Filmmakers tend to look at big pictures; Sujoy Ghosh wants to think small. After being widely feted (and criticised, too) for his short film Ahalya, he has begun work on its sequel, another mini-film.
Ahalya, for those not familiar with online films, is a 13-minute Bengali film about a beautiful young woman married to an old man, their strange collection of figurines and a young police officer.
Ghosh says he has already started writing the script of Ahalya II. "Many people are curious about the figurines - what they are doing, what they are thinking of and so on," Ghosh says with a smile.
The second film, which will be 14 minutes long, will have the same star cast (Radhika Apte, Soumitra Chatterjee and Tota Roy Chowdhury) and start from the point where the first one ended - with someone pressing a doorbell.
"I finished writing Ahalya in three weeks flat. But this time it's not that easy as I have to build on a different storyline. There is nothing left of the epic," he says, referring to the mythological Ahalya, married to the sage, the much older Gautama, which provided the subtext to the film.
He faced some flak for Ahalya - with a section of viewers accusing him of plagiarising the story from one of Satyajit Ray's Shonku tales and from a Roald Dahl work. Ghosh is reluctant to speak about this, for he fears that people will misunderstand him. But he adds that he has heard "at least a thousand allegations" that he'd copied the story for the film from 13 stories and films.
"Before anything or anyone else, the Ramayana was written, and there was the Greek goddess, Medusa. So by that logic Satyajit Ray and Dahl were plagiarists. Can't people across generations and ages have similar thoughts," he asks.
We move on to another subject. Short films and online releases, one thought, were the platforms for budding talents, and not for established directors. Isn't Ghosh, the National Award-winning director of Kahaani, going backward in time?
"I feel there's more challenge in doing a short film. You have to adapt to a completely different kind of discipline. My ultimate window is a mobile phone, and I have to ensure there is the same entertainment value there as on the big screen," Ghosh says, taking a deep drag from a cigarette.
But it will take a while before we see the short film since he is busy with his first production TE3N, with Amitabh Bachchan in the lead. The film is a thriller in the garb of a human drama, with Bachchan playing a fourth generation Christian living in Calcutta.
Produced by Ghosh's company Cinemaa, it will see Ribhu Dasgupta debuting as director. "The biggest challenge of being creative is to let others be creative. I will try hard not to poke my nose into and interfere with the nuances. This will be an acid test for the brakes within me, to see whether I am fit to continue as a producer," he says.
Vidya Balan stars in the film, and that leads to a question about a so-called spat between Ghosh and his Kahaani heroine. The two stopped talking to each other when Balan, citing ill health, opted out of Durga Rani Singh, a film that Ghosh had written with her in mind. The movie was stalled, leading to a financial loss.
Media reports say that the two bumped into each other in a coffee shop in Mumbai recently and patched up. Balan has spoken about it, but Ghosh's lips are sealed.
"No, no, no, I won't utter a word, ask Vidya. I read in the newspapers that she has said she did not talk to me for one-and-a-half years. She should know best why," he says.
But he admits that it was "juvenile" on his part to carry on a feud. "My biggest flaw is that when I get close to someone and things don't work according to my expectations, I get angry with them and I keep quiet. What we did was extremely stupid and both of us should be punished for wasting so much time when we could have done so much work," he rues.
Now that they have made up, will work begin on Durga Rani Singh, the story of an urban working mother, set in Calcutta?
"Wait, it's been only a few days since we made up. Like Kahaani, it's another mother of a story. So let's see," is all that he'll say.
Ironically, projects don't seem to move smoothly for this maverick director. Films either get stuck midway, or are deferred. Ghosh wrote Badla with Bachchan in the lead, but put it on the back burner because he was not happy with the way the script had turned out.
Kahaani 2 is yet to see the light of day. Likewise, a film produced by Balaji, based on Keigo Higashino's The Devotion of Suspect X, starring Saif Ali Khan and Aishwarya Rai, is still to take off.
Ghosh had also bought the rights of Saradindu Bandyopadhyay's novel Tungabhadrar Tirey, but the project has been deferred because the movie is a period piece which demands a big budget.
"I really don't know why this happens to me all the time. I guess that's life - sob kichhu chailei paoa jai na (you don't always get what you want). But I will do these films, I won't abandon any," he stresses.
It's difficult not to get swayed by the 49-year-old director. He is sitting in his Beltala Road office in south Calcutta, smoking one cigarette after another. But in a pair of three-quarter jeans and a white striped shirt with three buttons open, showing quite a bit of his bare chest, Ghosh looks like a college-goer.
He reveals that he is a lover of fast food, of books and of Hindi songs - in that order. He doesn't open up before his wife so as not to say anything that may land him in trouble (she is a practising counsellor). Clearly, he has a wicked sense of humour.
His critics describe him as an eccentric and whimsical man who often bites off more than he can chew. "I have got the grit of my mother who was a doctor and the anger of my father who drove a taxi in Calcutta for a living," he says. "They got married despite stiff opposition," he adds.
Ghosh, who calls himself a "mamma's boy", lived in Calcutta before moving to Britain with her when he was 13. He went on to study computer sciences at the University of Manchester, but returned to India in 1993 and took up a position in the wire service, Reuters, in Mumbai.
Always fond of writing, he started penning the script for Jhankaar Beats - and then finally quit his job. He decided that this was a film he had to direct.
"My mum and wife saw it as wishful thinking - it was like wanting to go to the moon. But I gave myself a deadline and decided it was now or never," he recollects.
There is, he believes, a rebel in him - quite like his mother. Like her, he too eloped and got married when he was a young teen. He has two children - son Agni, 20, and daughter Diya, 22, a microbiologist - and worries about whether he can take care of his family's needs because of the erratic nature of his work.
Life, indeed, has not been an easy ride for him. Even though Jhankaar Beats (2003) did well, Home Delivery (2005) and Aladin (2009) bombed. Finally, Kahaani in 2012 brought him success.
Three years later, Ghosh came to discover, and exploit, a new film distribution medium called YouTube - and was happy to find that it freed him from the demands of big budgets and distribution channels.
"We all know films like Ahalya give creative satisfaction, but you can't live off Ahalya," he says. So to keep the kitchen running, he writes scripts and shoots ad films - a commercial for Tata Salt is to be aired soon. "I have two kids, a wife and mother to look after (his father died in 2005), so I don't have the luxury to sit back and mourn. I am always ready to ask for work but people need to give it to me too," he says.
Does he regret falling behind in the race with his contemporaries Shoojit Sircar, Anurag Basu and Dibakar Banerjee? "They all are far ahead of me and that's great, I have no problem with that," he replies.
So who is his personal favourite among the three? "Shoojit is much more honest in his work; much more in sync with the world. I find his work a little more appealing and identifiable than what Dibakar and Anurag do," he says, adding that Sircar's Piku is a film he would have loved to make. And who he would have cast? "Vidya, of course, if she talked to me," he breaks into a laugh.
Ghosh's hands are full, but his brain keeps buzzing with ideas. He has one dream - and that's to make a film with Shah Rukh Khan. "It's not for nothing that he is a superstar. He is a tremendous actor and I would love to work with him," he says excitedly. Well, now that he's working with Bachchan, can SRK be far behind?
