit me: here is another Baangali

who isn’t quite a Bengali—his life and background don’t fit the archetype
of the Bengali intellectual figure, although it’s tempting to slot him as
one. His credentials as a discerning filmmaker apart, he is a perceptive,
well-spoken man with a variety of artistic interests, someone who was
raised in a genteel environment, cushioned at all times by the trappings
of high culture. But there is a flaw in that portrait. Banerjee grew up in
pockets of West Delhi, where his family has lived since 1950, when his
grandfather—formerly an army man—shifted there from Ranchi. There
was plenty of culture inside the house—his mother and sister are
classical singers, and as a child he was surrounded by books. But outside
was the boisterous world of the streets, a world of lower-middle-class
business families that he came to know very well, as any Delhiite who has
seen his first two films can attest.

“Bengali culture is not my primary influence,” he explained. “The

primary influences would be Delhi the city, the Bombay film industry,
and the Western intellectual and cinematic world.” That said, one of the
first things he told me was that he disliked the word “intellectual”
because of stereotypes associated with it. “Too often I have heard the
word used to describe someone who has a judgement for everything, but
who has never gotten his own hands dirty.”

For the young Dibakar, “getting his hands dirty” meant being part of a
street-smart lifestyle that was far removed from the cliché of the
armchair intellectual. And that early life is inseparable from what he is
today. Even “good” international cinema came into his personal orbit
through what was an adolescent’s rite of passage: at age 17, he and four
friends rented what they thought would be a porn film called Confessions
of a Taxi Driver to watch in a darkened room in Jhandewalan—and ended
up with Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver instead. “We closed the drapes,
waited for the obligatory hardcore moment but nothing happened—and
by the end, here were five guys from a typical Karol Bagh setting, riveted
by what they were seeing.”

A few years ago, Banerjee drew three elegant sketches to accompany an

article he wrote for First City magazine about his early memories of Delhi.
One of them shows the courtyard of the house he grew up in, with a
distinctive thick pillar, his father’s Lambretta scooter, and in a corner,
hunched up in a chair, his then recently widowed grandmother. “She
would look down and look up and then look down again,” Banerjee
wrote of the sad old woman. The drawing—plaintive, sympathetic—is
like an image long imprinted on the mind; looking at it, you can imagine
a boy reading or playing with a ball, constantly mindful of the people and
things around him. “Honestly, I would rather describe something by
drawing it than through spoken words,” he told me. It takes an effort for
him to refrain from drawing complex storyboards for his films—a
creatively satisfying but time-consuming process—and to do functional
stick-figures instead.

“Even when he learnt the alphabets, he drew them as if he was

sketching,” his father told me when I visited his parents in their second-
floor flat in West Delhi’s busy Maya Enclave, where the family has lived
since 1984, when Banerjee was 15. “And he learnt to write in English,
Hindi and Bengali at a very young age.” His mother Parul recalled him
sitting with one thumb in his mouth while the other hand would be busy
with a pencil, drawing. “Even today you’ll see him doodling constantly on
his legs or on his shorts,” she said. She took out a small, worn diary with
his childhood sketches: jumping lions, a warrior depicted from behind—
an unusual perspective, much like our first view of Lucky sitting with his
back to the camera, gazing contemplatively out the window, indifferent
to the commotion around him.
Banerjee’s parents in their Delhi home. The resemblance between his father and Anupam
Kher’s character of the wronged old man in Khosla ka Ghosla is not merely a coincidence.
DIVYA DUGAR FOR THE CARAVAN

They listed his childhood achievements with pride: “After he joined Bal
Bharati school, we didn’t have anything to worry about—he was always
topping class, winning prizes.” Allowance must be made for parents
inflating a child’s feats (and for the questing-vole journalist building a
narrative around them in light of his later success), but photos and
artefacts emerged: pictures of a little boy sitting at a table, a focused look
on his face; an older boy receiving citations in school for painting
competitions, debating, and Hindi recitations. Mr Banerjee produced a
small sculpture that his son made of a woman breastfeeding a baby—a
strikingly minimalist, almost featureless piece. When Dibakar was in
class six, I was told, he did an English translation of Bibhutibhushan
Banerjee’s 1930s novel Chander Pahar; a few years later, returning to it at
an age when his sense of language was more developed, he was
embarrassed by the earlier translation and reworked the whole thing.
The young Banerjee, precocious and overachieving in school, went through restless and
moody teenage years in the 1980s.

As with so many budding artists, creativity went hand in hand with

restlessness; in Dibakar’s case, it also went with a tendency to easily get
scared. “He was an unusually fearful child,” his sister Mallika—older than
him by eight years—recalled. “If you gave him a moving toy, he would not
take it. Balloons were okay as long as they were in his hand, but if one
went up and got stuck in a corner it would set something off in his mind
—he would refuse to come back into the room.” It made me think of
uncanny moments in Banerjee’s cinema: an elderly woman with an
ingratiating smile coming out from behind her desk to greet a minion,
like a spider scuttling towards a fly; a bright red statue of a horse’s
grinning head standing out amidst routine artefacts in a house; and the
cold dread of a scene where a girl who has just eloped checks her phone
and finds 40 missed calls from her father.

But you can’t expect quiet, imaginative children to remain the

unblemished apples of their family’s eyes forever. At some point it’s likely
that a gap will appear between what they are expected to do and what is
going on in their own restless minds. His family faced this when he went
from being their “Murphy baby” and Mallika’s “curly-haired living doll” to
becoming a distant adolescent late in his school years; when he
registered but didn’t show up for his entrance exam for the College of
Engineering in Rourkee; and later, when he dropped out a year and a half
after joining the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad.

The young Banerjee, precocious and overachieving in school, went through restless and
moody teenage years in the 1980s. COURTESY DIBAKAR BANERJEE

They may have felt similar misgivings years later when their son, having
settled into an advertising career by the early 2000s—and having married
his girlfriend Richa—told them he was taking time out to make a feature
film. His friend Jaideep Sahni had come up with an idea for a movie
about a middle-class man being cheated out of a precious plot of land,
and had suggested they develop it into a script.

I HAD BEEN SPEAKING WITH BANERJEE’S FATHER for over 20

minutes when the nagging sense that there was something familiar about
him resolved itself into a light-bulb moment: the man sitting before me
could easily be an older version of Anupam Kher’s character in Khosla ka
Ghosla. The features are uncannily similar, so is the gentle smile, the
hesitant speech and the white kurta-pajama. It’s possible to see him as a
peace-seeking man who might just fly into a temper if pushed too far by a
recalcitrant son.

