Tell us about your background in theatre.
I am a Maharashtrian and theatre is part of our growing up. As kids we would go with our parents to watch plays and this included children’s plays. A natural corollary was acting in children’s plays. My parents have always been fond of the theatre and I was in a professional play for the first time when I was in Std. III. I remember a children’s play called Dishau Dishau in which I acted. Most of these plays were rehearsed and put together during school vacations and did not interfere with our studies.
Participating in college drama circles was the natural outcome, wasn’t it?
Yes, to begin with. My close friend Sandeep Modak and I joined Mithibai College because it had the most active drama circle that took part in inter-collegiate drama contests. We got actively involved in theatre though we also interacted with theatre stalwarts and playwrights like Vipul Mehta of Gujarati theatre and Nishikant Kamath from Marathi theatre. We enjoyed a lot less in terms of learning to act and more in terms of sharpening our sensibilities. This worked like a two-edged knife. On the one hand, our sensibilities sharpened and on the other, these sharpened sensibilities woke us to the fact that the theatre that was being done was terribly outdated and bad. This made me question what we were really doing and whether it made sense for the kind of theatre we were involved in.
So disillusionment set in. Right?
Right. It was true that winning prizes at intercollegiate drama competitions brought recognition and affirmation of what we were doing. But inside, I increasingly felt that these awards gave us a false sense of our talents and our achievements, which would not translate into real opportunities. I just quit the circuit.
But wasn’t Grey Elephants in Denmark, your first professional play as writer-director when you were 21, a much acclaimed production?
It was reasonably well-acclaimed but it did not make me as happy as I felt it would. It was a character study of a performing artist who is partially intelligent and partially talented. He belongs to that rare breed of magicians who truly understand the difference between ‘puzzles’ and ‘mysteries’ performed at kids’ birthday parties, and real magic which is nothing short of a great art. I know magic myself so I felt, why not give it a try in theatre? It was a live interactive play, because we invited audience participation with the magicians on stage and this proved to be a crowd-puller.
We would like to hear about your first short feature Six Strands.
Six Strands is the story of a mysterious woman who has created a magic brand of tea called Moonlight Thurston. The process, the way it is made is secret and ritualistic. But one fine day, the woman finds that this brand of tea will not be made anymore. It was shot entirely at the Makaibari Tea Estate in the Northeast. It is a very silent, intimate and minimalistic film featuring one actress. Six Strands was screened at the inaugural International Competition section of 4th Gulf International Film Festival. At the end of the festival, I was pleasantly surprised to have been selected to attend a ten-day film-making masterclass with the great Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. Six Strands was also screened at Clermont-Ferrand International Film Festival 2011, Slamdance 2011, Edinburgh International Film Festival 2011, International Film Festival Rotterdam 2011, and Short Film Center 2010, IFFI, Goa. But this is not my first film.
You did a stint with Balaji Telefilms also. What was the experience like?
The best thing that happened was that it made me discover world cinema. There were people from the National School of Drama, Delhi who were working at Balaji Telefilms. They introduced me to films and this opened a new world of ideas for me. I was fascinated by the medium, the language, the art and craft of cinema and discovered that these films were different from what we were used to seeing in our films. I also learnt that most Indian films were complete plagiarisation of Western films. This inspired me to make my first film ever. In 2006, I wrote and directed a feature-length documentary called Four Step Plan on plagiarism in Indian cinema sequenced chronologically from the 1940s. During my research, I met Anand Gandhi who made Ship of Theseus. Later, he produced my play Grey Elephants in Denmark.
How did Court come about?
I began thinking of a real courtroom setting in an Indian situation after I finished my long tour of foreign film festivals with Six Strands. I discussed this with my friend from theatre Vivek Gomber, and he asked me to begin writing the script. He plays one of the two major roles – the defence lawyer in Court. He also stepped in to produce the film. I set off on a chain of interviews with people belonging to different crosssections of society. I made notes, penned down free-association essays, followed by six months of casting and eight months of sighting and fixing locations entirely in Mumbai. Slowly, very slowly, Court was born. I visited many courts in Mumbai and found that they were far removed from the courts we see in cinema. I wanted to create a more realistic vision of what a real court looks like, how it functions on a day-to-day basis, the people who attend court professionally or as witnesses, accused and victims and so on.
How did you pitch this realistic image of the court to a credible storyline?
It begins with a small incident revolving around Narayan Kamble, a frail and sick man of 65, a performer of folk songs at small functions, who makes a meager living by giving tuitions to children. One day, he is arrested during a street performance on grounds of having triggered the suicide of a sewer cleaner with his insulting and inflammatory lyrics and songs. The complaint insists that the songs, written and composed by Kamble, are filled with unmentionable obscenities and incendiary lyrics. Narayan Kamble is not even aware of the existence of this sewer cleaner. There is no proof that the cleaner knew Kamble or had heard his songs. Till the end, the audience, the court and the entire legal and judicial fraternity within the film remain in the dark about whether the sewer cleaner had committed suicide or had died of suffocation and lack of proper protective gear at work. Yet, Kamble is sent to police custody all over again. When the defence attorney requests the judge to allow bail as the man is quite sick and the court will go on vacation the following day, the judge simply asks him to go to the higher court which will not be on vacation! This in brief, is the story of Court.
Your cast and crew were composed entirely of amateurs they say?
Not entirely, but a major part of the cast and crew have hardly worked in films before. Geetanjali Kulkarni, who plays the prosecution attorney and Vivek Gomber are the only two full-fledged actors in the film. Well, I am an amateur myself as I have never been to any film school. I have never attended any workshops in films nor have I assisted any director in films. It suited me to work with a cast and crew stripped of any rub-off from acting schools and previous films. Other actors have never faced a movie camera in their lives. For editor Rikhav Desai, Court is the first fiction film. The production designers Somnath Pal and Pooja Talreja have never done production design for any film before Court. The sound designer Anita Kushwaha is from documentary films while cinematographer Mrinal Desai has shot only a couple of feature films before Court. We auditioned over 2000 non-professionals to finalise the acting cast. We wanted actors who would be as real and identifiable as the script needed them to be.
Last words on Court?
I wanted to tell the story that I wanted to tell. It wasn’t as if I had set out to make a social comment. I just got interested in the subject and started researching on it.