Ramesh Sippy, the man behind Sholay, will be in Calcutta on Saturday for a masterclass on The Film at Purple Movie Town. Before that, t2 caught up with him about the 1975 film that defines Bollywood.

Sholay has just released in 3D, a move that you challenged in court and lost. Do you think Sholay as a film can ever be tampered with?

The intrinsic value of the product is such that people are going to watch Sholay for the film it is. The 3D aspect is an added value, but Sholay as a film is so strong that it will continue to draw its audience. Sholay was a film far ahead of its time… in its technique, its storytelling…. There was something while making that film that drove me to say: ‘I want to do more than what has been done before’.

The Wild West look and feel was the first for a Hindi film. What were your influences and inspirations?

There was (Akira Kurosawa’s) Seven Samurai. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and all these Sergio Leone films… A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good The Bad and The Ugly… the classic setting, the lazy pace and yet that sense of expectation and danger… the magnificent visuals.

One striking aspect of Sholay is your unflinching attention to detail — from waiting for the exact hour to film the lamp-lighting scene featuring Jaya Bachchan to taking 23 days to film Gabbar Singh’s massacre of the Thakur’s family…

When you make a film and decide not to compromise on anything, then the attention to detail follows automatically. Radha (Jaya) lighting the lamp was an important scene and if it didn’t have that moment of reality and that perfect light, it wouldn’t have been as impactful as it turned out to be.

The scene was a depiction of the silent romance between Amitabhji (Jai) and Jayaji’s characters. This ‘magic hour’ as we call it in cinematic language, the time between twilight and sunset when the sky turns almost dark and yet is photographable, that’s the time we would wait for every day, to shoot that scene. Then the background music from Mr RD Burman came in the form of Jai’s harmonica and added to the whole atmosphere and, of course, one cannot forget the magnetic personality of Amitabh Bachchan and the presence of Jayaji. It’s because of such moments in the film and such attention to detail that almost 40 years later, people are still willing to watch the film in theatres.

Sholay was the first Indian film in which the villain became iconic. While making it, did you have an inkling that Gabbar would become so big?

When the script was written, there was a feeling that yes, Gabbar’s character was quite colourful and would be interesting to watch. But nothing prepared us for the kind of mania that happened after release. During the filming, there were some apprehensions: ‘Oh, he’s a new guy… his voice is so different….’ But I was so confident of Amjad Khan’s casting that I was unfazed.

From sticking to your guns about casting a relatively unknown Amitabh Bachchan to sweeping aside suggestions of dubbing Amjad Khan’s voice, Sholay was a huge risk for you...

It wasn’t a risk… it was my conviction. In my head and heart, I did what I felt was right for the film. Like I felt that Amjad Khan’s voice was his USP… that laughter… you can’t get somebody to dub that laughter.

Did your faith in the film waver at any point?

Even the most confident filmmakers do have their moments of anxiety. In January of the same year, Deewar (the Yash Chopra film starring Amitabh and Shashi Kapoor) had released and for a while, I got the jitters because Sholay didn’t have the kind of emotions that Deewar did… the emotion of a mother and son.... I was worried that it was too western a concept, but then I realised that we were doing something different and we stuck to it. The film didn’t take off as we thought, but then I kept the faith. The reviews were unflattering, but the box office turned around after that and the rest, as they say, is history and Sholay became the film you know it today. The critics who brought it down, apologised a few months later.

Is there anything you wish you had done differently?

That was the toss of the coin during the time when Veeru (Dharmendra) holds Jai’s dead body and tosses the coin away when he realises that his friend had deceived him with a same-sided coin. The film was shot in stereophonic sound and the impact of the sound of the coin was such that people in the hall would look under their seats for the coin. But I felt later that the placement of that sequence wasn’t right at the time because that was the time when Jai was dying. It was a fun and frivolous moment and shouldn’t have been placed in a death sequence.

The film originally had a different ending in which the Thakur smashes Gabbar to death with his spiked sandals, but you had to change it when the Censor Board objected to the violence…

Yes, there are some people who have seen that ending. Under any circumstance, that is the ending I would have liked to keep.

THE SHOLAY MASTERCLASS

Ramesh Sippy started shooting Sholay in 1973. To celebrate 40 years of the making of this classic, Purple Movie Town in Sonarpur is organising a masterclass on the film on Saturday, January 11, that will be chaired by the maker himself. “Sholay is not only entertainment, but also education for every student of cinema and that’s why we are very happy to organise this event,” said Pritimoy Chakraborty, the man behind Purple Movie Town.

Students from SRFTI and various other film institutes are scheduled to attend the masterclass, which is also open to fans of Sholay. If you want to be a part of the Sholay masterclass, call Bishakha Das at 9674165444.

Priyanka Roy

What would you like to ask Ramesh Sippy about Sholay? Tell t2@abp.in