I cautioned myself to stop playing connect-the-dots, but a while later we

were discussing Khosla ka Ghosla and Banerjee’s mother leaned forward
conspiratorially: “You know what Anupam Kher told me during the
shooting?” she said. “He said Dibakar cast him because he looks like his
father. Kisi ko yeh nahin pata (No one knows this), but Dibakar asked him
to observe his father’s gestures and his way of wearing his lungi.”

On the face of it, Khosla ka Ghosla is the coming-of-age story of Cherry

(played by Parvin Dabas), an ambitious go-getter who is keen to leave for
greener pastures in the US, but who eventually stays behind to face his
responsibilities. But there is another son on the sidelines, Cherry’s older
brother Bunty (Ranvir Shorey), a loafer whom the family has long given
up on; he can’t even disappoint them any longer because they have no
expectations of him. And there was a time when it may have seemed that
Banerjee was heading in a similar direction. When he chose not to
complete his National Institute of Design course, his parents were very
frustrated. “Remember that scene where Khosla says, ‘Main bahut jhel
chukka hoon (I have suffered a lot)’?” Mr Banerjee asked me excitedly. “I
must have said those words many times to Dibakar. He put a lot of my
anger into the film.”

“I wouldn’t call Khosla ka Ghosla autobiographical at all,” Banerjee had

told me in Mumbai a few days earlier. But he admitted that this guileless
movie was the proverbial First Film, “where you work with what you
know most intimately—even the character played by Tara Sharma was
based on my wife Richa”, and that it can be seen as guilt-expiation for the
men who wrote it. Jaideep Sahni was a computer engineer who left his
career to become a trainee writer at an ad agency. “He took a huge risk,
and his parents were Punjabi refugees who had built everything from
scratch. Another aspect is that this is my guilt for dropping out of college
and becoming an ad-man and later a filmmaker, and making my parents
go through that agony of a decade and a half: isska hoga kya (what will
become of him)?”

The restless young man had answers for everything. “I have learnt
whatever I could learn at NID,” his parents remember him declaring. “If I
stay on there, it will be a waste of my time.” He had to move on to
something else, even if he didn’t yet know what that would be. At home,
though, there was limited patience for a lotus-eater’s whims, and things
got very tense for a few months. “I will pay you pocket money for one
year, but after that if you aren’t doing something you have to leave the
house,” his father recalled threatening him.

“WHAT are you trying to do,” his father demanded. “You think you will
be Rabindranath Tagore, the jhola-boy? Tu kya Satyajit Ray banega (Will
you become Satyajit Ray)?”

HOW DID THAT BOY GO ON TO BECOME, not a Ray—it’s too early

for such comparisons—but one of our most versatile film-makers?
Banerjee himself insists that the journey involved no romantic stories of
a hero emerging from a fiery trial. “My movie career was handed to me
on a platter,” he said. “Jaideep and I were friends. He recommended me
as a director based on our drunken chats in our agency days.”

Some of the discipline in Banerjee’s films can no doubt be traced back to

his advertising years, which gave him a sense of how to express a mood
instantly, and compress a story into 30 seconds. He also sated his hunger
for multi-tasking during his early days in that profession, while working
in agencies like Shems Combit and Anthem. Being from NID, he was
expected to be a visualiser, not a copy-writer, but he had his heart set on
being both, and occasionally found bosses willing to indulge him. If he
was sketching at his desk and a visitor, or someone from another
department, asked him what he did, he would reply that he was mainly a
copy-writer; asked the same question when he was tapping away on a
word-file, he would say he was a visualiser. “But I was hardly God’s gift to
advertising,” said Banerjee. “I’m a better film-maker—probably because
that’s what I wanted to do more.”

Banerjee came to Mumbai as a successful ad-film-maker with his own

company, Watermark, and as someone reasonably well-known in his
trade. “I never had to hustle my film from door to door. And my wife was
a senior executive—financially, she cushioned what might otherwise
have been a shaky experience. This is one reason why I feel
uncomfortable about constantly being compared with Anurag [Kashyap]
—he had a much tougher struggle to get where he is. As did Sudhir
Mishra in an earlier time, or so many others.”

Just when I thought he might be consciously overdoing the self-

deprecation, he pulled back a little. “What you can perhaps give me credit
for is that despite the cushy beginning, I didn’t take the easy way out. I’m
still trying to carve out a reasonably dangerous existence, instead of
resting on my ass. But I don’t want to take too much credit, because I
know that if I had to ragdo it in Mumbai for years, it would have affected
my psyche. I wouldn’t be the same guy I am today.

“Most people struggle just to break into the system. My struggle has been
to become the film-maker I want to become.”

Banerjee’s films are entertaining, but he seems to tap entertainment from

helplessness: the mood he trades in is not a triumphal “this is possible”; it
is more like “this is what the world is like. Now can you do this?” And
significantly, his canvas has become blacker over time: as his frequent co-
writer Urmi Juvekar pointed out, there is an immeasurable gulf between
the cosy ending of Khosla ka Ghosla—fairy tale-like in the way good,
middle-class guys triumph over a crass, nouveau-riche builder—and the
cynicism of Shanghai which, even as it acknowledged the worth of
individual conscience, left viewers with little to cling to. In this context,
it is perhaps worth noting that one of the darkest scenes in Khosla ka
Ghosla—the protagonist having a nightmare about his own death and his
family’s blasé reactions to it—was a Banerjee creation, a radical twist to
the original screenplay that began with Khosla waking up in the
morning. “You have crystallised Khosla’s biggest fear, that nobody cares
about him and that he is redundant,” Banerjee recalled Sahni telling him
about the scene. The scene is vital to the film’s effect because it makes
the viewer feel emotionally invested in Khosla from the start; but it also
creates a strange foreboding that balances the generally upbeat—and
sometimes silly—mood of the story, and perhaps points the way to
Banerjee’s subsequent work.

Banerjee is aware that a commercial movie industry does not provide

ideal conditions for such cinema, or for the personal filmmaker. “Movie-
making is a craft, not pure art,” he said. “Pure art is where there is a
minimum distance between what is in the artist’s head and what is
expressed—between Van Gogh’s brain and his canvas, for example. There
is more distance between an advertising painter’s brain or heart, and the
billboard he makes—he has to go through many other processes, he’s
removed from the final product.

“I’m trying to reduce that distance, to put as much of myself in my films

as possible.”

So, to backtrack a bit: picture a well brought-up boy in a rude West Delhi
colony. In the courtyard of his house he comes to love books, music and
art; but in the streets beyond he makes friends from very different
cultural backgrounds, learns the swaggering life that involves
punctuating every sentence with “bhenchod”, or standing with a group of
male friends and staring pointedly at a girl walking by, because that’s just
what you do if you’re a young stud in a certain place and situation—even
if you’re secretly embarrassed by your own posturing. He is in the
moment, yet there is enough self-awareness to be able to record things
like these in the little camera running in his head. Twenty years later he
will put this scene (and others like it) into one of his films—allowing the
viewer to look at young Lucky and his friends indulgently and see
through their fake, brittle machismo.

