Shortly after Dhurandhar’s success, star-director Aditya Dhar told Ram Gopal Varma (Ramu) that he’d essentially made “Satya, Company, and added patriotism!” Ramu told me this.
Anurag Kashyap, likewise, tells me he often wonders aloud to blockbuster filmmakers, when they admit to having been inspired by him: “What did you see in my films to [churn out] Rs 600-800 crore [hits]?”
To be fair, directors of Malayalam minimalism express the same sentiment to Kashyap (Black Friday, Gangs of Wasseypur, DevD).
Among Ramu’s biggest bhakts, publicly voicing impact of his cinema they grew up on, are the likes of Prashanth Neel (KGF), Sandeep Vanga Reddy (Animal).
Besides that they’ve been such influential, working writer-director-producers, over multiple decades — what’s common to Ramu, 63, and Kashyap, 53?
Firstly, Satya (1998), which the latter, as co-writer, debuted in movies with; and that the former, rightly believes, is still his “most perfect” work as director.
Also, both are mainstream auteurs. For, what’s any great popular cinema, if not inevitably meeting mid-way, between self-expression, and certain public expectations from the medium itself.
They’ve widely resonated with realism (in characters, storyline), for believability — in a manner that even Star Wars is realistic. It’s what Dhar does with Dhurandhar, too; only amping up scale/style to altogether another level.
To a lesser extent, of course, Ramu believes he probably achieved the same effect with Satya — by raising mass-appeal of a grimy, gritty underworld/crime thriller from, say, Govind Nihalani’s Ardh Satya (1983). At any rate, Nihalani told him so.
Ramu recalls, after a screening of Satya, top producer Boney Kapoor sighed to writer Javed Akhtar about how somebody from outside Bombay could make such a film. Akhtar retorted, “That’s exactly why he could!”
Kashyap theatrically debuted as director with Black Friday (2004), set in 1993 Bombay blasts. To compare, barring exceptions, he’s decidedly more left (artsy, experimental) than right (crowd-pleasing, commerce).
In 2012-13, as filmmaker (producer/director), Kashyap had seven films simultaneously selected at Cannes. It’s unlikely Ramu has ever submitted films at a festival; let alone, cared to attend one!
As Ramu repeatedly prompts his audience, he got into the movies, swayed by “Amitabh Bachchan’s guns, and Zeenat Aman’s thighs!”
You can sense superstar Bachchan, throughout his debut, Shiva (1990), with Nagarjuna as ‘angry young man’; even a hat-tip to the iconic, police-station scene from Zanjeer (1973). Kashyap’s first film, Paanch, was also about an angry young man (Kay Kay Menon). It never released.
Ramu first met Bachchan at a preview of Shiva. Ever since, he would’ve singularly collaborated with Bachchan, the most number of times in his acting career — nine, once he eventually directs the greenlit Sarkar 4.
Not Manmohan Desai (eight), Hrishikesh Mukherjee (eight), Prakash Mehra (seven)… It’s Ramu! Bachchan, recently, reminded him of it.
Survey online comments on anything to do with a Kashyap film, lately, it’s inevitably full of randos ranting, “He’s going the Ramu way!”
What does that even mean, I ask Kashyap. He says, “That I’ve made my [Ram Gopal Varma Ki] Aag!” Which was, perhaps, Bombay Velvet (2015); commercially, flop, of a different kind, still.
I guess, you can tell, how separate Kashyap and Ramu are, from their responses to the ongoing onslaught of AI in filmmaking.
Kashyap’s clear: He’d rather be rendered irrelevant than submit to its artistic fakery. Ramu can’s stop singing praises, to anyone willing to listen, about this Chinese video-generating sensation called See Dance!
What unites them, chiefly, is how, as rank outsiders, they built a mini film industry/ecosystem around themselves, for such a long while in Mumbai, turning into messianic mid-cap producers of the movie trade.
It’s hard to list the sheer number of completely untested talents (directors, actors, technicians, musicians), and films, they backed on creative conviction alone.
Kashyap feels the one thing he’d tell his 20-year-old self is never to produce films: He lacks the financial acumen. Ramu bears no such grudge. I’m sure, though, that Kashyap could gracefully pontificate, forever, on first films by his ‘finds’, for lack of a better word: Vikramaditya Motwane’s Udaan (2010), Bejoy Nambiar’s Shaitan (2011), Neeraj Ghaywan’s Masaan (2015)… Or the movies that many made later.
With friends and camera at my favourite bar, WTF (Versova), I ask Ramu to list me the same for his protégés. He says, “It’s like this: I could’ve given Shimit Amin (Ab Tak Chhappan) to make Gayab (directed by Prawal Raman), instead. The films would be the same!” Some of Ramu’s cool-quotient emerges from precisely this.
He reminisces (because I prod him to), “Prawal Raman was an interior decorator; E Niwas (Shool) was my office boy; I met Sriram Raghavan, when he was with Trade Guide (box-office journal); cinematographer Hemant Chaturvedi (Company) was fourth camera-operator in a TV show….”
I first met Ramu, in my early 20s, over a story, for my newspaper. On way back, I nearly flipped, in my train, with a text from Ramu: “If you ever get fed up of journalism, you know where to come…” Evidently, never quite got fed up of journalism! Ah, well.
Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14
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