Looking at Kiran Rao and a unique trend she may have started in the independent filmmaking space
By Mayank Shekhar
In an age of the hyper-active social media where a film’s release instantly generates over thousands of reviews in various shades of like and dislike, something out of the ordinary happened with the theatrical opening of Anand Gandhi’s oddly titled film Ship of Theseus, about a blind photographer, a Jain monk, and a stock broker, in which there was no ship nor anyone named Theseus. Right after its release, let alone journalists, film reviewers and regular viewers on Facebook and Twitter who began to champion the film as the greatest thing they had ever seen, even folks in the Mumbai film industry appeared to be knocking each other over in a social media competition to proclaim who liked the film more.
Mainstream audiences may have first heard about Ship of Theseus three months before its release at a ‘quiz round’ kind of moment, straight out of the celebrity chat-show Koffee with Karan, at one of the panel discussions on the news and current affairs television channel CNN IBN. Directors Anurag Kashyap and Dibakar Banerjee on the panel celebrating 100 years of Indian cinema were asked to name one Indian movie that they wished they had made. Both immediately replied, “Ship of Theseus”. On the Friday of the film’s release, Banerjee also wrote an editorial in Mumbai Mirror calling Ship of Theseus, “A rare film … No cheating. No copout. No contrived truths,” and urged readers to watch the film twice.
Producers in Mumbai rightly wondered how a picture, so very art-house, mostly in English, partly in Hindi, with a smattering of Arabic (the blind photographer is Egyptian), and also Swedish (the stockbroker travels to Stockholm), had made it to a wide chain of multiplexes across the country. Popular writing credits of first time filmmaker Gandhi, 33, include television soaps Kahani Ghar Ghar Ki and Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi. Independent producer Sohum Shah, who’s also acted in Ship of Theseus, is a real estate developer from Sri Ganganagar, the northernmost city in Rajasthan. There is no established actor on the cast. And the film meditates on the nature and purpose of art, science, belief, values, and life itself, using an ancient Greek paradox as a starting point.
Guneet Monga, CEO of Anurag Kashyap Films – a production company that has a fair number of movies that have been internationally feted but are unable to secure a theatrical release in India—told me she had been closely eyeing the distribution, marketing and promotion strategy of Ship of Theseus.
The credit for unexpectedly docking Ship of Theseus into theatres almost wholly went to writer-director Kiran Rao. Rao had decided to put her name as presenter on the film’s freshly designed poster, besides drawing a game plan and cutting fresh trailers for its release. She had brought in UTV-Disney to invest in developing prints and publicising the picture. There was no money in it for her. Domestic chores, she said, hardly allowed her enough mind-space to work on her own script. Still, she went out on a limb to beat the drum for Gandhi’s film, shuttling between cities on a promotional tour, giving press interviews on every possible web-portal, besides print and television, because she was left awestruck when she first watched Ship of Theseus at a fairly low-profile ‘Naya Cinema’ Festival at the Russian Cultural Centre in South Mumbai in November, 2012. “It was unlike anything I had ever seen. I was excited that it was possible to make a film like this,” Rao told me when we met in July, 2013, at Aamir Khan Productions’ office in Khar, not very far from her Pali Hill home in Bandra, where she lived with her husband Aamir and their two-year-old son Azad.
Rao, 40, is best known as super-star and producer Aamir’s second wife. She had made her directorial debut in 2010 with Dhobi Ghat (also known as Mumbai Diaries). The film comprised four unrelated central characters in Mumbai—a washer-man (dhobi) from Darbhanga in Bihar, a housewife from Uttar Pradesh, a female banker from New York, and a male artist in South Mumbai—whose lives, despite barriers of class, somehow inter-connect in a huge metropolis. Likewise, Ship of Theseus is a stunningly shot collection of three separate stories set in Mumbai, where the protagonists in each short film somehow finds a relation to the other at the end. Dhobi Ghat had premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). The apparent similarities between the two films could be the reason why Cameron Bailey, director of TIFF, had mailed Rao asking her to look out for Ship of Theseus in 2011. Bailey had seen a few minutes’ clip while the film was still getting made.
