Part -2 – the
efforts.
Someone comes up to you and tells you that you have to buy a piece of ocean…depending on your budget. You see the problem here? You have a constrained budget and the area, from which you have to choose your part, is so vast. And yet you have to keep it accessible.
I was confused between what parts of Kashyap’s life and movies should be included. How much personal the film must go; What contexts could be included in the
movie so that the general viewers (who are not Kashyap followers) will
understand them without the internal references; how much amount of Western
cinema’s influence on Kashyap and Kashyap’s influence on me should be mentioned
and including all this, how should we establish Anurag Kashyap as everything
that is described in the first part (the Prologue) – And All of this through
the eyes of Kashyap’s fan!
After taking
into consideration all of the above aspects, what I felt is needed was that,
the script should be trendy & meaningful and crispy & classy at the
same time. The genre should be humour and realisation together. With December
12th to write the first letter of the script, taking a lot of time,
doing quite a research and giving it a final specific dimension, in pieces and in
halts the final draft of the script was completed by mid February.
The bounded
and registered script was narrated to my close friend and a beautiful actress
Sakhi Gokhale and I put forth to her the demand to rope in an actor called
Rajdeep to play the lead role of Amit. (The protagonist was named Amit as it
was shown that his parents fell in love while watching an Amitabh Bachchan
movie, which was later excluded from the script taking into consideration the
amount of things I already had to juggle with.)
The script
was narrated to few others who were needed and many other who were not but were
to be an indirect part of project.
In all of
this, one person who was with me, Rock solid, was my elder cousin, Rugved
Deshpande, a musician and lyricist. Once the things started moving ahead with
certain pace, we decided of composing an original song for the film - One, to
be used in the film and one more to be used for online promotion. Rupali Moghe,
a very talented singer and a personal favourite of both Me and Rugved gave her
voice to the unbelievably well composed sound track. This track was composed by
Rugved himself after consistent changes of my demands which actually made him
drive nuts. (Best-things are the outcome of creative frustration, is what I
believe.)
The budget
of the short-film, which would be of the 30mins duration, was racing up to
Rs.70, 000. But everyone was ready to be a part of this project with one carrot
hanged, and that was my craziness about reaching to Kashyap with this film.
Everyone wanted THAT NAME IN THE TITLE of this film to read their names in the
end scroll. With things like these happening, the budget was cut down to Rs.
20,000 now. With everyone’s dates that could be attained, we had a narrow
window of 9 odd days, for us to shoot. But 9 days were more than sufficient.
And I prepared a lavish schedule of shooting only two-three scenes a day. With
3 initial days left only for preparations and rehearsals.
The date of
the shoot was slated. We were going on floor in April 1st week. All
the arrangements were done. The A3 size photo frames, with Kashyap’s photos in
them were made as a part of production design. Leaving a couple of scenes to be
shot later in Mumbai, the rest of the locations, shot division & other
paper work were finalized. (We were going to shoot in Pune for convenience and
location availability purpose). The crew of 12 people who were supposed to be
fed and accommodated by the production (us) was set to come to Pune.
Things were
going exactly the way they should be proceeding.
And with all
smiles on my face a quote by Swami Vivekanand ran through my head – When things
are happening exactly the way you want them to be, be sure that something
somewhere is going terribly wrong.
A day before
we were leaving for Pune – Rajdeep called to say that, as per the contract of
the last film he signed, he has to be there for its promotion. The two people who were supposed to assist me for continuity and other
technical stuff couldn’t make it as something changed for them at the last
minute.
And the cinematographer would only come 8 hours before the call time of the
first day, which meant he would only see the locations at the time of shoot.
And on top of everything, the available camera we were going to use degraded
from Canon 5D to Canon 60D.
With all
this we still began the shoot. Kashyap’s Photo-Frames were hanged as the
property on Amit’s house walls. And another ‘Amit’ was finalised only a day
before the first day of shoot, named Siddharth Menon.
With Siddharth’s dates the lavish schedule had to be constrained to the 4-5
scenes a day. And on the first day itself after shooting 4 odd scenes,
Siddharth got a call from his feature film director, Sachin Kundalkar, to come
to dub his part of dialogues in Mumbai the following day and staying there for
the next 4 days as well.
Siddharth,
who was roped in, with great efforts and Sakhi’s enormous help, and who was
playing the lead protagonist, had to leave the sets of Being Kashyap.
With all the
apologetic and motivational words, Siddharth went out bringing the shoot to the
halt and putting all of us in a great despair.
Believe it
or not, with a whole lot of silence in the room after the actor went, the frame
of Anurag Kashyap’s photo slipped down the wall with a huge noise.
The silence
grew colder and my heart beats ran faster. All of us only gazing at the frame
and then staring at each other.
Hardly had
we felt that we should have believed in the sign. Even though you have the
faith in
positive vibes, we cannot ignore the existence of negative one.
The shoot
was aborted the next day at the dusk as the sun set, leaving me shattered,
speechless, insulted and at the lowest of my moral.
The despair continues…
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