Delhi is like the back of his hand and he will bring everything he knows
of the city into his first two movies—even locations that strike a personal
chord. (Watching these films, his family will marvel: how did he find a
house exactly like the one he was born in, for the opening sequence of
Khosla ka Ghosla?) In his later work, he will consciously walk away from
his comfort zone of Delhi-style cultural details. Looking down from his
flat on the 20th floor of a Mumbai building that came up in an area
formerly occupied by textile mills, he will realise that some people who
worked in those mills now have janitors’ jobs in these skyscrapers; that
his home was constructed on the dreams of others. And he will put some
of this into his new film, about a country setting its sights so high that it
can no longer see ground realities. This film will open with a vertiginous
bird’s-eye view of a city—Banerjee himself calls it his “Google map
shot”—over which we hear the sound of a man whistling on the ground
miles below, before the camera cuts to a close-up of his face. “What one
is saying through that abrupt cut and the sound design is that in this
town there is a life, and I have picked it up. Now let’s go to ground level
and get right amidst these people.”

“JUST TODAY,” BANERJEE SAID, on the first day I met him in his office,
“I passed a typical Bombay street-fashion shop—not high fashion, just Rs
150 for a T-shirt. And they had put the clothes on mannequins that had
monster faces. It triggered a thought in my head.”

Such flashes of images frequently lead to ideas for his films: the genesis of
Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! lay in two newspaper photos of Delhi’s “super
chor” Bunty, including one of the thief with a big stash of his loot—a
visual representation of an underprivileged man pulling himself out of
the world he was born into, by obsessively accumulating other people’s
things. “This glimpse today of the Frankenstein in the T-shirt hit me in
the same way. To me, it was alien—if you use it intelligently, you can use
it to talk about any notion of alienation, whether it’s UP-wallahs living in
Mumbai, or Muslims in India, or Kashmiri refugees in Delhi.”
A scene from Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! Banerjee drew from his own childhood in the Punjabi
neighbourhoods of West Delhi to sketch class aspirations in the film.

Significantly, Banerjee resists talk of ideology or a specific thematic

concern that governs his work. “If I had been born 40 years earlier, I
would probably have been very ideological,” he says, recalling the moral
certitudes—the conservative “straightness”—of his grandparents and
parents. “But in my father’s case I saw a steady erosion of that belief. I
think that generation never had the ability to climb out of itself and see
from the outside. Truth was always with a capital T.”

“Dibakar is always very sarcastic about hypocrisy in society,” said

Banerjee’s sister Mallika. “One thing that angers him is the
transactionary nature of relationships,” said Kanu Behl, who was
assistant director on Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! and co-wrote Love, Sex aur
Dhokha.

In post-liberalisation India, he feels genuine ideology has been diluted,

and that a case can now be made for social improvement bereft of lofty
goals—improvement that is just for the sake of survival: “Unless you
clean up the air, your children will die; how about THAT to start cleaning
up the air, rather than thinking of the ecology, or doing something
because you are told it’s the right thing to do?”
What has become increasingly important to him is empathy, and as he
spoke of this I recalled a description—“humanist”—that is often used for
Satyajit Ray’s film work. Shanghai, ostensibly a political thriller, was a
tapestry of characters with different motivations; watching it is a bit like
reading a multi-narrator novel, where one empathises in turn with a
number of different people, and indeed Vassilis Vassilikos’s book Z—
which Banerjee adapted with Juvekar—tells its story in many voices. “The
novel is deeply humanistic in comparison to Costa-Gavras’s 1969 film
version, which was more explicitly Leftist, and that’s what Urmi and I
tried to bring into Shanghai.”

In his audio-commentary track on the DVD of Love, Sex aur Dhokha,

there is a point where he dwells on the same theme. The scene is one of
the “joining” sequences of that three-tiered film, where we see a marginal
character who will become the central figure in the next segment. “Life is
about point of view,” Banerjee says. “Here is someone who comes into
the frame for just five seconds, but he has a whole life behind him, which
one is not yet aware of.” Notably, both Shanghai and Love, Sex aur Dhokha
have key moments where the same event is shown from different
perspectives, several scenes apart.

But as he pointed out to me, ideology—even if limited to something as

basic as empathy—can’t be the starting point for a film; it is ever-present
in everything he does anyway. “Your guiding belief is the sauce in which
you cook again and again, or it’s a fucking frying pan that you never
wash.” In other words, the distinct, underlying flavour will remain; the
challenge now is to find new dishes, or modes of presentation.

TO SPEAK WITH BANERJEE over a period of time is to realise that

directing movies was a natural culmination of his inquisitiveness, his
need to know as much as he possibly can about many different things: it’s
a good profession for a polymath whose mind frequently darts from one
thing to another (like the student who left NID because he could learn
nothing more there). During one of our conversations at his office, he
told me about how the idea for Love, Sex aur Dhokha came to him after he
gave a talk at a digital film festival at Symbiosis, Pune, advising the
students not to use inferior digital technology for a purpose better suited
to 35mm film. (“If you try to emulate a Rembrandt oil canvas with a piece
of charcoal, you won’t succeed—but what if you use the charcoal to do a
graphic novel with an insightful story?”) Take the new grammar and find
an appropriate use for it, he told them—and then, on the way home, he
realised he had sold himself an idea. There was an old story he had
written in Hindi—a dark, ironic letter addressed to the director
Manmohan Desai by a boy who has been murdered and stuffed in an
unmarked grave with his lover. “Thanks for teaching me about love,” he
tells Desai. “Now we are finally together, never to be parted, just like in
your films.” What if this tale were to be told through a handheld camera
wielded by the boy?

I expected this anecdote to lead us into more details about Love, Sex aur
Dhokha; instead, Banerjee dwelt on the evolution of film technique, from
DW Griffith to the MTV videos of the 1980s and beyond. He held forth
on the shift from the long shot to the close-up—“the emotional upheaval
for early audiences must have been huge”—and proposed that the
documentary filming of combat during the Second World War changed
movie grammar in ways that aren’t properly acknowledged, predating the
French New Wave of the 1950s and even the “jump-cut” phenomenon.

