When the budget is small, idea should be bigger than the scale: Apurva Asrani

Manoj Bajpai in a still from Aligarh.

While Aligarh marks Asrani’s debut as a screenwriter, the 37-year-old has been a part of the film industry for nearly two decades. He was 19 when he first met success. Satya, made by a bunch of newcomers, challenged the establishment that was Bollywood and became one the most defining films on Mumbai underworld. He was the film’s editor. That was 1998, the year Asrani should have graduated. Instead, he dropped out of college in pursuit of a career in the film industry. The awards that came his way pacified the enraged parents.

In the years that followed, Asrani was credited as the editor of several movies, including Snip!, which won him a National Award. However, he soon dropped off Bollywood’s map, choosing to live between Mumbai, UK and later, Bangalore, only occasionally flirting with film editing, film writing and theatre. “I had been celebrated beyond what I had expected. While I got the opportunity to be part of interesting, offbeat films such as Snip! and Chhal (his first collaboration with director Hansal Mehta), they didn’t work at the box-office,” he recounts. In an attempt to live up to fame he had earned, Asrani took on projects that he didn’t believe in. “Films such as Om Jai Jagdish and I were like a wrong marriage, which didn’t work. There was some bit of corruption in intent.” He soon left it all in search of a “normal life”.

The distance allowed him perspective and the subjectivity about the fact that his identity and existence aren’t dependent on the film industry. While in the UK, he wrote and directed plays for the Asian diaspora, and also took up courses in screenwriting and acting. He soon found love, moved to Bangalore where he had spent considerable time during his childhood, and took up a nine-to-five job as a writer for a film website. But the Bangalore dream soon began to crash. “The website folded up. Around the same time, my maternal aunt whom I was close to, committed suicide. I was the one to discover her. Suddenly, I found myself questioning everything,” says Asrani. Deliverance came in the form of an email from Mehta, who, much like Asrani, had also given up his career in the film industry. “It was a poster with Rajkummar’s (Rao) silhouette, ‘Shahid: Based on a true story’ written below and my credit as the film’s editor.” In a week, Asrani was back in Mumbai.

The 2013 release of Shahid, based on slain human rights lawyer Shahid Azmi, brought Asrani back into spotlight. And now he hopes that the run will continue with Aligarh. The editor believes that real, gritty subjects are his forte, especially when made on a tight budget. “When the budget is small, the idea needs to be bigger than the scale of the film,” says the editor who asserts the importance of good material and director. “Editing is like rewriting of a film – sometimes, reinterpreting it. And the director has to be self-assured and trust the editor with . Add a dash of instinct and what you have is magic,” says Asrani. While as an editor he may have played storyteller several times, Aligarh will remain special to Asrani as it helped him come out. For him, it looks beyond Siras to talk about how an individual is much more than his sexuality.