Given the proliferation of social media avenues, it isn’t uncommon for big-banner movies to produce ‘making of’ videos for buzz-generating purposes but Zero Se Restart is the first-ever BTS documentary of its kind to not only make it to the multiplexes but also to arrive in our midst more than a year after the film that it is about did its rounds.
Tracking the making of 12th Fail, one of the biggest sleeper hits of recent years, Zero Se Restart, helmed and narrated by editor Jaskunwar Kohli, brings alive the rough and tumble of moviemaking in a hugely entertaining and remarkably educative manner. It is a wonderfully lucid work of cinema that every film lover must watch.
As much as anything else that it does, the documentary presents a lively, immersive portrait of writer-director-producer Vidhu Vinod Chopra, whose commercially and critically successful production banner has been in existence for 45 years.
Zero Se Restart plonks itself in the middle of a film unit that frequently runs into rough weather, ideationally and logistically, as 12th Fail takes shape and progresses, compelling everybody in a key position in the team to think on his feet (yes, his feet because not a single crew member who figures here is a woman).
12th Fail was without any star power. When the unit moves to Delhi, VVC thinks shooting with Vikrant Massey in a crowded Mukherjee Nagar neighbourhood would be a breeze because nobody would recognise the actor. The director is taken aback by the fan frenzy that Massey sparks on the streets. The glee on the face of the actor as he waves to the crowd is palpable – and perfectly understandable.
But before Zero Se Restart reaches the Delhi schedule of 12th Fail, it throws light on the long, frustrating gestation period that the production weathered, much of it during the peak of the Covid pandemic, a period that saw the script being changed and chopped repeatedly over Zoom calls.
The documentary features music director Shantanu Moitra, lyricist Swanand Kirkire, writer Anurag Pathak (whose book was the basis of the 12th Fail screenplay and on whom the character of Pritam Pandey is modelled), UPSC coach Vivek Divyakirti and Manoj Sharma and Shraddha Joshi, the bureaucrat couple whose life the film dramatizes, and of course Massey, Anant Joshi and Anshumaan Pushkar.
The 12th Fail team faces all the challenges and confusions that usually attend any movie production but since it is an independent film fuelled more by passion than any belief in its financial viability, the team is required to find quick ways out of tight spots. None of them, mercifully, proves to be a quick-fix solution.
Delightfully vibrant and disarmingly candid – by the end of the film, both VVC and his crew are ready to admit that the man at the helm knows nothing and is only learning as he goes along – Zero Se Restart captures the veteran filmmaker at work in a different light. With 12th Fail he was out of his comfort zone and attempting something he had never attempted before. The drama of that situation is captured with all its ups and downs.
Right upfront the documentary returns to the points of the planning process when VVC was on the verge of giving up on 12th Fail. It then takes the audience on a ride through the locations that the project wended its way through on the path to completion.
It presents a captivating account of the stops and go’s that 12th Fail encountered – with finding a suitable director, with its actors, and with scouting for locations. All of it lasted well over two years, a period that tested the patience and perseverance of every crew member.
As the film takes us through the evolution of the original idea – the script was dismissed as unoriginal by every young director that Vidhu Vinod Chopra offered the assignment to – innumerable course corrections on the back of scepticism expressed by collaborators, including educator Vikas Divyakirti, and its eventual execution against many daunting odds.
A significant chunk of Zero Se Restart is devoted to the hurdles that the unit had to surmount when filming real students in actual classrooms.
Pulling off the sequence that has Massey sitting amongst students was the hardest. The failure of the boys to grasp and pay heed to VVC’s instruction not to look at the camera necessitated as many as 21 takes.
One segment of Zero to Restart – it is with good reason that the documentary opens with it – stands out. On the opening day of the shoot in the village of Reha, Chambal impelled VVC to overhaul his well-laid plans and turn a sequence that was expected to be all of two dozen shots into a single-take scene. The improvisation provides a masterclass in on-the-spur-of-the-moment recalibration.
There is much else in Zero Se Restart that celebrates other marvellously epiphanic breakthroughs, none as exhilarating as the transformation of the shell of an abandoned train terminal in Agra into “a fully functional” Gwalior railway station from where the protagonist of 12th Fail begins his journey to Delhi and the promise of a new life.
Or consider the search for a cramped chakki (flour mill) where the hero works, lives and prepares for his shot at the UPSC examination. It sends VVC’s assistants scurrying to different parts of Delhi to find the right space. He nixes all their suggestions much to the bewilderment of the team. It is only when he steps into the breach and takes it upon himself to locate the right chakki that it dawns on everybody what is going wrong with the quest.
Multiple scenes in and around Mukherjee Nagar pose their own set of problems, crowd management being the foremost especially because 12th Fail was a period film that demanded unfailing ambience accuracy. Zero Se Restart drives home the role of rigour and the primacy of the screenplay in filmmaking.
Even if you are prone to perceiving Zero to Restart as a self-congratulatory exercise, there can be no denying that it is a little marvel. It is a wondrously engaging insider’s view of filmmaking with all its highs and lows, pains and joys, false starts and fresh beginnings. It is a film that deserves a wide audience.