Rao said she had Bailey’s email exchange somewhere at the back of her mind, but she had pretty much forgotten about the film, since it had taken far too long to finish, chiefly owing to budgetary concerns. She doesn’t make much of drawing any parallels between Ship of Theseus and Dhobi Ghat. “That our lives in different worlds overlap is metaphorically and philosophically more at the core of Ship of Theseus,” she said
Gandhi didn’t expect to find Rao at the film’s Russian Centre screening. After the show, almost in gratitude or in a “fan-girl” moment, as she calls it, she wished to go over and hug the director, though newly converted fans surrounded him. In the ensuing months, they kept in touch. She eventually asked Gandhi if there was anyway that she could help with the film’s release.“There are such few of us doing our own thing. It makes it all the more important for us to stick together,” Rao said.
As we sat and chatted at her office’s guest room, employees of Aamir Khan Productions were in an adjacent editing suite, sifting through possible stories for the second series of the actor’s social reality TV show Satyamev Jayate (SMJ). Before her child was born, Rao had been closely involved with the production and conceptualizing of SMJ. She hasn’t had any time to spare for the show’s second season, though. “I am a producer in the company but I don’t know if I’ll be credited for the show this time,” she said. I was Rao’s ninth interviewer that day— Ship of Theseus was being promoted at the time—and she rushed away to take her little son out to a “kids’ gym”.
She is a full-time mother now, who gets a couple of hours of free time during the day for meetings and to read and write when her son is in school in the morning and when he takes a nap in the afternoon. As Rao gave me a blow by blow account of her day, it was easy to sense that the only moments that she has to herself is when the little boy, Azad—–named after the freedom fighter and statesman Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad, Aamir’s grand uncle—is asleep at 8:30 pm.
Image courtesy: mid-day.com
Rao was born in Bangalore and lived in Calcutta until she was 18. She said she had the fondest memories of growing up in a typically middle-class home with her parents. She went to the exclusive Loreto House until her tenth standard and La’ Martinere for her “plus two”. She has two half-sisters—“It’s kinda complicated as so many families are.” She grew up with one of the sisters who is “8 or 9 years older” than her. While she eventually took up filmmaking as a career, her engagement with the arts began with music and literature. She would wake up every morning to eclectic sounds, from MS Subbulakshmi to the Beatles, and her sister would introduce her to rock—Led Zeppelin, The Doors, etc. The only toys she remembers from her childhood are books. She was surrounded by them, she said. And she remembers watching blockbusters on Friday nights at the Saturday Club that was down the street from her home.
Rao’s father had worked in a steel company for 25 years, but his firm eventually shut down in the late 1980s, owing to Calcutta’s perennial trade union problems. Her parents decided to move to Bangalore, where her mother is from. Rao’s sister was already living in Mumbai when she moved there to study economics at Sophia College. After graduating, Rao enrolled into the master’s programme at the Mass Communications Research Centre (MCRC) at Jamia Millia Islamia University in Delhi. The MCRC was a premier institute at the time offering a rather well-rounded course in the media that touched upon photography, theatre, television, radio, and filmmaking. Its most famous alumnus is the dropout, Shah Rukh Khan.
Rao again moved to Mumbai after her finishing her master’s from Jamia. She was clear about taking up filmmaking as her profession. She didn’t quite know how to go about it. In a moment that can only be ascribed to exuberance of youth, she dashed off a letter to producer-director Subhash Ghai suggesting that she would like to work with him, even while she was quite apprehensive of Bollywood’s lackadaisical approach to filmmaking. Nevertheless, Ghai didn’t reply to her letter.
One of her seniors from Sophia College, Reema Kagti (currently filmmaker Zoya Akhtar’s writing partner, and whose last film as director was the Aamir starrer Talaash) was at the time working on Ashutosh Gowariker’s Lagaan. Kagti asked Rao if she might be interested in joining the crew in Kutch. As “second second AD (assistant director), Rao’s job during Lagaan’s shoot was to take charge of the costume department. She spent most of her time matching clothes with the right cast in the make-up room—she recalls it was a “scheduling nightmare.” This is also where she first met Aamir, who was both the producer and the leading man in the film.