He moved on to cinematography, talking about Nikos Andritzakis, who

shot Banerjee’s last two films (“he would have been a star cameraman in
old Hollywood—he designs everything around the narrative”), and about
Kartik Vijay, whose work in Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! made that film look as
cheery as Shanghai was deliberately gloomy. (“He’s a Tamil boy who knew
nothing about Delhi. I told him the Punjabis of west Delhi are like
Italians, and I want to see the pasta and the tomato sauce on the screen!”)
He spoke in high terms of the recently deceased Ashok Mehta, who
photographed “one of the seminal films” in Banerjee’s life as a movie buff,
Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen: “I wish I could have had a parallel life
working with some of the greatest DoPs [directors of photography] and
then come back with that experience. Look at what Subrata Mitra did
with the interiors of a Calcutta house in Ray’s Parash Pathar in the 1950s
—see his use of shadowless lighting. After they fought, Ray’s visual
quality immediately dipped.”

(Right to left) Banerjee with his Shanghai actors, Abhay Deol and Emraan Hashmi. HT PHOTO

He reflected on the conundrums one faces while writing a good,

balanced script. “If you make the dialogue deliver too much of the idea,
the emotion goes away. When you take too much of the emotion, the
idea gets hidden.” In his own writing, he constantly reaches for
conciseness. At the end of Shanghai, when Abhay Deol’s bureaucrat
character Krishnan subtly arm-twists the corrupt personal secretary
played by Farooque Shaikh, the latter asks “Is this your justice?”
Krishnan’s original, world-weary response was, “Justice ka sapna maine
chhod diya hai (I have given up on the dream of justice).”

But Banerjee and Urmi Juvekar cut the line out, “because that line is what
the film has already summed up to, and explicitly using it would have
been a betrayal of the film”. The pithiness sometimes has unusual roots
too. The words “Abhi jeena haraam hai, lekin marne se dar lagta hai”—
spoken by the weary, exploited Jaggu in Shanghai—come from the lyric
“Ah’m tired of living / And scared of dying” in the classic “Ol’ Man River”
(famously sung by Paul Robeson). “That song became for me the core of
Jaggu’s character.”

“I’m into music,” he said suddenly, in what turned out to be a very big
understatement. This single line led us—like the sound of one man’s
hum segueing gradually into a full-blown orchestral performance—to a
two-hour conversation that covered such disparate material as Banerjee’s
own childhood career as a tabla-player (he would play it while his mother
and sister did their riyaaz), European techno and French North African
protest music, Jamaican dub reggae, RD Burman’s use of the tabla in the
scene in Sholay where Basanti is chased by the dacoits (“no one thought
such a delicate instrument could be used so menacingly”), and the
possibility that Burman might have got the idea for this by listening to
the soundtrack of Dirty Harry.

One of Banerjee’s most vivid childhood memories is of resting with his

mother in the afternoons while she listened to folk songs on the radio,
taking down notes for her classes. Later he developed an interest in
Western classical music—“I went from khayaal and Rabindrasangeet to
Bach, Haydn, Schubert, I have no idea why”—and after that, Richa
introduced him to “another river of music”, including Dylan, Cohen and
Joni Mitchell. I struggled to keep up as he talked about the history of film
music, from Pandit Ravi Shankar (“he was touring so much in the West,
we lost a fantastic film scorer—look at how he reinterpreted Meerabai’s
bhajans for Gulzar’s Meera”) to Salil Choudhury, and from Bernard
Herrmann to Lalo Schifrin to the avant-garde jazz musician Don Ellis.
Pulling his laptop out, he played the soundtrack of the Samurai classic
Sword of Doom on YouTube (and typically, this led us into another detour
about that film’s climactic swordfight and closing freeze-frame). “I am
intensely influenced by Japanese incidental music—by Masaru Sato, who
scored Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, drawing from western influences as well as
Noh and Kabuki.”
To watch Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! is to know that it was made by someone
with an excellent ear for the use of narrative-enhancing music; with
lyrics and rhythms continually commenting on the hero’s changing
fortunes. “I used to think Punjabi music mainly meant bhangra,” the
film’s composer Sneha Khanwalkar said, “but Dibakar was tuned in to
nuances of Punjabi folk music.” According to Banerjee himself, the idea
was to use a musical structure that would mirror the repetitive
storytelling traditions of the katha-vaachak, with certain motifs coming
back constantly into a narrative. (“The story is like The Rake’s Progress—
the hero is not changing or intended to change, he is reflecting the
foibles of the society around him, and the music goes with the circular
nature of such a narrative.”) After Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! he hasn’t had the
opportunity to do a film with music used as a storytelling device—Love,
Sex aur Dhokha and Shanghai had minimalist scoring—and this is
something to which he wants to return. “I’m waiting for a screenplay to
go back to the roots of Indian musicography so to speak, to bring out
new ways of scoring for a scene.”

When he finally paused for breath, I told him I was surprised he didn’t
become a full-time composer. “Oh no, he responded, “that’s only because
I wanted to be a film-maker just a little more.”

INTERVIEW SOMEONE OVER A FEW DAYS, and your feelings about

the person shift from one encounter to the next. At the end of my first
day with Banerjee, for example, I came away thinking that he was one of
the most articulate people I had met. By the second day, a touch of
annoyance, stoked by my private snobberies, crept in: what kind of
poseur holds forth on classical music and art and says “anyways” at the
same time? And what was with that precious habit of replying “Let’s
figure out life together” every time I texted him to confirm a meeting?
(The annoyance deepened when our appointment was postponed and I
had to wait a few hours to meet him.) By the third day, however, I
returned to something closer to my original impression, seeing signs of
introspection and what seemed like genuine humility. And so it went.
At times I thought I had him pegged. Asked about his early cinematic
influences, he named Ketan Mehta and Satyajit Ray and said the
Bachchan era completely passed him by—an intriguing admission from a
Delhi boy who would have been eight or nine years old when films like
Amar Akbar Anthony were released. He recalled laughing nonstop
through that tacky tribute to testosterone, Manmohan Desai’s Mard, and
there was ambivalence in his attitude to even the “Middle Cinema”
directors like Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Basu Chatterji—he liked their
films for the songs, “but I can’t remember a single case of good art
direction in them”. He didn’t take it as an unqualified compliment when
Khosla ka Ghosla was likened to the “simple”, “grounded” cinema of the
1970s.

Naturally, then, when he mentioned being a Dharmendra fan, I assumed

that (having scoffed at Mard) he meant the early Dharmendra, the sweet-
faced leading man of such 1960s movies as Bandini and Anupama. But no:
he was talking about Dharmendra on the cusp of his kuttay-kameenay
phase, the glowering alpha male of Yaadon ki Baaraat, Charas and even
the risible Shalimar. (“He was at his sexiest in that film! My sister and I
were consumed by him.”) More paradoxes emerged: his principal filmic
memories of 1979–80, he said, are of listening to the radio programme of
Shyam Benegal’s austere period film Junoon, and also of random cheesy
horror movies such as Jaani Dushman and Darwaaza.

