Television veteran Shashant Shah makes his big screen directorial debut with Dasvidaniya. t2 caught up with the man on the day the Vinay Pathak film released...

What were you doing before this?

I have been associated with TV shows for the last 13-and-a-half years. I have done a lot of non-fiction shows for channels like Zee TV, Channel V, SET Max…. in various capacities… as director, as supervising director, as creative director… I have been involved with shows like BPL Oye, Kahani Poori Filmy Hai and The Great Indian Comedy Show, which I did for three-and-a-half years.

What was wrong with fiction shows?

I didn’t have a directorial background… So, it would have been difficult for me to get into fiction stuff. I am a science graduate and have also done a six-month course in architecture. Non-fiction, you don’t need to have a history. Also, the kind of fiction that was happening around me at that time was a lot of daily soaps. And with due respect to them, the director there changes everyday. That’s unfair in any creative medium. In non-fiction, I could use any style I want and do it my way.

How did Dasvidaniya happen?

Vinay and I go back a long way. We worked together in Channel V and also on The Great Indian Comedy Show. The two of us set up this company called Lemontea Productions. Then Vinay would keep telling me to stop TV work and do something in films. It was then that Arshad Syed, with whom I have worked in Channel V, came up with the subject of Dasvidaniya. He scribbled it on a piece of paper and showed it us. I asked him to go and turn it into a proper bound script. It really felt like the right film to start with.

Was the script written with Vinay Pathak in mind?

Why just Vinay Pathak, almost the entire script was written with the actors in mind. All the people who worked on The Great Indian Comedy Show are there in Dasvidaniya. There’s Vinay, there’s Ranvir (Shorey), there’s Purbi Joshi, there’s Gaurav Gera… Also, I always wanted Saurabh Shukla as the boss, Neha Dhupia as the childhood love and Rajat Kapoor as the friend. I had a feeling that with Vinay’s influence I would be able to get all these people to read the script and they wouldn’t possibly reject such a beautiful script.

Did it never cross your mind that Dasvidaniya is very close to Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru in its content?

To be honest with you, I have not seen Ikiru. I know the story because I have read about it. But this whole thing of a dying man has been tackled in so many films… Anand, Kal Ho Naa Ho, Bucket List… Amar Kaul’s character has to do 10 things before he dies. Of these 10 chapters, four or five may have commonalities with other films. I had asked the writer Arshad and he told me, bahut imaandari se film likhi hai… If the two films were the same, I wouldn’t have shied away from it. I would have tried and bought the rights of the original.

Moving from TV to films, was there a conscious toning down?

I was very clear about what I wanted and I told my crew: “Let’s not show off.” It’s my first film and I am a very simple man. The film doesn’t require the loudness… If it did, I would have been the loudest. The film is a beautiful script and I wanted to keep it that way. It’s an emotional comedy… I remember most of the actors having moist eyes after reading the script. On the sets, I had to control them because having worked together on The Great Indian Comedy Show, they would get carried away some times.

By calling it Dasvidaniya aren’t you alienating a lot of the audiences?

Amar Kaul meets a Russian girl abroad and that is where the title comes from. It means goodbye in Russian. I know, many people think that the title might put off people. But my theory is that tell me a good film which has not worked for a bad title or tell me a bad film which has worked for a good title. Sajid Khan once told me that Mother India released at a time when not a lot of people spoke in English. Dasvidaniya sounds Indian. So the phonetic acceptance is there. Some people get confused with Dus kahaniyaan… I don’t mind that. It’s better than calling it Tata, Bye Bye and making people think it’s a comedy. Or have it called Alvida and make it seem like a serious film.

How do you plan to handle the Goliath in Dostana?

We were scared of coming a week earlier because of Quantum of Solace, Fashion and Golmaal Returns. Dostana is thankfully not a one man’s journey. It uses homosexuality to bring in the house while in actuality nobody is gay in the film. I wish them all the best. I know that my cast — Vinay, Ranvir, Rajat, Saurabh, Neha — has its own audience who identify them with sensible cinema. And I am sure they will check out Dasvidaniya and, once in, they will love the film.

Pratim D. Gupta