Calcutta girl Bornila Chatterjee, a graduate of Tisch School of Art, New York University, whose second film The Hungry was shortlisted for the Toronto International Film Festival 2017, tells t2 about taking a lesser-known Shakespeare play and giving her own spin to it.

The Hungry is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s relatively less popular Titus Andronicus. Why choose this of all his plays?

It’s true most people have never heard of Titus Andronicus, let alone read it. But that is precisely why we wanted to do our version of it. It is one of Shakespeare’s earliest works — he is believed to have written it at some point in his mid to late twenties. In it, you can see him working on ideas and characters that would recur in some of his later, greater works. Because of its relative obscurity, we felt free to play with the story and the characters in a way that we probably could not have if we were dealing with, say, The Tempest.

Die-hard fans of Titus Andronicus might be disappointed because we took the original premise and just ran with it. From the start, we knew that we wanted to take Shakespearean arch villain Tamora and turn her into our heroine Tulsi. So in our version, she is a single mother and a bride-to-be who is out to avenge the murder of her eldest son.
And yes, Titus Andronicus is probably best known for its goriness. It’s a manic dissection of basic instincts. But there is also poetry and emotional complexity within that mania that Tanaji (Dasgupta, who co-wrote the script) and I wanted to figure out how to translate on screen.

How was it working with Naseeruddin Shah? What made you choose Tisca Chopra?

Tisca plays Tulsi, who is based on Tamora, the villain in the original play. In our version, she is the protagonist. What first attracted me to Tisca was her voice. It’s so soft and elegant. She exudes this loveliness that is the opposite of what I think I would associate with someone harbouring murderous thoughts. So, of course, she had to be our Tulsi!
Working with Naseeruddin Shah was a learning experience and a privilege. From the minute he came on board, he was keen on reading every draft we wrote and was open to brainstorming. During the shoot, we were all living and filming in the Mud Fort together.

One morning, he saw one of the assistant directors teaching a group of junior artistes how to march the way we wanted them to. It was proving to be a lot more difficult than anticipated and so Mr Shah offered to step in and teach them the movement himself, so that the guy could go attend to everything else he had to do that morning. Being around that sort of commitment really brought out the best in everyone in the cast and crew.

Before The Hungry you made the feature film Let’s Be Out, The Sun’s Shining. Share your experience of making them...

The Hungry is my second, but in many ways it is my first. It is the first time I worked with a crew of 100 people. It is the first film I made in India and the first time I made a film with a lot more equipment than just a handheld camera and a couple of lights.

The first film I wrote and directed is Let’s Be Out, The Sun Is Shining. It’s a gritty little love story that I made in Brooklyn with my best friends from film school right after we graduated. We were a tiny crew of 11 recent Tisch graduates and a main cast of eight actors shooting scenes guerrilla-style all over city streets, in the subways, in a tortilla factory in Bushwick, muggy nightclubs in East Village, a mansion in the Hamptons, large apartments, tiny apartments and in even tinier apartments. Making that film was a watershed experience for most of us. Pretty much everyone on the crew, including myself, quit the day jobs we had taken up right out of college and moved on to doing things that lined up a little more comprehensively with what we wanted to make of our lives.

But I had blown all of my savings making that film, so the next three years were spent earning some of that back. During that time I shared some of my writing with Tanaji Dasgupta, who I had done theatre with before leaving Calcutta. Tanaji had begun working as a producer in Calcutta and was helping me develop the script I was writing. In 2013, I left New York and came to India, with the intention of making the film that Tanaji and I were developing. We took the script to the Co-Production Market at Film Bazaar, where we heard of the micro-budget initiative between Cinestaan and Film London, to develop and fund an Indian adaptation of a Shakespeare play to celebrate Shakespeare’s 400th anniversary. There was nothing to lose in applying for the workshop and the deadline was a few months away, so we quickly wrote a first draft; several drafts later, it became The Hungry.

What is your connect with Calcutta?

I was born in Los Angeles in 1986. When I was seven, my family moved to Calcutta. My dad was an engineer and my mom a teacher in a school.

But their professions had little bearing on what they were like at home. My dad was obsessed with painting and ceramics. My mom would direct the children’s function in the para every Durga Puja and Saraswati Puja and those times of the year were my favourite because the house would suddenly be full of friends who were my age. So yeah! Because of my parents, I can’t remember a time when art and performance were not a part of my life. When I was a teenager, I did a lot of plays with The Red Curtain and Seagull and spent all my spare time reading plays at Sumit and Katy’s (Lai Roy), watching foreign films at Seagull or rehearsing/performing at Gyan Manch, Kala Mandir, GD Birla Sabhagar. It was awesome.

Where did you do your schooling and college?

I went to Calcutta International School, college in New York and I got my BFA in Film and Television Production from Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. I was in New York full-time from 2004 to 2013. The first four years were spent in college and it was the best time of my life thus far.

At Tisch, I was surrounded by people studying acting, writing, filmmaking and photography. These were people who loved and were interested in the same things as me. I took a bunch of classes with (NYC-based) Amos Poe (described by The New York Times as a “pioneering Indie filmmaker”) and his approach to screenwriting and films really shaped how I approach films and the process of making them.

The city itself was a huge influence, since it provided a sudden access to way more art, books, films and photography than I ever experienced growing up. PS1, 5 Pointz, The New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Public Library.... I ushered at a theatre so I could watch dance performances for free. The Walter Reade Theater at the Lincoln Center had $6 student tickets to their film retrospectives and I would pretty much spend every day of my holidays there, since I couldn’t afford to come back to India every year.

What’s your next project?

My next project will hopefully be the one that Tanaji and I have been developing for a couple of years now. It’s a love story among a trio of misfits that takes place in a crumbling palace in Calcutta. It’s an Indo-French venture this time. For me, the best thing about international collaborations is that they make you work with people with completely different perspectives, worldviews and work ethics. It makes the process feel quite fresh, because you are constantly learning and adapting, while trying to create your own shared language.

It’s easier to make films now, in that pretty much everyone has access to the minimum technology required, via their smartphones and laptops. However, access to funding and distribution is still elusive.

Anasuya Basu