And then, just when it seemed he had nothing interesting to say about
the Bachchan era—you know, the one he barely registered—he came up
with a startling suggestion about the superstar as comedian. “Many of
those drunken acts, in films like Naseeb, might have come from his
memories of watching Bengali box-wallahs in the Sixties when he was
working in Calcutta,” he said. “Bachchan had a very Andy Kaufman-like
quality, like a human installation: he would climb out of his character
and do a completely different character under the guise of being drunk.
And in those scenes you can see him sending signals to the directors
around him, saying ‘I can do THIS, give me something like this to do!’
But he mostly got lazy directors and films.”

Banerjee himself was known for a zany sense of humour as a copywriter

(“I have always been a funny guy in a facile sort of way—there is even a
promo somewhere in the Channel V vaults, with me acting in it”) and
glimpses of a stand-up comedian come through every now and again.
Discussing subjectivity in responses to art, he conjured up the droll
image of himself standing alongside an Eskimo in a gallery, the two men
looking at Picasso’s Guernica through the prisms of very different life
experiences. Recalling that the actor who played the terrifying father in
Love, Sex aur Dhokha had a real-life stammer that he had to control, he
went off on another tack. “That’s a great idea, isn’t it—for a story about a
controlling patriarch who stammers, and many things don’t work out for
him because of this. He has a sheep for a daughter-in-law because he
can’t finish the sentence ‘Mere ghar mein yeh b-b-b-b-b-bakri nahin aayegi
(This sh-sh-sh-sh-sh-sheep will not enter my house).’ So now this sheep is
his bahu and it’s frustrating, but he’s still a patriarch.” (I contemplated
the possibilities in Ekta Kapoor financing such a film and calling it
“Kyunki Baa bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi”. That isn’t as facetious as it sounds:
Banerjee is full of genuine praise for Kapoor, who produced Love, Sex aur
Dhokha despite her mixed feelings about shaky cameras. “She is one of
the smartest people I’ve met—emotional, spontaneous.”) When in a
bitchy mood, he can be very funny about some of Bollywood’s younger
actors, “who are basically still-picture actors who sometimes behave like
they are in a fancy-dress competition: ‘Main ab paagal ka role karoonga.
Mera role very disabled person ka hai (I will now do the role a madman.
My role is that of a very disabled person).’”

Most people are content to let certain things pass in small talk, but I
rarely saw this happening with him. During a very casual discussion of
Saeed Mirza’s Salim Langde pe Mat Ro—over a fish-and-rice lunch in his
office—I mentioned that the opening-credits sequence had a stylised,
film-negative feel to it; it was a tangential observation, but he jumped on
it. “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “Not like the negative effect in Ray’s
Pratidwandi, anyway.” And he is very particular about his own phrasing,
meticulous to the extent that he will often backtrack in the middle of a
sentence to correct himself or choose a sharper phrase, even when the
original would have sufficed. (“The star system is related to a wave—no,
sorry, not a wave—to a subterranean layer of dissatisfaction in an
audience’s life.”) At other times, he would simply shake his head and
admit to not being able to collect his thoughts (“Sorry, I can’t express
what I want to say...maybe it will come later”), perhaps the sign of a man
preoccupied with presenting himself correctly and saying exactly the
right things. “Let it be a record of what I sounded like at a particular
point in time,” he said of a book of interviews he has committed to
despite misgivings about whether it is too early in his career.

Banerjee prepares with actors for a shot. Meticulous planning with his team far ahead of
shooting has been key to his filmmaking method, allowing him to balance control and
spontaneity while working on set. COURTESY DIBAKAR BANERJEE

As one might expect, he is full of frequently offbeat theories about

filmmaking and the film industry. He discussed the phenomenon of
superstars in India in terms of the country’s feudal history and the after-
effects of colonialism: “In our system there is the ingrained acceptance of
a superior and we enforce this through social rituals—fan following,
worship, hagiography—until stars become feudal lords, and eventually
patriarchs.” In India, he goes on, “an extremely elite member of the
society—the superstar—is mainly communicating with the lowest
common denominator of the society. The distance between his screen
life and his real life is so large that it results in a kind of schizophrenia,
which is why most stars get trapped in their screen persona—it takes a lot
of energy for them to step out of that because they are already out of
their comfort zone.” This is a different take from the conventional view
that a star actor plays “himself” in every role, but as Banerjee pointed out,
“avatar” is a better word.

This doesn’t preclude finding new ways of tapping into an existing

persona. Casting Emraan Hashmi—a big star for a B-market comprising
sexy potboilers—in a deglamourised part as the uncouth photographer
Jogi in Shanghai may have seemed an unusual decision, but Banerjee
cannily observed that the characters Hashmi played in the best of his
noirish films had interesting psychological dimensions. “Most of those
stories are about conflicted people, so maybe that schooling went into it.
I had very little to do with Emraan’s transformation—there is an innate
emotional intelligence that certain actors have without their even
analysing what they are doing.”

Banerjee with Nikos Andritzakis, the cinematographer for Love, Sex aur Dhokha and
Shanghai. The former, a formally experimental film, was shot entirely using hand-held
cameras and CCTV footage.
Importantly, however, both men were clear from the outset that Emraan
was working in a Dibakar Banerjee film, not the other way around.
“Directors like me must be very careful not to import the entire star
system into a film along with a star,” he said.

“Yes, I got that this guy is an asshole, but what kind of an asshole do you
want him to be? Decide that first.”

“No, no, no, no, no.”

I played fly on the wall as Banerjee anchored a script session for the first
film he is producing—Behl’s directorial debut, provisionally titled Titli.
Banerjee, Behl (who wrote the story) and co-writer Sharat Kataria held a
magnifying glass to nearly every plot turn in a script that—as far as I
could tell—was about a young boy trying to break free of an elder
brother’s controlling hand while himself getting involved with a less-
than-legal project.

It took a while for them to warm up—Banerjee languidly chatted about

the merits of the Scrivener software he was using to order the script (“it’s
a great software for writing panel-by-panel descriptions for a graphic
novel, which I hope to do someday”)—but as they discussed character
arcs, things got busier. Jargon was bandied about, phrases and words
repeated: stimulus response, beats, penny-dropping scenes.

For an outsider, this was an intriguing ringside view of the messiness of

creative collaboration, where two people might argue whether a
particular element is cute or tragic, even as they dig into an idli-vada
meal together. It is also a view of Banerjee at an early stage in his career
as a producer-mentor: on a tightrope, maintaining the balance between
contributing something of value and giving autonomy to people whose
work he respects.

