Published in OPEN magazine in Dec 25-31, 2013, edition
Read the article here
Courtesy: Ritesh Uttamchandani /
OPEN
Shubhashish
Bhutiani is anxious at the prospect of talking about himself for 90 minutes.
“What do you want to know,” the 22-year-old filmmaker asks. “Seedha saadha ladka hoon main (I am a
simple guy).” It is after nearly two weeks of email exchange that I have
managed to pin him down to a date and time. But the chase isn’t without its
reasons. Shubhashish has been flooded with requests from film festivals and has
been coordinating with several quarters – cast, crew, festival managers and his
producer parents – to get his debut film Kush
maximum visibility.
Getting
your film shortlisted in the Academy Awards does that to you, I suppose.
As
we speak on Skype, I can see exhaustion writ large on his face; the contents of
his white coffee cup having to work extra hard to restore his watery eyes. It
is the second week of December and I have caught him is at the apartment he
shares with a friend in New York, in a room where the walls are bare and only
his bookcase is visible. He has had a long night at the South Asian Film
Festival where Kush was premiered the
previous evening. As we speak, he admits to counting days till he comes back to
Mumbai, his hometown.
“I
wanna just read a book or something,” he says. “Maybe watch a movie. I am
tired. Maybe I will just go to Goa.”
It
might just be a much-deserved break for the youngster who has spent every one
of his earlier vacations working on a film set since the age of 16. A graduate
of the School of Visual Arts in New York where he had been studying filmmaking for
last four years, Shubhashish has devoted a better part of last one and a half
years in a single-minded pursuit of perfecting his 25 minute thesis. Set in
1984, ‘Kush’ is a time capsule to the turbulent times that saw massive culling
of Sikhs after the assassination of the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Lavishly
shot and crisply edited, the bittersweet drama unfolds in the hills of North
India, the geography established only by the accent of the characters. It is the
tale of a teacher struggling to protect the 17 children she had taken on a
field trip from communal frenzy that endangered the life of her only Sikh
student, Kush.
‘Kush’
is largely a true story, says the director, based on the experiences of his
economics professor. The incident was mentioned only in passing in one of her
classes she took at Woodstock School in Mussoorie. Though it had lodged itself
in his mind then, it was only a year later in 12th grade that Shubhashish
realized the cinematic appeal of the story. Since then, he has been chewing
upon the idea, always one step short of taking the ambitious project head on.
Shot
on the fringes of Mumbai and Lonavla, the shoot took all of five days in
January earlier this year. The next five months were spent at the chopping
board, assembling the film together. “We were rolling all the time,” says
Shubhashish, which is why the editing was a gargantuan task. In September, the 70th
International Venice Film Festival happened.
***
The
trailer of 'Kush', the short film selected in the top 10 for the Academy
Awards, 2014
On
the bookshelf, kept between an 8 mm film projector and a box that looks like a small
treasure chest, is a typewriter. Is he old-school in his approach to writing? Not really. “Sometimes, I do it for fun. I feel cool when I do it,” says Shubhashish.
Shubhashish
is at ease with how he has shaped up, accepting his insecurities without any
attempts at cover ups. He is as much in awe of the works of Wong Kar Wai and
Asghar Farhadi as he is of the chick-lit Mean
Girls. “I love Mean Girls. I can quote Mean Girls. It’s great filmmaking.”
Even as he says that, you know it’s not just the intellectual in him being
gallant about his choices.
In
his days in the United States, the running joke was to make him the stereotype
that is the flavour of the season. Over the years, he has answered to all kinds
of names – Slumdog, Pi and now, Miss America. “All of us are the biggest
racists with each other,” he laughs, referring to his college friends. All
bases were touched when in the graduation ceremony, out of nowhere, the
speakers burst into the song ‘Jai Ho’.
Having
been a writer for several years, filmmaking was only a natural progression for
Shubhashish. At the age of 16, Vishal Bharadwaj took him under his wing for a
brief while on the sets of Kaminey. The
sheer amount of work was an eye-opener, breaking any romantic perceptions he
had. But that only spurred him on and a year later, he directed a cast and crew
of 100 people in a stage-adaptation of Peter Pan in the final year of his
school. Seeing this, his parents decided to approach career choice in a
different trajectory from the standard convention of Asian parenting.
