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Road, Movie has literally been on the road travelling from one major international festival to another. How has this new experience been?
It’s been a learning experience for me. It’s been fun, through and through. I have grown as a person I would say. My knowledge base is that much broader now when it comes to the making of films, their distribution, film markets around the world, all that.
Were you aware of director Dev Benegal’s work before saying ‘yes’ to Road, Movie?
I had seen Dev’s film Split Wide Open when it had released, in 2002. I, of course, knew that he had made English, August in 1995. I pretty much knew his history when I actually met Dev towards the end of 2007. I liked his work. I liked him after I met him and I wanted to work with him. It was exciting all the more so because I realised how little he has worked in the time that he has been there. And how much of a pioneer he was given the kind of film he made way back in 1995. So I was very excited when he wanted to work with me. I didn’t have the dates at that time because I was doing Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! and Dev D. So I didn’t know where to accommodate him. He said, I will come in after them. That made me even happier. That he was willing to wait. I thanked my lucky stars.
Was it any different from your work experience with Mumbai-based film directors?
It was good. Filmmaking is a process, from set to set, from team to team. It’s almost like starting all over again each time. With Road, Movie I was initially a little tired because I had just done two films back to back. I needed to keep the spontaneity going, I needed the freshness within me. But it needed very little effort because Dev’s such a great guy. He’s got a great sense of humour and he kept the set light... there was not much intensity. Everyone was on the same page and everyone got along really well.
That Ross Katz and Susan B. Landau, the producers of films like Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette, were producing the film, did that have any effect?
Oh yes! Susan was on set with us every day in Rajasthan. She is a wonderful, wonderful woman. She is the driving force behind all of this. There was, of course, a cultural difference in terms of work. She is from Hollywood, we are from Bollywood. So it was really good to see her adjust to the way we work. We are a little more laidback and things get taken care of themselves! She comes from a culture where there is a Plan A, Plan B and Plan C. With us, we never have a Plan B and somehow Plan A manifests later on. So, it was cute to see her get habituated to that. She is a dear friend of mine today.
When the buzz around Road, Movie started, it was quickly dubbed as the new Slumdog Millionaire in terms of its scope. Would you agree with that?
I don’t think so. Slumdog Millionaire is a 15 million dollar project with a big British director behind it and Fox Searchlight backing it. It was a different platform altogether. The figures they can project with that are that much big. We are a much smaller Indo-American film. Anybody who takes us on wouldn’t talk about the film in terms of such figures. It’s really much smaller.
How much of Abhay Deol is there in your character Vishnu?
Vishnu is a guy who drives a truck through the desert and experiences things along the way. It’s about how he changes as a person. He is initially very sheltered but grows up as he is exposed to the real world. I am not as simple as Vishnu... he is a much simpler, very humble human being. But I do share the desire of getting out of the sheltered world and having an adventure of my own. I need to understand the world and stand on my own two feet.
Is it important for you to own every character?
I do infuse my characters with qualities that I can relate to. Lucky of Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! is a very ambitious person. I am not as ambitious as him (laughs). But I do have my own ambitions. I am not, I think, as arrogant as Dev is in Dev D, but I think I have some of the obsessions and frustrations that he feels. There’s always some similarities. That’s what you bring to the character. The rest of it is all part of the story, part of the director’s vision.
Will the international success of Road, Movie have an effect on the choices you make from here on? You have been different in your film selection, anyway...
I want to continue trying my hand at new things. I want to continue raising the bar... pushing the envelope more and more. We have to take baby steps, one step at a time, when it comes to doing the non-formula film, the non-Bollywood film. It’s getting more support now than ever before. The success of my last two films has helped me in my cause and made it slightly easier for me to do these movies. I want to continue with that. If anything, just to be different, I might just do a Bollywood film! Because I don’t do that kind of film as such.
That’s ironical...
(Laughs out loud) Yeah, I know! I am being different now because I am doing a Bollywood movie. I would like to explore and like to grow as an actor. There’s Aisha (with Sonam Kapoor), which should release this year. And I have a film with Hrithik and Farhan, directed by Zoya Akhtar.
It was your idea that Anurag Kashyap adapted and made into Dev D. Do you have any more ideas coming up?
Oh, I have a whole bunch of ideas. I always have two or three treatments ready at any given moment. I would like to develop them soon.
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I a white desert somewhere in Rajasthan, the noisy projector at the back of a 1942 truck beams a silent Buster Keaton comedy on a white cloth. The hardened faces of the villagers, lined with creases, glow in the flickering light of the screen. And then the muscles around the lips relent and everyone starts laughing at images created a century ago seven seas away.
Oh cinema! My cinema!
Dev Benegal’s Road, Movie is a bittersweet — less bitter, more sweet — fable about the timeless — and boundary-less — magic of cinema. Just like in the Giuseppe Tornatore classic Cinema Paradiso, this one too ‘projects’ how a motion picture can make good weary lives.
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There’s more, of course. Like his last movie Split Wide Open, Benegal again explores the water wars in Road, Movie. And in a brilliant scene towards the end, he pits the value of water in today’s times against that of oil. Remember the line in Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers — “When you’re dying of thirst, you can’t take a swig of oil”?
How do water, oil and cinema mix together? Well, Vishnu (Abhay Deol), in a bid to escape inheriting his father’s oil business, volunteers to take the moving cinema lorry across the deserts. His parents slip in crates of the family oil bottles which would later come in handy.
But what’s in store for Vishnu is more than khuli sadak, dhabey ki kadak chai and raat ki thandi hawa. On his journey he would meet a dhaba boy (Mohammed Faisal), a mechanic chacha (Satish Kaushik) and a banjaran girl (Tannishtha Chatterjee). The three hitchhikers and the incidents they tag along would go on to make the iPod-toting nonchalant city boy slightly more worldly-wise.
Despite its witty charm and robust appeal, Road, Movie at the end of its 97-minute duration is very much an arthouse film. Its pacing is laboriously slow, its exposition minimal and there are fleeting moments of magic realism. It also comes with the trappings of the kind of Indian exotica the West so loves. For the Bolly cinegoer a film like Road, Movie is definitely an acquired taste but also a taste of the future.
The dialogues are smart — Benegal’s script was an official selection at the L’Atelier du Cannes in 2006. When Vishnu makes a face after sipping the flat dhaba tea, the boy shoots: “Kya socha tha? Yeh Starbucks hai?” Or, the line of the film: “Yeh chalta phirta cinema home theatre ka baap hai!”
What makes Road, Movie an irresistible visceral experience is the astonishing background score by Michael Brook (Into the Wild), the stunning cinematography of Michel Amathieu (Paris, je t’aime) and the rich production design by Anne Seibel (Munich).
The performances are nice. Abhay is expectedly effortless. Tannishtha shines in her restricted screen time. Faisal the boy is a complete natural. But you go back with Satish Kaushik. There’s so much of history in that face and the kind of rhythm he generates in his body language and speech is so infectious.
If you do catch Road, Movie at a plex near you, spare a thought for the enduring magic of cinema. Sitting in your reclining seat with a tub of popcorn you are watching images of Dev Anand’s Johnny Mera Naam being projected by a travelling cinema which in turn is captured by Dev Benegal’s camera and projected for your eyes only.
Oh Cinema! My Cinema!
