PARI LEADING MAN PARAMBRATA CHATTOPADHYAY IS SCARED OF GHOSTS BUT DIRECTOR PROSIT ROY IS A HORROR FILM BUFF! THE DUO SHARED THEIR SPOOKY STORIES IN THE T2 OFFICE OVER SOME CUTE, ‘GHASTLY’ CUPCAKES!
Come Friday, they promise to spook us with Pari — starring Anushka Sharma and Parambrata Chattopadhyay in the lead. With first-time director Prosit Roy, Param dropped in at the t2 office on Tuesday to talk about their “atmospheric horror” film, produced by Anushka. The high point of the 50-minute chat? The Pari-themed cupcakes — courtesy Paris Cafe — that they knifed through with glee, in true horror tradition!
Priyanka Roy (Team t2): You’ve managed to scare us even before the film’s come out!
Prosit Roy: Everyone is really scared! (Laughs) I’ve had friends come and tell me, ‘I’m not watching your film, It’s damn scary!’ Which is, I think, an achievement.
Parambrata Chattopadhyay: Watching a horror film trailer, the moment people start saying, ‘Oh, I’m not sure I’m going,’ means that you’ve driven home the point. We all love getting spooked.
Prosit: The whole reaction has been, ‘What are you guys making? How come it’s so different from what we are used to seeing?’
Param: The title can be quite confusing. Pari can mean anything in the world. Because I was doing a film with Anushka Sharma, everyone would keep hounding me, ‘Dude, what’s the film about?’ I would be completely tight-lipped. Now that people have figured out what zone the film is in, I see the level of excitement rising. I have been noticing that everybody has been unanimous that this finally looks like the kind of horror that they would like to watch. This looks like serious, proper, slick horror stuff.
Prosit: Everybody has their own version of the story. ‘Is she (Anushka’s character) a victim of abuse? Is there a double role?’ They all have their own ideas. None of them is correct, though! (Laughs)
Priyanka: Prosit, where did the idea of Pari come from?
Prosit: Abhishek Banerjee, my co-writer, and I are big horror film buffs. We knew that the kind of horror films that we see in India are not the kind that we want to watch. We wrote the script for another production house, but they didn’t want to make a horror film. I was heartbroken and at that time, I was assisting on Phillauri and Karnesh (Sharma, Pari’s producer and Anushka’s brother) asked me to send him the script. One morning, he told me, ‘I finished reading the script, and I couldn’t sleep last night. Let’s make this film!’ We gave the script to Anushka. She got really excited and asked me, ‘Who are you thinking for this boy’s character?’ And I always thought of him (looks at Param).
Param: There was a boy who looked a little bit like me who was there on his mind! (Everyone laughs)
Prosit: Though everybody is saying that the film has Anushka Sharma and Parambrata, they are just two people who look like them! The way they have embraced their characters, they have changed themselves completely.
Param: He gave me a half-hour narration and once I came out, I didn’t know what to say. I said, ‘I need a bit of time to soak it in, because I don’t know whether to call it super scary or super beautiful.’ That’s the fun bit about atmospheric horror. It transcends being only ‘jump scary’, it becomes a wonderful cinematic piece.
Priyanka: The best horror films are the ones where the spook stems out of the innocuous and there’s a lot of that in the Pari trailer. How did you build the atmospherics, especially in the choice of visual palette?
Prosit: In atmospheric horror, it’s all about location, sound, background score… it gradually builds up. And after a point, the fear engulfs you. We wanted to make the film look very gloomy.
Rushati Mukherjee (MA first year student of Jadavpur University): Did any particular film inspire the look and feel of Pari?
Prosit: (Satyajit) Ray… I know, as a Bengali, that’s a very cliched answer!
Rushati: There is one in the Teen Kanya trilogy…
Prosit: Monihara, yes!
Param: I think Ray has some of the finest horror short stories. But once I heard the script and got to know about the visual palette and motifs, it reminded me of the world that Guillermo del Toro creates. They are scary, the films are spooky, but there’s so much more to it. They are very beautiful. If you watch Pan’s Labyrinth or Mama….
Arindam Chatterjee (Team t2): Did you consciously set the film in Calcutta?
Prosit: We are both from Calcutta, we’ve grown up listening to this kind of stories from our mothers and grandmothers. For me, automatically I start thinking in a direction that points towards (pauses) Victoria Memorial! Look at the literature we have here regarding horror… and most of it is atmospheric horror.
Arindam: Do you believe in the supernatural?
Param: Oh ya… you bet we do! I’m not superstitious at all, but I love the fact that I can get scared (smiles). I think believing in the supernatural adds a certain zing to our daily, mundane lives.
Prosit: The fear of the unknown…
Param: The fear of the unknown and that there is another parallel world… something like Stranger Things! That excites me.
Arindam: In life, what scares you?
Param: I can get scared of ghosts (smiles sheepishly). People who are wannabe… and spiders. I am
super-duper arachnophobic!
Prosit: Rats scare me like hell!
Arindam: Did rats and spiders make their way onto the Pari set?
Prosit: Not rats and spiders, but a strange crow. We were shooting in an enclosed set and suddenly this crow came in from somewhere and started crowing continuously!
Arindam: Very Hitchcock! (Everyone laughs)
Priyanka: When you make a film like this, how careful do you have to be that it doesn’t encourage blind belief or superstition?
Prosit: When you make a film you have a certain responsibility. At the same time, you also have to keep in mind that this is entertainment.
Param: This is purely fiction.One should also credit the audience with some intelligence. A major section of the audience will know where to draw the line. If they come in to get scared, they will get scared and we need to have faith in the audience that this will be their only takeaway. Honestly, I don’t think Pari has anything that will inject superstition… it’s beyond that.