Lagaan was one of the first Indian films to organise the band of ADs into a polished structure. The experience helped Rao land assistantship in equally professional productions, including Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, Shaad Ali’s Saathiya, and Ashutosh Gowariker’s Swades, before she turned into a freelance AD for ad films. Since their marriage in December, 2005, Rao has been involved in all of Aamir Khan’s productions—Delhi Belly, Peepli Live, Taare Zameen Par, Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na—where she has been credited either as producer or associate producer
When Rao entered movies, she was certain that within a year or two she would be the “next Tarkovsky”. “That’s my job, to give good cinema. People had no idea what they were watching,” she said. Her well-paying job in advertising instead kept her from scripting the sort of film she would have liked to make. She found her experience as an AD on ad films creatively dissatisfying. “The script is already given, casting is done, there is little room to maneuver, it’s a great place for technicians to hone their craft,” she said, cautioning at the same time that she could never publicly dismiss the ad-world because it is only from working in the field that she could afford “a car, a computer, pay rent, travel to Venice, Rome [to make an alcohol commercial], make friends, see a lot of life.” She can’t quite recall any of the campaigns she worked on. I prod her some more, and she recalls a Levi’s commercial with John Abraham and Sheetal Malhar: “I don’t know if anyone remembers that!” This is besides the ‘Thanda matlab Coca Cola’ (‘A cool drink means a Coca Cola’) campaign with Aamir, where she enjoyed assisting Ashutosh Gowariker. On the side, she would attempt scripting full-length stories for features as an exercise, but would discard them immediately, being unhappy with the outcome.
It was in a hotel room in Dohara, in the interiors of Punjab, holed up for days while Aamir was shooting for Rang De Basanti that she managed to get the first draft of Dhobi Ghat out of her system. Aamir liked the script and wanted to act in it. She wasn’t keen on carrying the burden of a superstar in her film, or shooting with a popular face in the intensely crowded Mohamed Ali Road where a fair portion of the picture is set. So he auditioned for the part. The film was 100 minutes long, with a very low-key background score, without songs or an interval, and, thanks to its starring a top Bollywood actor, was playing at a theatre near you.
Multiplexes made this feat possible, Rao said, though there is still a long way to go as far as quality niche content is concerned: It isn’t quite as simple as equating low budget with critically acclaimed, and mainstream with song, action and dance. While the lines are visibly blurring, there is quite often rubbish produced in the name of both. What excites Rao is the number of cinematic voices emerging from outside the “culture of big names and huge production houses, mushrooming from unlikely places … Filmmakers with guts and gumption, gaining entry into film festivals….” For example, she cited Amit Dutta’s Nainsukh (a 90-minute experimental film that recreates miniature paintings of the 18th century Mughal artist on whom the film is named); Aamir Bashir’s Harud (on the plight of Kashmir’s youth in the wake of terrorism); and Celluloid Man (the biopic of PK Nair, founder of the National Film Archives of India).
The latter two got a limited release as part of Director’s Rare, a section introduced by the multiplex chain PVR that screens independent films for one or two shows a week at some of their metropolitan outlets. It’s the first viable distribution option for unconventional films in India. Financial gains for producers are minimal. But the filmmakers are only too happy see their works screened before a paying public.
In 2011, when I first met Rao, she had told me her dream was to start an art-house theatre in Mumbai. It seemed like an uphill task, she said, to get anyone to invest in culture let alone commit resources in a theatre that could serve as venue for offbeat films in the city’s western suburbs. Last checked, she was negotiating with the state-run National Film Development Corporation (NFDC), but nothing has come of it so far. Late last year she had prominent corporate philanthropist Ratan Tata over for dinner. They would presumably have discussed her art-house cinema idea, but she remains tight-lipped about the project, given there has been no major breakthrough yet.
New wave, she said, cannot take off isolated from an audience. The Hindi parallel cinema of the 1970s and 80s, popularly called the Indian New Wave, with star directors like Shyam Benegal, Saeed Akhtar Mirza, and Mani Kaul, was to a large extent government funded. It fizzled out by the 1990s. The French New Wave in the 1950s and 60s famously originated with critics from the magazine Cashiers du Cinema—Francois Truffaut, Jean Luc Godard, etc.—who went on to make films.
Rao points out that the artistic community has done little to support each other in India; and the government, next to nothing: “You can’t blame a bunch of producers—with no safety net, salaries to pay, shareholders to answer to, looking for their next hit—to think about the future of Indian cinema. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there.” This is why she was automatically drawn to Ship of Theseus when she first saw it: “There are few lone survivors on this island who live by their own rules. It’s important for a growing number of us to stick together.” After several meetings with Gandhi, chiefly discussing physics and philosophy, she asked if he needed any help with the release. There was clearly no money in it for her. She is mostly busy with her little son. She loved the movie enough to make time for both.
