Mirzya director Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra: Bhaag Milkha Bhaag was a movie on partition, not a biopic
Director Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra on Rang De Basanti, his upcoming film Mirzya, on censorship and the factual inaccuracies of Bhaag Milkha Bhaag.
We caught up with Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra ahead of the release of his upcoming film Mirzya, which stars Harshvardhan Kapoor and Saiyami Kher in the lead roles. This is the second part of Mehra's conversation with IndiaToday.in. (You can read the first part here.)
One of your more successful films, Rang De Basanti, recently completed a decade. Given the Censor-stance right now, do you think a Rang De Basanti would see the light of the day today?
100 percent. What makes you think it wouldn't? I think it is a very immediate reaction to things. And it is unfortunate to name just one person. He/she is not the law of the land, there is a recourse committee for everything, you can go to the revising committee and even the Supreme Court. At best, you could just delay the film's release. In fact, I was a part of this committee with Shyam Benegal, Kamal Hasaan, Piyush Mishra, Goutam Ghosh and I, we studied all the rating systems from all over the world, we did this for over five months. And we came up with a bunch of recommendations which could become the constitution for censorship in India. There CANNOT be censorship. Period.
We came up with a ratings system of 12+ and 16+, and the debate is not just about freedom of expression, it is also about the freedom of consuming content. The first line of our recommendations was that a Censor Board cannot be a pair of scissors. Abolish the scissors. Being an 18-year-old, if I can vote to elect the Prime Minister, then I have the brains to choose my own films too.
At the same time, the censor board plays a very important role where the impressionable, vulnerable young kids cannot be subjected to everything a filmmaker wants to show. There is violence, there is sex, that the children need to be protected from. But does that mean you can't have nudity in a film? What is this backdoor with showing gyrating pelvic moves and asking their films to be rated 'Universal'? And then you want a 10-year-old to learn that and perform it at his annual function? What is going on? Now, we submitted our report in May and it will be heard in this parliamentary session. Let's not make this a tamasha; it's more important than that.
In your last film Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, there were some factual inaccuracies that were pointed out. Was that a case of oversight? In an age where information is so easily available, how much creative license is permissible and how do you decide on it? Especially on the life of someone like Milkha Singh which is so well-documented?
Before the film, I must've spoken to Milkha Singh for thousands of hours on my dictaphone. I only saw him cry twice. One was when he was talking about the partition and how his family was massacred, and another was when he was talking about the 1960 Rome Olympics, where he lost. In those five days, I wrote the first scene of the film that he's getting ready for the Rome Olympics, and he's running as one of the favourites. Then we dramatised it, when his coach shouts 'Bhaag Milkha', which was basically what his father told him when he was 12 years old, that was my creative interpretation that he looks back and sees his past demons. Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, more than a biopic, was a movie on the hatred of partition, the hatred Mikha Singh had to live with. I was trying to heal those wounds more than trying to make a biopic. When Milkha Singh saw the film, he broke down, he held my hand and said "Yeh tune kya kar diya? Mere andar jo itni nafrat thi woh pighal gayi!" (Son! What have you done? All that bitterness inside me has melted!) - which I thought was my big achievement after the film. If the man himself has lost the bitterness after the movie, imagine what happened to the millions scarred by partition on both sides. I was using Milkha Singh as a device to tell the story of lost childhoods during partition.
Some people thought that there was an attempt to justify his loss in the race. So the question again is how far do you take your dramatic license?
It's a valid question. And it's all been done after a lot of thought, it's not like we woke up one day and shot the sequence. I never thought I was justifying his loss in the film. In his autobiography, he talks about a recurring nightmare he had where his feet are not moving. So he basically is seeing this massacre happening but his feet refuse to move. As a story-teller, I linked these nightmares to the days of partition which were knowingly or unknowingly always there inside his head. The loss in Rome was a technical error, but then I wasn't making a film on athletics. It was about the spirit.
You have this style of always filming spectacular visuals. Will we ever see Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra make a procedural drama of two men sitting in a room and talking?
What I discovered about myself after Aks (his debut) was that the most important element of a movie were its visuals. For me, movies are not just about the intellectual stimulation, but also about the experience. There are masters like Alfred Hitchcock who have made movies entirely inside one room and yet held your attention. Me? I don't know if I'm capable of something like that, the films I visualise are just much more than that. But that's just my preference. So the folklore we shot in Leh (for Mirzya) is completely silent. I think visually, we tell the entire love story of Mirza-Sahiban without a single word being uttered. It's just visuals. Maybe I can attempt a short film one day, within the confines of a room.
You've mainly worked with Binod Pradhan before this. For Mirzya, you're working with Polish cinematographer Pavel Dyllus for the first time. Why the change in DOP?
I felt I needed a fresh pair of eyes, because the grammar was different. So I began exploring and came across Pavel's film which was a lovely, little Polish film. The entire movie was set in a room and I fell in love with the way he used that contained space. And somewhere, I also felt a connect, which is hard to explain. So we Skyped, and spoke for a couple of hours about life; nothing about the film. I spoke about Krzysztof Kieslowski and his influence. We chatted about the great director and it turned out he was Kieslowski's pupil. We just hit it off right there. The attempt was to make an un-Bollywood film. The attempt was world cinema. It felt like the right thing, Pavel entering the scheme of things.
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