Like an essentially benevolent schoolteacher who also recognises the

need to learn, Banerjee raised questions, made his points, but then
retreated and reconsidered if he heard a convincing counter-argument,
readily saying, “Okay, I never got that.” He fiddled with the coasters on
the table, shuffling them like dominoes. To make a point during the
discussion of an epiphany experienced by the script’s protagonist, he
invoked a personal dilemma: “I was speaking to Adi [Aditya Chopra] just
today, about a possible deal. And I have come to a decision that if I agree
to this aspect of it, then everything from now till the deal ends will
require me to work at a notch lower than I want to. And therefore I won’t
agree. Being a mundane, real-world guy, I had this epiphany while eating
oats in the morning. For our character, we have to express a similar
moment in cinematic terms.”

The discussion spooled on, with Banerjee raising one concern after
another.

“Iss character ki vipda kya hai (What is this character’s jeopardy)?” he

asked. “Is it a first-degree vipda that will later be compounded by a
second-degree vipda that will turn him berserk? Or is there a huge vipda
right from the beginning?”

“Which is the character flaw? How do we seed the character flaw?”

“I feel these dilutions will take away from the core value of that scene—
my fears could be unfounded, but I’d rather say them now.”

“A suggestion I have—which you are free to discard—is that...”

“You have your intention, you have the history of the characters in your
head, but what the audience will see will be the sum total of the
accidents of production. So it’s good to have a scene like this as
insurance, to spell out this thought.”

What is a graph structure, I asked him during a break in the conversation.

The term had been used a lot, and I figured it has to do with a character’s
personal growth over a story. Banerjee confirmed this with characteristic
precision: “Take Veeru and Jai, who go from being unrooted, devil-may-
care types to becoming integrated into a wider community and taking on
responsibility; and the film, while it is about other things on the surface,
is fundamentally about how these two people undergo this transition.”

“Anaath bacchon ko family milee (Orphaned children gain a family),” he

said, enunciating each word. Needless to say, this is not your typical plot
précis of Sholay, but it gets the idea across effectively.

Things lightened up soon enough. They talked about the films they love
—from Scorsese and Coppola to the Korean thriller Memories of Murder—
and movies with tropes similar to the script under consideration.
Banerjee brought in jokey reference points to other directors, especially
those from Bollywood’s kitschy past: “If you do the scene that way it will
turn into a typical Rahul Rawail moment—I can even see the young Anil
Kapoor in it.” (He simulated a booming background score—“dhan dhan
dhan”—of the sort that might be used in such a scene.) “Remember that
scene in Soderbergh’s Traffic where Del Toro bangs his face against the
wheel? That was an absolute Prakash Mehra moment.”

They picked on definitions: how does duality differ from ambiguity?

“Duality means two values in one mood: hero says ‘Fuck, I got what I
wanted! But IS this what I want?’”

And after more than three straight hours of psycho-analysis and banter,
he was tired of sounding off. “Ab dimaag nahin kaam kar raha mera (Now
my mind is not working).” He lay down on a red beanbag and spread his
arms out in an exaggerated show of Christ-like weariness. “Meri dukaan
bandh hai (My shop is closed).”

His emphasis on planning every detail long before the shooting stage
reminds me, a little uneasily, of Alfred Hitchcock’s claim that he never
had to look through the camera and that he was often bored or distracted
during the actual shooting of a film, because in his mind everything had
already been done beforehand. Banerjee doesn’t see himself as being a
control-freak of that magnitude; and he admits to be invigorated by the
film-making process. (“If Hitchcock really was bored on the set, I wish he
wasn’t—because then we might have had an even better Vertigo.”) But
there is still a question to be asked about whether over-planning can
result in a loss of spontaneity. “A huge inverted pyramid of various
disciplines cones down into one small wedge called the shoot,” he says,
“and planning well beforehand helps you to be spontaneous on the set.”
He recalled the case of a cast member whose performance during a
particular scene was too melodramatic. Banerjee realised that being told
this outright could have shattered the actor’s confidence; as a solution,
he decided to tire him out. “So you keep going for take after take after
take. But you have that extra time only because you have planned
properly; you can make the required adjustment in the next shot.”

“I had the option of doing this film with other people,” Behl told me later,
“but the difference between Dibakar and everyone else is that they see
the film as it is now and he sees it in terms of what it can become. That’s
testing but also stimulating for a writer.”

In fact, Behl was thrown into the deep end very early during their
association, when he was told—out of the blue—to handle the dubbing
for Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, something he had no prior experience of,
without the director’s supervision. Banerjee’s other long-time associates
have similar stories. “Dibakar would tell me do what you want to do,”
said production designer Vandana Kataria, “and if I don’t like something
we can discuss it.” The meticulous set and colour design of Shanghai
required Kataria to work very closely with the film’s cinematographer,
Andritzakis. “I would tell him I have this shade chart for this scene, so be
sure to use a cool light here. We would be intensely discussing something
and Dibakar would walk past and joke, ‘Arre mujhe bhi bataa do (Tell me
also), it’s my film!’” Andritzakis himself said he got many of his cues for
the Shanghai look not during formal discussions with Dibakar but from
his experiences of being in Mumbai as a foreigner for the first time.
In only his second month of working for Banerjee, Behl had a strong
difference of opinion with him. Banerjee mentioned Rakhi Sawant for
the role of Dolly in Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, but Behl wanted none of it. “I’ll
leave this film if you cast her,” he said, an audacious statement coming
from a young assistant director. “Dibakar was taken aback, but he told
me okay, in that case it’s up to you to find someone better.”

Such accounts suggest that Banerjee leaves his crew members alone,
letting them work their own way through situations—
uncharacteristically, for such an opinionated director. But Behl offered
an explanation. “He trusts people, but he trusts very few people,” he said,
citing other regular members of Banerjee’s team such as the editor
Namrata Rao. Behl also feels that Banerjee isn’t a “people person” in a
superficial sense of that term. “He won’t encourage a false sense of
family. His focus is entirely on the film.” Or as Urmi Juvekar put it,
naming a quality that binds so many serious artists, “He has a wonderful
selfishness.”

WHERE DOES THAT SELFISHNESS LEAD HIM FROM HERE? At

times Banerjee seems rigid in his ideas about how a creative person must
be assessed—too hung up on the notion of a meaningful career arc. He
prides himself on having gone a step further with each film. “I am getting
better at understanding the difference between tone and content,” he
said, “so that a funny scene which makes you suddenly giggle doesn’t take
away from the horror of the next scene. In Khosla ka Ghosla there are
some nice comic moments, but they are fragmented; in my later films,
different moods are better integrated.” But this also implies a self-
consciousness about improving in some easily observable way. When he
discusses the career trajectories of other directors, he does it in terms of a
rhetorical question like: “From Black Friday to Gangs of Wasseypur, or
from Maqbool to Saat Khoon Maaf, do you see a growth? Is this an
accretive journey?” And personally, this makes me a little uncomfortable:
there should be room for a more nuanced discussion, given that these are
very different kinds of films, and that many great artists have had
puzzling career arcs.