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As the wife of a top Bollywood star and producer, Rao comes appears as someone with a uniquely insider-outsider position in the film industry. She seems incredibly keen to make conversations about films and the arts in general. I discovered this when we got a drink after a panel discussion on Ship of Theseus, with director Anand Gandhi and producer Sohum Shah at the Olive bar and kitchen in Bandra. She is a good listener, which worked well for Gandhi, a consummate raconteur, as he explained some of the scripts he’s been working on. The four of us discussed the sub-conscious effect music has on the human brain, whether the internet will eventually make big screen cinemas irrelevant, and if conflict zones indeed produce the finest art. Despite the accoutrements of high life, she comes across as a grounded, middle-class, suburban Mumbai professional. At some point, she recommended I try the chili cheese toast at Café Coffee Day.
Some of this insouciance towards fame could be attributed to her movie-star husband. Talking about how she and Aamir started dating, Rao said in an interview to the Times of India, “We started seeing each other in 2004. Initially, I wasn’t sure that I could be ‘friends’ with a superstar. But in so many ways he is such a grounded person that in four minutes of speaking to him, you forget that he is a star. We like each other’s company, and our friendship is still the basis of our relationship.”
Kiran Rao with husband Aamir Khan
Of the three Khans—the other two being Shah Rukh and Salman—born in the same year (1965) and who have practically reigned over Bollywood for almost 25 years after making their debuts in the late 1980s, Aamir’s public image has been the least starry—often earning him the tag of the ‘boring’ one. The homes of Shah Rukh (Mannat) and Salman (Galaxy apartments) are Mumbai landmarks, across which, on any given day, one can find scores of fans milling about, clicking pictures. Aamir’s place in a quiet corner of Pali Hill is a modestly done up apartment that is not easy to find, though the couple recently moved to a sea-facing apartment on Carter Road. The family home on Pali Hill still remains.
Aamir does not attend any film award shows—or at least hasn’t since 1993, when he missed out on the best actor Filmfare Award amid rumours of rigging. In the early 2000s, after the release of DCH, he completely disappeared from public life, and was spotted once in a while by paparazzi while making quiet entries at a Jethro Tull or Roger Waters concert. Even with the release of Rang De Basanti (2006), he chose to not to give any press interviews.
He is a much more accessible star now, making several public appearances, besides participating in road shows for his film’s promotions. In press interviews, he comes across as far more chilled out and even cheeky while taking digs at his contemporaries Shah Rukh and Salman. This change in his personality, he told me in an interview in 2009, was mainly because of the influence of his wife. Rao suggested that her being married to Aamir has changed her life in public as well.
In the tabloid press, Rao usually gets featured for her trendy but relaxed eveningwear. A comment on her geeky glasses is customary. When she entered this new world of films, she did become conscious of the fact that she would be photographed whenever she stepped out to attend functions: “I couldn’t land up in Bata chappals.” While she is still happiest in jeans and t-shirts, now that she can also afford to, she began to take interest in fashion, actively seeking out designers whose styles matched her sensibilities. She first turned to the major Indian designers. A lot of their work, she felt, dealt with heavy embroidery, inlays and bling—something she wasn’t personally comfortable with. “I’m not into clothes designed to flaunt the curves either,” she said. Some of her favourite international designers, she mentioned, are Dries Van Noten, Bottega Veneta, Céline, Lanvin and Marni.
There is an effortless understated quality to her dressing sense, which becomes quite clear when she names her favourite Indian designers. They don’t feature a Manish Malhotra, Neeta Lulla or Ritu Kumar, whose clothes most Bollywood stars often wear. This automatically makes her stand out on the third page of newspaper supplements. She said she was really fond of Bodice by Ruchika Sachdev, Péro, Savio Jon and Ikai, and that she made it a point to check out their latest collections: “They develop their own fabric using craftsmen and weavers, and the cuts are suited to the Indian frame.” She enjoys mixing together various pieces of clothing—“a ganjee, a top, under coat or something else”—rather than wearing a “single dress”.
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Until she met Aamir, Rao said she was generally “judgmental” and “dismissive” of Bollywood films. She still rarely interacts with people from the “film world”, finds a lot of the producers “under-confident” or just “plain lazy” about the films they make. The audience is “equally drunk”, she said: “They are far more sensible than what they put up with in their films.” Beyond their maiden release Lagaan, Aamir Khan’s production house really hit the road after they got together. It might be fair to grant her some portion of the credit.
