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| DIRECTOR’S CUT |
| Lost and found: Name of a 1995 documentary he made on a young street vendor Jaadugar: Directed the gloomy music video of this Indi-Pop song by Silk Route Chocolate Vanilla: Wanted to film a London love story between a teenage Muslim girl and a white cockney boy. |
Someone once said that a lie never lives to be old. In the case of Kaizad Gustad, it survived less than a week. And, when the truth finally came tumbling out, the writer-director of Bombay Boys and Boom founded himself in a Mumbai railway police lock-up.
If lying is high art, Gustad and his aides came close to winning an Oscar last week. After assistant director Nadia Khan was fatally hit by a train while shooting for the film, Mumbai Central, in Mahalaxmi railway station, neither the doctors who attended to her, nor the police were told the truth.
Even Khan’s London-based parents were told that she was struck by a speeding car. “First Gustad said she had been hit by a car. Then, he said, she had been run over by a truck. And before leaving, he casually mentioned that she had been hit by a train,” Ruby Rizvi, the victim’s elder sister who lives in London told The Telegraph. For the 36-year-old film director, truth was a variable changing according to the need of the moment. No wonder, he has been christened The Liar King.
Gustad would never have made a George Washington. Dance instructor Salome Roy Kapur alleges that Kaizad promised her Rs 1 lakh to teach Amitabh Bachchan and Padma Lakshmi to tango for Boom and never paid up.
A former colleague alleges that while shooting in Dubai, he collected 21 mobile phones from crew members and auctioned them off to raise money for his personal use. And it is said that he was so offensive towards debutante Katrina Kaif that an outraged assistant director hit him.
The absence of a moral core appears to be Gustad’s trademark. He is someone keen to change the rules of the game — and then play it his own way. It didn’t concern him that he had permission to shoot only on the sparingly used Mahalaxmi yard, and not in the heavy-density track where the accident took place. He went ahead with the shooting — and then tried to pin the blame on the victim.
It now transpires that Gustad’s life is based on a long list of half-truths. The film-director has claimed that he went to a New York film school on a full scholarship and completed a four-year degree programme there. Now, an associate says that all he did was use the school’s studio facilities. “He used its equipment until the authorities realised that he was not an enrolled student,” he alleges.
But, clearly, the stint — unofficial or otherwise — at the film school didn’t help much. His last film, Boom, a whacky gangster flick where the fashionworld collided with the underworld, was riddled with inanities. “Just don’t bring your mother (to the theatre),” said Gustad, before the film’s release. Turned out that most mothers stayed away. So did the fathers, the wives, the children and the girlfriends. In trade circles, Boom is now jokingly referred to as Doom.
Nobody really knew that a filmmaker lurked within the Bohemian young man when he first made his literary appearance in India in 1998.
It appeared as if he emerged from nowhere, waving a collection of short stories, Of No Fixed Address, and dandy dreadlocks that have since disappeared. For the next few weeks, he had found a fixed address: the newspaper columns. Few first-time authors hire public relation firms to promote themselves. Gustad did — a practically unheard of feat then. But his stories were dismissed by one critic as “pop philosophic puerility of the Gibran crossed with gibberish, Dylan with drivel variety.”
But his own life, reeled out in ultra-cool racounterish smartspeak, impressed most interviewers. It transpired he was born in Mumbai but grew up as a third-generation Iranian, in Vadi, northern Karnataka, where his family owned a movie theatre. “I spent the whole day in my father’s cinema hall watching Seventies’ films,” he once said. Not surprisingly, he was packed off to St Paul’s School in Darjeeling.
The family later moved to Mumbai, fell into bad times and migrated to Australia. At 18, as wanderlust consumed him, he left home. Gustad claims he worked as “an exotic dancer in Sydney, a drug peddler in New York, a wine critic and a tramp”. It is not in Mumbai that he was locked up for the first time. “I have been in a slammer in Tahiti for a bar brawl over a girl,” he says. Gustad was a headline hunter all right.
The headlines came with Bombay Boys — his debut feature film for which he “begged, borrowed, stole, mortgaged and creditcarded” himself up to the ears. Irreverent, experimental and funny in a manic way — the tale of three youths of Indian origin, each in search of something, pushed the envelope in new, urban cinema and was a surprise 1998 box-office hit.
Someone who had earlier claimed to have slept with women to get a roof above his head (the things that penury can make you do!) now had a trophy girlfriend in former Miss World Diana Hayden.
Like many things in Gustad’s life, Hayden wasn’t there for long. In January, he married Alexandra Ritt, an American who had not seen any of his films. The honeymoon, he said, lasted only three days because he was already working on Mumbai Central.
The film, where the life of two Mumbai couples is played out in the backdrop of local trains, could have got him back on the success track. But a conviction in the Nadia Khan cover-up case could earn him a 10-year prison sentence.
Sometimes — Kaizad Gustad should know — lies metastasise into millstones.