Ironically, however, his own future plans involve varied movies. “I’ve said
what I had to say about the things that are happening around us—the
new liberalised economy and all that—and now I have to start afresh.”
He now wants to make his canvases more intimate while still playing out
the themes that interest him—including the oldest of them all, the
nature of good and evil. “I’m trying to figure out what conscience is. How
do you begin not to have it? What does the environment do to us that we
lose the ability to distinguish between taking someone’s pencil and
taking someone’s life?”

Banerjee expects his future films to become more intimate while still exploring the perennial
themes of good and evil. NATASHA HEMRAJANI FOR THE CARAVAN

As he knows, genre fiction can provide an effective framework to

examine such ideas. His next feature-length project, which is now at the
script-development stage, is about Byomkesh Bakshi, the popular Bengali
detective created by Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay. Banerjee’s adaptation,
“a mélange—not a triptych—of two or three different stories”, will be a
period film set in pre-Independence Calcutta. Meanwhile, other ideas
keep coalescing in his head. “I want to do a film about personal combat—
martial arts. That would be about craft, choreography, visual rhythm,
about the use of the human anatomy and the space around it. Something
close to installation.”

The horror genre, too, is very near to his heart—“that is the most
moralistic tale you can tell, you can really preach when you’re doing
horror!”—and he has developed an interest in TED Kline’s short story
“Nadelman’s God”, about a monster emerging out of a goth-rock song
written by an advertising executive. “I want to do an Indian version of
this,” he says, adding—with a straight face—“The title will be Narayan
Murthy ka Paaltu Raakshas (Narayan Murthy’s Pet Demon).”

“That’s the name you came up with?”

“Yes—it’s from Nadelman’s God,” he said, as if he was stating something

very obvious; as if the comical juxtaposition of a banal word like paaltu
and a menacing one like raakshas flowed naturally from that English title
rather than from the imp inside his own head.

(Left to right) Directors Anurag Kashyap, Anand Gandhi and Dibakar Banerjee at TIFF, 2012.
Kashyap and Banerjee represent two bold, yet different, energies in new Hindi cinema. MATT
CARR / GETTY IMAGES

Before any of these, though, comes the short film he is making for a “100
Years of Indian Cinema” project—four separate short films directed by
Banerjee, Zoya Akhtar, Anurag Kashyap and Karan Johar, to be released
together in 2013 as Bombay Talkies. Given free rein to choose his subject
as long as it involved cinema in some way, Banerjee turned to Satyajit
Ray’s short story “Patol Babu, Film Star”, about an unemployed 52-year-
old man tapping into a long-forgotten creative impulse when he gets to
play a tiny movie role. Banerjee has updated the story to contemporary
Mumbai, turning his protagonist into the son of one of the displaced
mill-workers of Lalbagh, an area he knows very well. “It is very vibrant—
mere ghar ke baahar Shiv Sena ka office hai, din-raat traffic jam hota hai
(outside my house there’s a Shiv Sena office, day and night there’s a traffic
jam) because there is some party or procession.” He grew animated again
as he described—with arm movements that resemble the Punjabi “balle
balle”—how the people leading these processions behave like hooligans
and show public-mindedness at the same time. “Even while they are
dancing, they’ll be controlling traffic on this narrow road with BMWs,
owned by the people who live in those bloody multi-storeyed things.
Maybe this character in our film can join them at some point.” And he
has other, whimsical plot points constantly swimming around in his
head. During another script session, I thought I heard him say in a
deadpan voice: “We have to work out where a man like that can keep that
one emu, which is the detritus of his past.” I must have misheard, I told
myself, but no, it turns out that the film’s protagonist is indeed
contemplating emu-farming—in a crowded Mumbai locality.

Though this is clearly a fictional story about a dreamer looking for a

break, one of Banerjee’s key decisions—another step in the journey out of
his comfort zone—is to make this 25-minute film with the help of two
documentary film-makers, Shabani Hassanwalia and Samreen Farooqui.
He wants to use this collaboration to expand his understanding of
human behaviour. “I am a documentary-junkie,” he said, in a tone that
suggests it is one of the very few things he is interested in. (I rolled my
eyes.) “It’s an important way of understanding how people behave at
critical junctures in their lives. We don’t always get a real understanding
of that from conventional cinema. When my grandfather was found
dead, the first thing my father did was to go to the loo—he got so
nervous.” And so, a notable decision in making this “fictional
documentary” is to weave into the plot the personal story of the lead
actor—Nawazuddin Siddiqui, who had a long, hard struggle before
becoming, in just the past few months, one of the hottest stars of the
new cinema.

A few days earlier I had asked Banerjee about the extent to which the
major changes in his life—fatherhood, for example (his daughter Tara is
now three years old)—are reflected in his cinema. “An artist,” he had
replied, speaking in a note-this-down voice, “is a human being who has a
good open window to himself and the world. A well-ventilated house. So
if you call me an artist, I will have to express everything I feel, and my
fatherhood will also be expressed.” It is no surprise, then, to learn that
the updated Patol Babu has a little daughter and that their relationship is
one of the points to be discussed at length. “If it’s a unitary family like
mine, the father would mean a lot to a five-year-old girl,” he said. “But
this man is from a background where male aur female ka social world
alag ho jaata hai (the male and female worlds are different): the guy
might sit in the Shiv Sena office while the woman will be with her
friends. So in this situation the father is an old-style distant figure for
daughter. We have to work out their relationship accordingly.”

YEARS AFTER Mr Banerjee mockingly wondered about his son’s chances

of becoming a serious artist like Tagore or Ray, I got the impression that
Banerjee’s parents feel a little daunted by the types of films he is making
now. They haven’t watched Love, Sex aur Dhokha fully, for instance—the
shaky camera was an assault on their senses. Their son may have
anticipated their resistance. “He would force us to come for the shooting
of the first two films,” his mother said, “even if it was at six in the
morning. But for Love, Sex aur Dhokha he said stay at home.” Soon they
sensed that something different was going on; Banerjee’s driver would
tell them he had returned from shooting at 4 am and bhaiya was doing
strange things, such as making a man jump repeatedly into a lake with a
camera for a scene. What kind of a film was this, they wondered.
While his father seems more accommodating—on the surface, at least—
his mother wistfully wishes that her son would make more films like
Khosla ka Ghosla. “Usske picture ordinary people ke liye nahin hai, na (His
films aren’t for ordinary people, right)?” she said, and I sensed an
unspoken “hum jaise (like us)” in that sentence. “His brain has its own
take on things, how can we interfere with that?” her husband told her
gently. “We can’t expect him to make meaningless things like Phir Gol
Maal, or Phir Hera Pheri.”