Delhi Belly clearly took off one evening in 2006 when she was waiting around at home for her husband to get ready. They were supposed to go out, and he was taking a while to finish off work on his computer. She was flipping the pages of screenplays that were stacked up in his study. A few pages through one of the scripts lying at the top of a pile, she found herself giggling and eventually laughing hysterically at a comedy set among three crazy dudes who were up the creek for having accidentally replaced precious diamonds with stool sample inside a Russian doll. Aamir read the script after she was done, and they cancelled their evening plans. He got in touch with the writer, Akshat Verma, who was in Los Angeles at the time. Verma’s first draft of Delhi Belly had earned him an A-minus in his UCLA screenwriting class and he had left the script behind with Aamir’s maid.
Five years later, the film, mostly in English (though there was also a Hindi version), with a no-holds-barred approach to the grotesque, headlined by a sd (Aamir’s nephew Imran Khan), clocking less than 100 minutes, and playing in theatres without an interval, was a Bollywood hit. That Delhi Belly was a game changer of some sort can be gauged by the number of mainstream theatrical releases in the past couple of years that have somehow or the other reminded you of it—whether it’s the zombie comedy Go Goa Gone produced by Saif Ali Khan, Rohan Sippy’s Nautanki Saala, and the more recent Fukrey, a film about demented Delhi boys produced by Farhan Akhtar’s company Excel Entertainment. It is already common these days to hear screenwriters in Versova succinctly describe their comic scripts as being in “the Delhi Belly space”.
“We’ve become a lot more organised about script selection,” Rao said. She’s hired script readers to filter out various screenplays submitted to Aamir Khan Productions and has so far zeroed in on three scripts, one of which should go on the floors soon. The distance between the screenplay and the screen still depends largely on serendipity in Bollywood, and Rao is currently a moderator on the second season of the international television series Good Pitch, which invites documentary filmmakers to pitch film ideas and connects them to possible funders for the project.
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According to the film’s publicist, Ship of Theseus made Rs 4 crore from its theatrical release. Producer Sohum Shah, who also acts in the film, spent between Rs 2 to 2.25 crore making the film. This means that the movie broke even and may have made a profit. This, in Bollywood’s measure, is at best a modest success. But the film’s promotion and distribution could be seen as a case study of sorts for self-funded independent films in India.
Ship of Theseus was perhaps the film to get a ‘platform release’. It opened in very few theatres initially. The buzz generated, especially in the inexpensive online space, created a demand for it in newer cities where the film gradually travelled. It’s a model often followed for art-house cinema in the US and Europe. Rao, headlining the project, ensured that the film became a talking point in the mainstream media. That her husband Aamir plugged the picture in radio spots was an added bonus. I asked her if she would like to do it again. “A film like Ship of Theseus gets made only once in a lifetime,” she said.
A poster of Ship Of Theseus
Hot on the heels of having Rao on board as the presenter of Ship of Theseus—a sound marketing strategy, no doubt—distributors UTV roped in popular TV host/filmmaker Karan Johar to attach his name to their next art-house release, Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox. The film had picked up a prize at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, but like several Indian films that do the film festival rounds, it could have gone straight to the cans if it weren’t for the relentless marketing push granted by Johar’s presence. Popular filmmaker Viktamaditya Motwane similarly went all out to promote Deepti Kakkar and Fahad Mustafa’s brilliant documentary film Katiyabaaz on the power crisis in Kanpur, which got a rather wide theatrical release, opening in about 400 screens across India. Popular Bollywood director Imtiaz Ali will now lend his name to Mangesh Hadawale’s Dekh Indian Circus, which won the best film award in 2011 at the 16th Busan Film Festival, which is currently Asia’s top film fest.
Enthused by Ship of Theseus’ success, director Gandhi and actor-producer Shah, decided to push Nishtha Jain’s documentary Gulabi Gang into theatres. The film, now produced by Shah and Gandhi’s company, is based on the life of Bundelkhand activist Sampat Pal Devi, and got a theatrical release in February this year. Rao hosted a special screening of the film for her industry folks—directors Rajkumar Hirani, Vidhu Vinod Chopra, popular actors Aditya Roy Kapoor, Aditi Rao Hydari, lyricist Prasoon Joshi and the rest. The flashbulbs at the venue ensured that the screening received red carpet coverage across mainline print, fashion and gossip websites and television news and lifestyle channels. The conversation centred on Gulabi Gang, and this is significant, given that most Indian documentaries hardly find space on television, let alone generate publicity before they open in theatres, in the off chance that they do.
This overt patronage from within Bollywood for independent films appears to work better than needlessly casting stars in offbeat films or critics doling out stars in their reviews. If this does become a trend in the long run, Rao could take some of the credit for a newfound formula of popular Bollywood figures helping independent voices find their way to mainstream audiences.