Amit Masurkar looks like a regular college kid, complete with laptop bag, denim shirt and unkempt hair. This boy we can claim from Karnataka (parents from Bagalkot and Baindoor) who’s lived in Mumbai, tells MetroPlus how he’s worked his way through Bollywood, writing funny lines for TV comics, directing corporate films, and making-of videos, and “paying his dues” in the Bollywood system so to speak. His film Sulemani Keeda is a bro-mance slacker comedy that’s got a lot of attention for talking about the lives of people who slog it out in Bollywood: the invisible scriptwriter. Masurkar sits down for a leisurely chat over ‘medu vada’ and pineapple juice in between screenings at some of Bangalore’s film schools.
Is this an autobiographical story?
Not at all! It’s about two young people in a big city. It’s a youth film — about aspirations, fleeting love, about relationships and what happens to friendships when big career goals suddenly happen, about two writing partners who are not very talented but think they are. They’ve been hustling their scripts in Bollywood and it’s about the days in their life when one of them falls in love, which is also when one of them gets a big break. Even though it’s set in the film industry, it’s not an insider kind of movie, it’s not a meta-references thing. It’s just a regular story. But there are definitely incidents and characters which might have happened to me or my friends; so it’s inspired 50 per cent from real life.
Everybody has desire to tell their story, not bowing to market diktat. Not everyone gets to make it. How did you manage to pull it off?
I’ve been working on movies since I was 20. I started as an intern. I assisted directors, then wrote for TV, directed corporate films and ‘making-of’ videos. Since 2007 I’ve been getting signed on to write films. But none of these films were getting made; they got stuck. I was very clear I wanted to be a director, so I was preparing myself for it. I realised if I depended on this industry to give me a break it would take me another five or six years, because there is a system, and you have to pay your dues and all that. I figured I’d already worked for 10 years and if I want to make a film, it should be now. So I started writing a film which I could make without taking help. I was thinking let me make a film, and without much money, so we made it. Things just started falling in place. It was not like I was alone. There were people helping out at every stage, it was team effort.
And what’s the budget?
The budget is very low. Asking an independent producer/director for a budget is like asking an actor/actress her age. You’ll never tell the truth!
How long did it take for the film to take shape?
I wrote the script in 2011, started shooting in 2012, and finished the edit. All of 2013, we were waiting for money to finish the post-production. That’s when one of my friends, a senior TV producer called Shailesh Dave came on board. My producers were Datta Dave, and Chaitanya Hegde, who was an RJ with RadioCity in Bangalore. Chaitanya was on sets and handled production. He was responsible for film being made on such a low budget. He was able to pull in resources, and favours and kept the unit together. Shailesh and his partners – private businessmen – who got interested in the film, finally financed it. PVR Director’s Rare is giving us a release.
Everyone’s talking of your film being of the slacker/ mumblecore genre. Where is this placed in Indian cinema?
There’s always been this kind of cinema coming out in India. You had Sai Paranjpe making such films in the 1980s. Chashme Buddoor was actually a slacker film. So was Kundan Shah’s Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro . I prefer to watch everything, but I’m good at writing and understanding comedy because I find it very challenging. It’s tougher than writing a drama.
Back to your writing days…You wrote for two years for The Great Indian Comedy Show. the first ever standup comedy show on Indian TV. From there to Murder 3, very different kind of writing involved.
The show was sketch comedy. TGICS was my first writing break. I learnt a lot because for two years I was only focussed on that show. – I was studying sketch comedy and got exposed to this whole world from England, America, Canada. Amazing sketches like Monty Python, The Kids In The Hall, UCB.
Murder 3 happened much later, when I was editing Sulemani Keeda . I had already worked with Mahesh Bhatt. He’d signed me to write a film which never got made. And then Bhatt saab agreed to play a cameo in my film and he very sportingly wrote his own lines and did it! A month later his nephew Vishesh called to say they’ve got rights to remake a Columbian film. I needed the money and I really like working for them.
Why did you want to tell the Keeda story?
This was something I was dying to tell because in Bombay where I work from, in Andheri, it’s an area full of filmmaker and film writers. And any café or pub or restaurant you walk into you’ll find people talking about films. Not films they like, but films they want to make. Everyone there is a filmmaker. And I felt nobody had really explored this world of the struggling writers , because this is where the germ is born. And I’ve gone through this also. This is the world I knew.
I believe you dropped out of college on the advise of Pulp Fiction’s co-writer Roger Avary…
I was a very foolish boy. I’ve always done things impulsively. I was studying engineering and getting interested in filmmaking and Internet was still new. People had just started going to cybercafés. I discovered a new use – I started hunting for film scripts. In that process I realised, Roger Avary had a blog then, even before the word blog was born. I just wrote to him and asked him for advise. So he told me ‘don’t have a backup plan. If you want to be a filmmaker you quit everything and do films’. And I actually took that very seriously! I was never in touch with him after that. When my film was screened in LA this April at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles I reconnected with him after 11 years. I never expected a reply. But he did! He came for the screening, he liked it, he said it reminded him of his young days with Quentin Tarantino, because they were also young writers going around like this. He was really kind and took me out for lunch, took me home and showed me his Oscar and it was all a big kick for me. This is a guy I wrote to once, and he was so warm and affectionate! I was really humbled. This is how a great person is.
Cinema that clicks in India is largely the “escape from reality” type. But yours is a real…
Mine is a comedy. And real life is hardly funny. I don’t know…haven’t given much thought to this thing. But I don’t think cinema is this or that. It can be anything. And it just has to connect with people who are watching it. And people can connect with anything – documentary, TV, film. And that is something nobody has been able to find a formula for. Every time we are honest and do something with love, it connects.