“Mujhe toh wohHera Pheri films bahut acchhe lagte hain (I like those Hera
Pheri films very much)!” she said, and they bantered about the relative
merits of Hera Pheri and its sequel. During Durga Pujas years ago,
Banerjee was well known for the comical skits he organised with the
residents of the locality, his father mentioned. “Ask him to come out with
a real comic picture— tell him that. We haven’t had one since Padosan!”

There was something touching about the moment. Here is Dibakar

Banerjee, hailed as one of the sharpest creative people in his field,
pushing the boundaries to make work that is hatke. And here were his
middle-class parents, proud of his success, thrilled when they see an
article about him in an international magazine—but a little lost, too, as if
the boy they knew has moved into a creative dimension that they can’t
really be a part of. And, perhaps, a little regretful about not knowing
enough about him firsthand. “These days we get to know what he is up to
from what we read about him,” his father said. “And, of course, through
his films.”

Given that film-making is a chaotic, collaborative process, it might be

said that Banerjee has—with the help of people whom he trusts—bridged
the gap between his mind and his canvas to a large extent. “I’m trying to
put myself into my work,” he said, “so that by the time I’m dead...”

“It will add up to a sort of autobiography?” I offered.

“No. What I mean is that when you see the films you will know me. That’s
different from an autobiography, which is a conscious presentation of
oneself. Knowing the person is more complex.”

What forces might prevent him from achieving this? One factor,
ironically, is the acclaim that he and other Indie film-makers have been
getting in recent years. “There is a new hubris of media around us,” he
said. “From tremendous disempowerment and marginalisation, we are
now in the middle of deification—an amateur, clubby, smoke-filled
version of deification—where every film is being acclaimed as a
masterpiece. As a result, there is a danger of your focus being taken off
your craft.”

In the past few years, we have seen intelligent, offbeat scripts being
executed with assured technical film-making and buttressed with a
certain quantum of star power; directors such as Kashyap, Bhardwaj,
Tigmanshu Dhulia and their young protégés are being recognised by the
mainstream heavy-weights and congratulated profusely on Twitter.
Movie-lovers in India find much to celebrate in this, but for the personal
film-maker who wants to retain his integrity, to be the monarch of his
(small) terrain, it can be daunting to find himself near that dicey zone
where he might get to work with really big stars and producers used to
dealing the cards. Or to find himself coming out of a preview of a
colleague’s film that he didn’t like too much and giving effusive sound
bites to the reporters outside—a sign that he isn’t quite as independent as
he would like to think. Independent is a relative term, in any case:
Banerjee has worked with big producers such as Ekta Kapoor and the
Bijlis of PVR Cinemas, and he tells me candidly that he would like
nothing better than to be the most commercial director alive, if
commercial means reaching the largest possible audience; it’s just that he
wants to do it by telling his stories, his way.

“Studio after studio, I hear executives talking down the films they
produce; there is a jingoistic pride about the money they are making but
they have shut off the topic of quality to some extent.” But despite these
criticisms, he is surprisingly empathetic towards directors and producers
who sell out. “Living in a cramped, difficult city like Mumbai, you’re
constantly craving for a bigger flat, bigger cars. I sometimes think the
extent of compromise in our cinema has much to do with the nature of
this city—the climate, the road design, the sewage system. If the film
industry were located somewhere like Pune, perhaps we would be
making better films!”

In a chummier mood at Delhi’s Gunpowder restaurant—I had joined

him, Hassanwalia and Farooqui for lunch—he told us that a real
superstar had his own problems. “Uss ko 300 crore ki film karni hee hai
(He has to do a 300-crore film), because he has to construct another
palace atop the palace he already has in Bandra. Or build a helipad for his
children because they are growing up.”

But of course, even those who prefer to focus on the creative side of their
job must deal with the pragmatic—occasionally distasteful—aspects of
the real world, much like the film director Guido in the opening
sequence of Fellini’s Eight and a Half—literally soaring away into the sky
and having to be tethered to earth. And it would be wrong to claim that
Banerjee himself has never compromised. He has on occasion offered
what he sees as minor sops to producers or to “lazy viewers”. For
instance, he prefers the international cut of Shanghai because it is much
subtler in its use of the songs “Bharat Mata ki Jai” and “Imported
Kamariya” (both of which are presented as conventional, narrative-
disrupting dance sequences in the Indian version). The question is: how
long can he get by with little sops, and might they incrementally lead to
bigger compromises?

After one of our meetings, I joined Banerjee on a car ride while he tried
to work out the specifics of a financial deal on the phone, speaking the
jargon of a marketing man. “It’s something that has to be done,” he
shrugged later, “like all those promotional interviews whenever a film is
 released.” But there was something almost symbolic about the fact that
this was a long northward drive from Lalbagh to a big-money producer’s
office in Andheri, the place where, according to Banerjee, “all creative
talent goes to die”.

“The moment you cross Bandra, the area of cheating begins. An

ambitious director is cajolingly told ‘do this, yeh ho jaayega (this will
follow)’, and that’s how all the compromise, all the lethargy begins.”

“People like me,” he said, as his car pulled into the huge entrance—the
famous gaping maw—of the producer’s building, “must constantly be
wary of Andheri and its easy solutions.”

Correction: The print version of this story, and the earlier online version,
wrongly stated that Sharat Kataria was the dialogue writer of Titli. Kataria is
the film's co-writer.

JAI ARJUN SINGH (/AUTHOR/79) is a New Delhi-based freelance writer. His monograph about
the film Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro has recently been published by HarperCollins.

KEYWORDS: Bollywood(/tag/bollywood) profile(/tag/profile) Abhay Deol(/tag/abhay-deol)

Indian cinema(/tag/indian-cinema) Anurag Kashyap(/tag/anurag-kashyap)

Indie film-makers(/tag/indie-film-makers) Dibakar Banerjee(/tag/dibakar-banerjee)

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READER'S COMMENTS
Matt Polson I saw Dibaker Banerjee's short film in cinema recently and wept and
30 May, 2013 wept when the protagonist mimes for his daughter. Probably, the
best movie since Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! by an Indian director.
Congratulations, on a well-written article.
 MC I really really enjoyed reading this piece, given my love for Bollywood
24 May, 2013 and increasing fondness for Caravan long reads... I actually wanted
to finish the length of the article and not only because I like
Banerjee. He has so many opinions on society and such
schizophrenic/opposing ones that too...

Ruchik Doshi A lot of psuedo intellectual ramblings! Yawn !

01 Feb, 2013

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