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SORRY BHAI!

Been wanting to write for PFC for some time now… a lot has been happening and despite wanting to, I have not had the time. So SORRY BHAI!

I do not know where to start. Suddenly the shoot is over. The first cut ready and I am in the midst of the CHITRANGDA comeback phenomena. How do I react? When I approached her for the film. I desperately wanted her to say a yes, because she suited the character of Aliyah perfectly, and I loved her as an actress in Hazaron… Also, I was one month away from shoot and had no actress. There was a lot at stake. The trust and dates of all my actors. A lot of financial investment had already gone into the film and I was really worried. What if I did not get the correct cast and had to push the film …

In the beginning there was chaos, and nothing but chaos… and I stepped into the chaos looking for an answer….

I remember from the time I was in school in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan Kashmir was the place my mother always wanted to come to… a place of romance and beauty…. Years passed by… we never made it to Kashmir … and then the unrest… but now the dream that lay dormant in her was a living dream in me. I was looking for an excuse to visit this place… .

Couple of month’s back I read the story of a successful Kashmiri Model in Bangladesh. One fine day he was arrested as a suspect RAW agent. After 40 days in prison he was deported to India. On arrival at the Delhi airport he was arrested as an ISI agent and …

Every morning I wake up and see the Spanish guitar I bought from Hobbner’s years ago standing in the corner of my bedroom. It’s become like a habit and I lie to myself every morning and tell myself that tomorrow I am going to pick it up . …

Having lived my entire childhood in Bhutan I have grown up listening to Beatles, Pink Floyd, John Denver, Bod Dylan, Rolling Stones, Cliff Richards, Led Zeppelin, Queen, Bread, Moody blues, Jethro Tull, The Carpenters, ABBA and many others…. basically primarily western music…. both popular and classical. Unfortunately because of that I get more excited to hear the guitar strings being plucked and the fingers tap the keys of the Piano than the sound of Dholak, Tabla and Sitar . And I feel terribly illiterate when it comes to Indian Classical music and am ashamed of my inability to relate to …

As I look back now two years later at the process of realizing my first film…. There are so many thoughts that surface.
Year 1999 was when I met Sanjay Suri(actor) on the sets of Daman. In the remote jungles of Assam, the only occupation after pack up was to discuss ideas and concepts. That was the beginning of my getting down to actually writing scripts that we wanted to make. Every few months I would come up with a new script. The next few months would go in producer/financer hunting…. A new director, no big stars, an unconventional story, not a comedy, not a thriller and not much of sex… the moneybags saw red.
Finally tired of being turned down Sanjay suggested that I write something that we could produce ourselves. That was the beginning of MBN. I remembered having edited some documentary material on Dominique De Souza (He was …

MBN posterFor the last ten months I have been trying to start my next film. I have signed three films. Have a few more producers wanting to sign me up… yes all that sounds like “why is this guy complaining?”.. But yes this is not it….

The wait to get to the shooting seems endless. I realize how much time I spend in doing things that I rather not do to get to utter the magic words…

Film making is increasingly becoming not about spending hours worrying about your craft but hours you spend negotiating with Producers/financiers/distributors/actors… More often than not you realize that to realize your film your producer does not need to be convinced about the script… as long as you have the star (not necessarily an actor)you film can get made .
Are we “proposal maker” …