Priyanka: The first thing about Pari that leapt at us was Anushka’s steely look in the posters. What’s the story behind that?
Prosit: When we were doing the look test, this was the first picture we took of Anushka and she just had this strange, blank look in her eyes that said a thousand things that one couldn’t decode. That was very spooky and when we saw the pictures, it was Karnesh’s decision that this should be used in the first poster. It also perfectly fitted the colour palette of the film.
Arindam: Param, how was it like working with Anushka and how did that compare with working with Vidya Balan in Kahaani?
Param: They are both very different actors and individuals and I have interacted with them at different stages of my life. From the first day, I found Anushka to be very straight and direct. I find it comfortable working with people like that. To make it really short, it was wonderful (smiles).
Also, I don’t think many people would dare doing something like this at the stage of her career that she is at right now. Once you watch the film, you will know what we are talking about because the trailer just says 0.1 per cent of what the film is about.
I can’t think of anyone else even trying something like this and that just shows the passion for good cinema that both Anushka and Karnesh believe in.
Arindam: Does she workshop a lot or did you guys keep it spontaneous on set?
Param: We workshopped a lot! The role of Arnab (who Param plays) was a little tricky because it was close to me, but then it wasn’t me. We had to differentiate very carefully… ilish maachh theke kaanta ta tule baar korte hoy na? It was almost like that (laughs). I have a lot of nervous energy and I had to get rid of all of that, which wasn’t easy. Anushka and I spent a lot of time together that broke the initial coat of just being courteous and polite and becoming more than that.
Arindam: Param, we know you hosted a party for the Pari gang when they shot here in Calcutta…
Param: Yes! Unfortunately, Anushka had some of her family over, so she couldn’t make it. But the rest of the gang was there. We partied till 3am… and Karnesh, I think, polished off more than half of the pot of mutton cooked! (Laughs)
Priyanka: What was Prosit like as a director?
Param: When you are making your first film, no matter at what age, you are a kid in a toy shop. In his own way, he was quite demanding. He has a sweet, and an apparently benign way of going about it (smiles). It was good fun working with him. By the way, his Hindi is atrocious even after spending 10 years in Bombay! And he has a certain kind of Deshapriya Park swagger. Also, he says ‘probably’ a lot, and that became a catchphrase. Everyone, including Anushka, used to pester me to imitate him doing the ‘probably’ thing! (Laughs)
Rushati: What kind of horror movies do you like more — the spine-chillers of the ’60s and ’70s made by Alfred Hitchcock, Brian de Palma and Roman Polanski, or the innovative directions in which the genre branched off later, such as horror comedy?
Param: I am a big Hitchcock fan… more a fan of his thrillers like North By Northwest. I’m not a big fan of horror comedy, it just doesn’t sit with me.
Rushati: So no Shaun of the Dead for you?
Param: Not really. When you watch something scary, you can watch these films as a kind of antidote, if you know what I mean. A film that spooked me out was the first Paranormal Activity film. I was in London, living in this South Woodford house all by myself. My friend and I went and watched Paranormal Activity and when we came back, the whole thing started dawning on us… that this was really scary shit! (Laughs) He left the next day and I was so scared… that’s when I watched films like Shaun of the Dead to get over that film!
Arindam: You should have watched Home Alone! (Everyone laughs)
Priyanka: Apart from a few, we haven’t really had a pure horror film in India, diluted as they are with romance and melodrama. How do you explain that, given that the same Indian audience queues up to watch pure Holly horror like The Conjuring films?
Param: The general perception is that the Indian audience looks for everything in a film. But post-Netflix, there’s a sizeable audience that can go for a film in a particular genre and not want everything in one film. A large part of the audience has now evolved, though there are many who still look for many elements in one film. The only genuinely scary Indian film for me has been Ram Gopal Varma’s Kaun?, starring Urmila Matondkar and Manoj Bajpayee.
Prosit: I really liked RGV’s Bhoot… it had a certain atmospheric quality up to a point. For the first time, wider shots were used and the background score was really scary.
Param: If an Indian film has got close to being scary, it has to have come from Ram Gopal Varma.
Prosit: There was also a Padmini Kolhapure film called Gehrayee in the ’80s which I really liked. I was seven or eight when I watched it on TV and I was spooked.
Param: Yes, I remember this film… it was more psychological horror and it reminded me of an American film called The Entity.
Arindam: In the Pari trailer, we see a lot of blood, in direct contrast to a Michael Haneke film where if an act of violence happens off screen, you let the audience imagine the horror. Do you feel that when you show blood and gore, it limits the scope of imagination?
Prosit: That’s a kind of treatment, and this is a kind of treatment. Yeah, it limits certain things when you show blood and gore, but it inflicts a different kind of horror when you see it on screen. That’s the kind of horror we are looking at.
Rushati: Horror movies in the West have started to take a political turn, like Get Out. Do you think Indian movies have the writing bandwidth and, more importantly, the freedom and the vision to go down that road?
Param: Don’t get me started on this or I won’t stop! Not just horror films, a lot of popular series are really political. I find Stranger Things political. I find Dark, a German series, very political.
Prosit: The recent American Horror Story has gone to a different level.
Param: At its core, Altered Carbon is very political. You were talking about Haneke… a Benny’s Video or a Funny Games was made around 20 years ago. That’s the kind of stuff you are watching or reading now in newspapers. There are people in the world who are visionaries and Haneke is definitely one of them.
Priyanka: What do you look for when you sign a Bollywood film?
Param: Sensitivity… whether the story being told is sensitive. You have to go by your gut. For me, it’s whether I find the idea at the core sensitive towards humanity and the world.
Arindam: Are you now conscious about the roles you take on post-Pari?
Param: Yes, they shouldn’t be set in desolate places… I might get scared!
Which is your favourite horror film? Tell t2@abp.in
