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| Sanjay Suri and Urmila Matondkar in Bas Ek Pal; (below) Jimmy Sheirgill and Juhi Chawla in the film |
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Onir keeps panting into the phone, “Aamar ghoom hochche na, khali bomi korchhi… I don’t know what’s happening to me.” He sounds like he is labour. Perhaps because his new baby Bas Ek Pal is a more complicated delivery than his first born My Brother… Nikhil.
“Yes, I have suddenly realised that now I come with a baggage and it is very unnerving,” admits the former comparative literature graduate from Jadavpur University.
A pause later, he adds, “I read somewhere that after flying a fighter plane, the scariest thing to do is to make a movie! Believe me it’s true.”
What Onir is really scared of is people walking in this Friday onwards for a screening of Bas Ek Pal expecting another My Brother… Nikhil. He points out: “The other day, a Mumbai journo asked me, ‘Why do you make such morbid films?’ Come on, you haven’t even seen my new film!”
Maybe not morbid, but Bas Ek Pal is definitely intense and dark. “It does start off on a happy note but 20 minutes into the film there’s this one incident which changes the lives of the five protagonists forever,” he reveals. “The format is that of a thriller, but more than the discovery of the incident, it is the changing relationships that interest me the most.”
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Onir does not want to pin the “grey” tag to his characters. “The term grey is negative,” he explains. “In my films, people are not heroes. They are very normal people, who have their weaknesses. I do not want to be judgmental towards a character by calling it grey. Like Juhi’s (Chawla) character in the movie may seem negative to audiences but you can actually understand the reason for her actions. And then you start empathising with her, your heart reaches out for her.”
Onir says that he had to work with Juhi after My Brother… Nikhil. “She is such a nice human being, apart from being a very good actor,” he spells out. “Also, I wanted to break her goody-goody image. Actresses like her are never given challenging roles and get locked in the same image over and over again. In Bas Ek Pal, she plays this person who leads a miserable life and hopes to change that with her actions.”
As for Sanjay Suri, unlike Juhi, Onir penned the script with him in mind. “This was the second script I wrote way back in 2002 and when no producer was willing to back the film, Sanjay kept pushing me to finish the screenplay,” recalls the young writer-director.
Interestingly, in Bas Ek Pal too, Sanjay is called Nikhil while Urmila Matondkar’s character is called Anamika, Juhi’s name in My Brother… Nikhil. “I just can’t remember names and numbers,” Onir laughs. “So all my scripts are written with the same character names like Nikhil and Anamika. I have lived with these names for four years now vis-a-vis Bas Ek Pal. Changing them now would have meant letting them down. Also, in the film, Nikhil doesn’t know Anamika’s name and keeps referring to her as ‘anamika’.”
For Anamika, Onir needed “someone glamourous and flamboyant” and who better than Urmila? “It had to be someone who is aware of her sexuality and is also a very powerful performer,” he says. “And Urmila is so good as this woman torn between two men. I have tried to show her in her own space, when she remembers the other guy despite being married to a different man. She even chopped off her hair for the second half of the film; so sweet of her!”
Rebel with a cause
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| Onir |
There is, of course, a rebel somewhere inside the young director. “People ask me why am I casting actresses who are past their prime,” Onir says. “But if you look at Hollywood, actresses get their best roles during this phase of their lives. And Bollywood keeps casting 16-17-year-old bimbettes who just can’t act.”
The other two characters completing the pentagon in the film are Jimmy Sheirgill and Rehaan Engineer (last seen in Everybody Says I’m Fine). “To me the film is about five incredible performances,” Onir declares. “For Bas Ek Pal, I have been inspired by three great film-makers — Akira Kurosawa, Pedro Almodovar and Krzysztof Kieslowski. The concept of one incident changing many lives is inspired from Almodovar’s brand of cinema, the different perspectives to the same incident is from Kurosawa’s Rashomon, and the treatment is like Kieslowski.”
After Bas Ek Pal, Onir may not immediately go into his dream project, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet with Hrithik Roshan in the title role. “I am very disheartened with the box-office failure of Omkara,” he says. “Maybe I would have wanted to have something more in the screenplay which was not there in the original but I would go and watch Omkara any day rather than all the meaningless films made every Friday. So I have decided to make my Hamlet on an international platform. The Indian audiences prefer to watch a film once it does well abroad. Hrithik is very much aware of the project and is keen to do it.”
Up next will be a comedy. “I need to laugh,” he says. “Also, they take me too seriously. I have to do something different as a genre. So, maybe, I will make another ready script of mine called My Brother’s Bride. No, it has nothing to do with my first film and is more in the Bend It Like Beckham mould.”