“My
dad said, math to aata nahi hai, science nahi kar sakta, history mein kuch kar nahi sakte, economics mein duba dega. Filmein bana (you can’t
manage mathematics, science, history or economics. Go make films),” he
chuckles. “But honestly, it’s all I have known. Every time I have spoken to my
dad, even when I was I was a kid, we used to talk about movies. I like working
with people. So it was right up my alley.”
Shubhashish
doesn’t think much about all the aces his film has been scoring. Even as Kush
has festivals at Moscow, Tokyo and Milan lined up for the next two months, he
has a dismissive take on things: “I’m just lucky right now.”
“I
have seen the movie so many times... last night I saw it again at the festival.
I couldn’t watch it. I saw so many mistakes in it. If you ask me what I was doing
yesterday, I was editing the film. I do that because if I see flaws, I don’t
want to ignore it.”
Back
in school, Shubhashish would never have imagined to find himself at the geek
table. But college changed that. “Everywhere I went I had a backpack with me. I
had a laptop, I had two books at all times – I could be bored of one book but
I’d have another option. I’d always have 5-6 DVDs. That was like my woman’s bag
with all the essentials in it. That’s what New York provided me – I didn’t have
to think of anything but movies,” he says.
Kush
took him almost 2 years of writing while simultaneously battling the other demons. It wasn’t just the budgetary constraints but the logistics and the
sheer scale of the movie. He was bent upon getting everything right but he was
still short of a cinematographer to compliment his vision. A month into his
thesis, he found the perfect fit.
“One
day, I was moving from the dorms to my first apartment in New York. I had
packed my suitcases and it started raining. The apartment was 5-6 blocks away.
The bags were heavy so you are dragging it all the way because, paise bachane hai taxi ke (to save money on a taxi). Then I
saw a car pull up in the front of the dorm. (Inside) I see this guy who I know
from the elevators. I said, ‘Look, I will give you 10 bucks or 20 bucks or two
beers or something, can you drop me to my apartment?’ He looked irritated but
dropped me to my place.”
“That’s
the first time I met Mike Mcsweeny,” says Shubhashish. “He is the man I call on
a rainy day.”
***
“The
first time he told me the story, I told him we should abandon it,” Sanjay
Bhutiani, his father, producer and the owner of the production house Red Carpet
Moving Pictures, told me a few days later. We were in his 7th floor
apartment in Jogeshwari, sitting in the living room of his 2 BHK house. The winged
lion trophy won for the Best Short Film at Venice looked regally at us from the
showcase, accompanied by various other awards his son has won for direction and
acting. Shubhashish is resolutely looking away; visibly awkward at the
full-throttled praise both his parents have been lavishing on him for quite
some time now.
“I
loved the script. But if we were talking of so many people, we couldn’t afford
it,” explains Sanjay. But Shubhashish was bent on making it happen. It took
three grants from his cinema school and a generous contribution from his
grandfather that made the project costing around Rs. 10 lakh to unfurl. As he
started landing filmmaking grants that his college gave to select students to
fund their projects, Sanjay had a change of heart. The prospect of flying down Sweeny
from the US, having a lights technician from Sweden and assembling a cast and
crew consisting of over 60 people was taken in a stride.
With
his parents having matched up to every one of his birthday wish-lists over the
years, from a walkman to a portable DVD player to an iPod to a camera and
finally, his labour of love – Kush, it is of little surprise when Shubhashish
says, “I am very fortunate.” The hiccups to realizing his passion are confined
to his high school days, when his hostel warden used to keep taking away his
portable DVD player. “I don’t know how we were caught every time. He would keep
it till the (semester) break. I would beg him but he would never give it back.
They kept it in a safe they had for confiscated goods.”
“That’s
my struggle story,” he grins. “It was an endless Tom and Jerry going on.”
For
now, the family has their minds locked on January 16, 5 pm IST, when the final
nominations of Oscars would be announced. So far, so smooth. But the journey has only just begun.
0 comments:
Post a Comment