All set for a red letter day
ZIYA US SALAM
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Anurag Kashyap's long delayed "Black Friday" based on S. Hussain Zaidi's work on the 1993 Bombay blasts is releasing this Friday. The director reveals the arduous journey.
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PHOTO : ANU PUSHKARNA
DIRECTOR'S CUT With "Black Friday" bleak days are well and truly behind for Anurag Kashyap.
This Friday, February 9 promises to be a red letter day in the life of Anurag Kashyap, for long considered a jinxed director of Hindi films. He has made a career out of screenplay and dialogue writing. He has notched up mega hits, having to his credits films like "Satya", "Shool" and the upcoming "Water, which just got shortlisted for Oscar's. However, it is when he has wielded the directorial baton that things have not quite gone the way he planned. His films were either not cleared by the Censors or not released for public screening after judicial orders. Now, the hoodoo is all set to be broken, or as Kashyap himself says, "The jinx will be broken. The floodgates will be opened". One swallow will be followed by an elaborate meal. "Black Friday" will soon be followed at the box office by "Paanch." "Alwyn Kalicharan" will be wrapped up. "Gulal" will be there too.
But it will not be the futile victory of a one-man army, smug at his own success, however delayed. "Black Friday", releasing at cinema halls across the country today, marks the triumph of a man who never, ever gave up. Not when the Censor Board refused to pass "Paanch", citing the absence of entertainment quotient and unexplained violence. Not when the Supreme Court's order withheld "Black Friday" from public exhibition, hours before the film was set to kiss the silver screen. It rankled that S. Hussain Zaidi's pioneering book on Bombay blasts of 1993 — on which Kashyap's film is based — had been in circulation long enough for anybody to memorise the pages.
"I had to wait for two and a half years. Now the film will be out. The Supreme Court cleared it on October 29 last year. It was cleared after the TADA verdict," shares Anurag Kashyap, more relieved than happy at the turn of events.
"The film was not banned by the Supreme Court, only postponed," he clarifies, before undertaking a long trip down memory lane.
"When I saw Zaidi's book, I said we should make it into a film. It won't do to make an episode for television or anything like that. The book deserved a big canvas.
"These are good times for independent filmmakers, and films with a different subject. The audiences are ready to accept the unusual. In a way it has been a bit of a blessing that the film was delayed. The multiplexes have helped new filmmakers and big fish like Adlabs have shown interest in picking up films with no star cast. If an independent, small budget film works, the multiplexes will give it good shows too. I don't quite believe that a good film will not get prime shows. Today, thanks to Adlabs we can get 200 prints across the country. At the end of the day, if the product is good, it will sell. Cinema is, after all, business." And this business, according to Kashyap, is beginning to get comprehensible for the common man. And a successful venture for the intrepid. "
"There is no policy that you need only stars to sell the films. I signed Kay Kay for `Black Friday', and before that for `Paanch' much before he became a star. I don't want the stars to promote my film. I would always my film to do well on its own, not because there are certain stars. In fact, I would feel uncomfortable if people to watch my film for its star value."
Ready for struggle
Kashyap is not through yet. "Everything has to sell. Stars do help to get the initial but beyond the first day crowd, a film has to run on its own steam. Everybody has to struggle. The common people forget Yash Chopra had to struggle too. Once he made good films, today he makes substandard films, but they sell. People are happy to accept them. So, where is the question of complaining? It only means people are happy accepting them."
But isn't it easier for Karan Johars and Aditya Chopras to get started than Kashyap who has had to plough a lonely furrow?
"Somewhere we are still a patriarchal society. Raja ka beta raja hota hai. A king's son is a king too. That will remain part of our generation though things are changing slowly. There is Ramanand Sagar's son Amrit who's doing his own things. There are outsiders who have brought in a whiff of change. There is realism in cinema. Outside perspective is seeping into Bollywood, changing its work ethos, its thought process. Even stars are experimenting now. Everybody is doing a balancing job."
Balancing job
Talking of a balancing job, Kashyap had to do a bit of his own in canning "Black Friday". The hard-hitting film, a nearly two and a half long saga is based on Zaidi's nearly 300-page book. And Kashyap, according to Zaidi, took some cinematic liberties, by stretching certain portions. The director says, "I retained the book in its essence. It is not possible to go page by page in cinema."
However, unlike Zaidi who got all kinds of threats, some veiled, others direct, Kashyap claims he had to face none. "I have had no problems from any quarters whatsoever. No threats, no phone calls, nothing. The only problem has been in releasing the film. But now after the Supreme Court verdict that has been sorted out too."
Talking of problems, it was not just while waiting for clearance for the release that Kashyap and his team had to come through the test. The entire unit experienced motion sickness as they shot at night in the ocean. Despite all this, Kashyap upheld his reputation for exactitude by canning the important scene of the RDX bombs landing in India prior to the Mumbai blast in 1993 in the same village that the RDX actually landed Shikhadi.
"We shot in the same village of the coolies which was actually picked up by the police post-blasts because the night when the RDX arrived, the villagers were paid Rs.1000 but they had no idea what contained in those ships", reveals Kashyap. This sharp eye for detail, ability to labour and to wait is likely to bear fruit this Friday. And "Black Friday" might just be a harbinger of better times for the indefatigable man.
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