It’s all coming together at once for Luke Kenny. About 18 months, ago he became programming head of Channel [V]. Yesterday, he followed it up by releasing his first film, 13th Floor, in Mumbai. Kenny reckons that both his loves, music and movies have come together perfectly.

“Music and films have always been in and around me from when I was a kid. It’s one of the reasons I got into the entertainment scene with the hope of one day being able to put together a creative project, whether it was a music album or a film,” says the VJ-turned-filmmaker. His love for films began early when his British grandmother took him for Hindi films when he was barely knee-high.

So given the recent growth in multiplexes and the emergence of the “indie” film, Kenny felt the time was right to get the cameras rolling. “The independent movie movement is probably truly happening in our cinema now. So it’s become fairly easier ? though not easy at all ? for people like us to do smaller but not lesser projects and get our vision across,” he says.

13th Floor, which is directed by Kenny and scripted by partner Devaki Singh, is the story of how two strangers relate to each other when they are thrown together by circumstances. In this case, the lead pair played by Sandhya Mridul and Purab Kohli are stuck in an elevator overnight.

“Look at any big city like Bombay. It’s a city of strangers. But whenever there is a crisis, people reach out and help each other. So this (the film) is just taking that thought and building on it,” says Kenny.

Kenny didn’t really plan on 13th Floor as his first film though. But when he and Singh went scouting for producers, all they got was the “don’t call us, we’ll call you” syndrome. So they decide to scale down their aspirations and write a script that required a smaller investment. Hence, the idea of just two actors and a single location, and of a cheaper format like digital video.

The film was shot in six days last May with friends pooling in with the editing, music and set designs. Of course, there were glitches along the way. Like the fact that they shot in sync sound, which required absolute silence. But they were in a television studio, where sets were always being constructed. Needless to say, they had to dub the entire film.

Kenny has only released 13th Floor in Mumbai for now. “Let’s see how the response is. Then we’ll see if we can take it to other cities,” he says.

The film has, however, already been screened at the TromaFling Independent Film Festival at Edinburgh and the Temecula Film Festival in California. “It got a good response,”says Kenny.

That’s not all though. For 13th Floor has developed into the first part of what Kenny calls the Karma trilogy. The other two films are 13th June and 13th November. The action in 13th Floor incidentally takes place on the night of March 12-13.

Both 13th June and 13th November will take forward the six-degrees-of-separation theme. 13th June is about four people from different walks of life who take a road trip. And the third film will bring together all the characters from the first two to see how they are connected. Kenny hopes to start shooting the second film by the middle of the year.

Why a trilogy and why the fascination with this theme? “Because we’ve all experienced it time and again. So we thought we would take that as a concept and run with it and see how far it takes us,” says Kenny.

But his cinematic vision is not confined to the trilogy. In fact, Kenny has two more scripts ready. One is a psychological thriller while the other has an all-female protagonist line-up.

If he can get a producer, Kenny may even make one of these films first. “My partner and I are looking to work as a writer-director team, to get scripts that we can have creative control over with good characters and good story lines,” he says.

Actually, Kenny recalls churning out story lines even as a child with his first building set and action figures. “I’d construct my own action sequences. So I guess the seeds were there,” he says.

As were his musical seeds. His Irish grandfather, who moved to India from Burma, was a drummer in the big jazz bands of the 1940s and 1950s. His father, Robert ‘Bob’ Kenny, too was a musician and had his own band, The Out Crowd, in Calcutta in the 1960s. In fact, Kenny was born in Calcutta in 1971 but moved to Thane when he was barely three months old.

He grew up on a steady diet of films and music ? even today, barring weekends, he watches a film every night, after feeding his 15 cats that is. The animal lover is also completely vegetarian and doesn’t wear leather products either.

Growing up, Kenny recalls watching all the Amitabh Bachchan and Mithun Chakraborty films. And in 1982, when Michael Jackson hit the world, he began exploring Western music ? and became a big Michael Jackson impersonator too.

“Everybody hates the 1980s but I don’t see why. It was great fun. Those were my halcyon days,” he says.

He also made the most of every opportunity that came his way, even dropping out of college to play the lead in a play. Soon, Arshad Warsi, a choreographer then, spotted him doing his Jackson impersonation and invited him to join his dance troupe. At the same time, Kenny sang with his own band called Greek.

These stints led to a chance to be a DJ. Soon Kenny was playing at all the popular Mumbai nightspots, which is where Channel [V] spotted him. “Any opportunity that would come to be a part of the entertainment field, I’d just give it a shot because you never know what could develop from it,” says Kenny.

In fact, he even did a bit part in Kaizad Gustaad’s Bombay Boys. “I love acting but because of the way I look, everybody kept offering me to come and play an angrez. I don’t want to do that,” he says.

At Channel [V], it’s been a steady climb for Kenny since he began hosting shows such as Vibe and House of Noise. In mid-1999, he began programming genre-based shows. Soon he started giving inputs for structuring the sound across the channel, which led to him becoming the programming head. He still hosts the Luke’s After Hours show on weekend nights.

So what does he think of programming a music channel at a time when they’ve all gone beyond music to reality shows et al? Channel [V] even ventured here first with its Pop Stars, Super Singer and Get Gorgeous shows. Kenny feels that reality shows are reaching a saturation point.. “Going beyond music has its own pitfalls,” he asserts.

Like other channels, music channels, he says, face the challenge of extending “the three-second average attention span into 30 seconds and into three minutes”. But he’s ready to take on that challenge on the small and even on the big screen now.

Photograph by Gajanan Dudhalkar