Cinema gets booked
Bollywood has always felt the need to be “inspired”. So much so that the industry has time and again stretched the term too far and ended up making blatant copies of Western blockbusters, often without official credits. Of late, however, filmmakers seem to be taking a slight detour and turning to the written word. Vishal Bharadwaj will be adapting Chetan Bhagat’s 2 States for his next film and a well-known production house has already brought the rights of Ashwin Sanghi’s bestseller Chanakya’s Chant.
Chetan’s last brush with the film industry didn’t go too well, resulting in a fracas between him and Vidhu Vinod Chopra over 3 Idiots. To avoid such unpleasantries, it’s crucial for the two parties to come to an understanding, says director Ashutosh Gowariker. “A writer should always demand his right — your negotiating skills need to be good in such cases,” says Gowariker, whose last film Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Se was adapted from Manini Chatterjee’s book Do and Die: The Chittagong Uprising 1930-34. “But thereafter, the novelist should step back. Cinema is a different medium altogether, and it involves working across many departments with different sets of people, unlike writing a novel where the author has complete control of what happens in the story.”
While most authors would hesitate to agree with Gowariker, Sanghi feels it is for the best. “I am currently co-authoring the script of my own novel Chanakya’s Chant for a film, and trust me, it’s no fun scripting your own book; it’s not easy for an author to be comfortable with writing a film’s screenplay. There are too many minor and major details to work with, right from camera angles, lighting to budgets and location. I’d rather do myself justice by leaving the cinematic bit to others,” says the author.
Interestingly, Gowariker’s own blockbuster Jodhaa Akbar is being made into a Broadway musical. “When they asked me to what extent I would like to participate in the process, I told them ‘none at all’. Because I understand that when the medium is different, I need to let go. Tomorrow, if I make a great movie out of a book, the book will always be better. But it’s also vital to understand the novelist so that one can bring out the essence of the book,” says the director, adding that he would love to make a movie on Amish Tripathi’s The Immortals of Meluha.
Seconding him is actor Shahana Goswami, who will be seen in Deepa Mehta’s Winds Of Change, an adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. “You cannot expect to see a book through a film. Even the visuals can be different as long as they are able to bring out the emotional core of the characters and the story they want to tell. And Deepa has managed to do just that,” she says.
Moreover, the nature of the two forms of entertainment needs to have a bearing on the way they are packaged. “Reading a book is a personal activity while watching a movie is a social one. One needs to respect the difference,” says Sanghi.
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