It’s a great honor to be here. It’s my first time, not just in São Paulo, not just in Brazil. It’s my first time in South America. So I don’t know where to start. Hearing everybody talk, mine is a very selfish little story, of my own little struggle.
I guess you all know Bollywood. And Bollywood is this film industry where we make more films than Hollywood does, where in India, there’s almost no literature, there’s a lot of cinema, and we make more than thousand films a year. And we don’t make documentaries, we don’t make anything. We only make fiction, entertainment, love stories, songs and dance.
And I was born in a very small town, which had no cinema theater, and I never thought that I would want to be part of the films or cinema. I was studying to be a scientist, I was studying Zoology, I was studying with honors. And there was a time when I was 18, 19, I was not interested in anything because of the girl that I broke up with. She had left me.
And there was a film festival and I went and saw a lot of films. And I had never seen cinema like that. It opened up my eyes completely, and I for the first time realized cinema is not just love stories and songs and dance. It can be much more. And that’s what I wanted to do. And my family was very unhappy about my choice. I come from a family of engineers and mathematicians. So they said: “Why do you want to go and do cinema?”, because it was an industry back twenty years ago controlled by film families. It was almost like few families controlled the whole industry and they decided what cinema was going to be.
And I was an 18-year-old confused, a complete impressionable boy who one day was a communist, next day would become a capitalist, it depended on who was the one talking to me. So — and I just knew that I wanted to do something with cinema, and I also wanted to be an actor, I also wanted to be a writer, I wanted to be everything. So like happens at the age of 18.
And I left home. I went to Bombay and that was the time where we did not write scripts before making films. And I had these ideas and I was — I would read books that people in the film industry would not read, and I was influenced by people that were considered suicidal because they would not make enough money if you made films, so why then you would make films that wouldn’t make enough money.
To make my space at that young age and industry was very difficult. And slowly what happened was that whole lot of idealism, when you go with that for one year, two years, you slowly realize that you need to survive, you need to eat food, you need to find a place to live. And slowly you give way to — I started doing television, and I forgot why I wanted to make films.
And then, something happened to me out of the blue: My dad came looking for me to Mumbai. I had left home. I’d run away from Mumbai, I had not seen my father. And he got worried and then came looking for me. And my father had this very strange philosophy in life: he never saved anything for the children. In India, in Hindi you say: [Hindi] it means that: “why do you need to save money? If your son is a good son, he’ll make his own. If he’s not, he’ll blow it all away”. So — and he was quite a stubborn man. And he said that: you came here to do something and now everybody at my small town that I come from looks at me and say — laughs at me and smiles at me. So he was such a prodigal child and see what he’s doing. He wants to make cinema. And now you are doing television and you are embarrassing yourself and you are embarrassing me. So at least try to do what you came here to do.
And I went on a journey and I got corrupted by a person — there’s a man I met and we made a film together called Satya, my film as a writer at the age of 22, which became a seminal film of last decade in India. It was my first film as a writer, it had everything about the film was wrong in the sense that, it was about everything you are not supposed to do with cinema. It had no stars, it had a kind of a remote love story, but it was real. It was not shot in studios, it was shot in actual locations. Locations which was slums. It was almost like the, say ‘Pixote’ of India. Or say “The City of God” of India. It was a film that was real, with newcomers and the film that changed a lot of things. And in the process of doing that film over two years when no one believed in the success of that film, kind of corrupted me. I suddenly — I remembered all those things, from which — that domination with which I had gone to Bombay.
And, I don’t know how much of what I say make sense to you because, in the context of Indian cinema where everything is about superstars and box offices and stars are really larger than life. It’s like religion in India, cinema. There’s a journey that started and I decided that I really wanted to make films. The two kinds of films that existed, one was the mainstream commercial film, that just made a lot of money made you happy, and the other kind of artistic cinema which was meant to go to the festivals and never released on screens and only came on television.
And I didn’t feel that I fit in anywhere. I didn’t feel I could fit in anywhere and we had our own independent minds and we were young and we wanted to do things nobody wanted us to do.
And after a lot of manipulations and things I realized that okay, I want to make a film and that I wanted to make a statement. I was young, I was arrogant. I wanted to make a statement, I wanted to make a film without anybody, without any superstars, in my own way, and we got, we manipulated, we got the money, we made the film. It was a film that everybody liked very much. And I felt that I had made my statement and the government of India banned the film.
So that was the start of another kind of journey. That’s when I realized that I was naive. And people allowed me to do things at that time because I felt, because they didn’t feel threatened by me. It was, annoyingly I was doing those things. I just wanted to be in a position to keep doing things. I didn’t care whether I was getting any money or not, I was getting any kind of credit for it or not. And people found it very easy to deal with me. So they gave me a lot of space to do things. And because of that, this film that I made, it got banned, I got even more angrier. I was like: here is my statement and nobody is allowing me to show it on screens, and my fight went on with the censor board, that’s when I was realizing that okay, even though we live in a democracy, we can’t really say everything. And I almost felt abused, by — you know, why can’t I say what I feel? It doesn’t have to sometimes make sense. I don’t really – so what, if cinema does not always have a social message, if something doesn’t have a social message, they thought it should not be – in the Indian constitution. In the Indian constitution, cinema is defined as healthy entertainment. And my film was banned on the ground, it’s neither healthy nor entertaining.
So, that’s what I was fighting against and then this film happened: Black Friday. Black Friday came when nobody wanted to do it, because in India we have never made films about real situation using real names. We fictionalize everything. And here was this film about an actual case, which used names of people which or who are alive, and I made this film. And nobody understood how can this be called cinema. The question that was raised was what is it? Are you making a documentary or is it a film? If it’s not a documentary, and if it is a film, then why is it using real names? And if it is a film, why it does not have songs?
So, it was difficult for me to explain those things. The court put a stay order in the movie, and the film got pirated. The film did not release and got pirated. It spread the world over and a lot of people saw the film. And I started do a third film that got stopped midway, a fourth film that got shelved two days before the shooting was supposed to be. It was a seven year long traumatic period, where I was trying to figure out where do I stand, because every time I would take the film out of India, they would think that I am too — I have music, I am maybe more Bollywood and not more European, not more universal. And when I went back home, they said that I was too European, I was not too Bollywood.
So it was a confusing period, not knowing where I stood. And that was the time when, by chance, a judge, a supreme court judge saw the film in Dubai, on a pirated disk. And he was surprised of which film is this. They say it’s a film from your country. So why is it not releasing? He said this film should come out. And he came back to India and he actually — the case was reopened and the film was passed and finally released in 2007. So, seven years without release, struggling. In that seven years it was a period where I was confused. I almost — I became an alcoholic. I was — my marriage broke up. I didn’t know how to deal with anything around me.
And the film came out. And in spite of the film coming out, because by then everybody had seen it, it did not work at the box office. Everybody loved the film, but it did not work at the box office because everybody had their own pirated DVDs.
So then about my years of confusion, I made another film. That film nobody understood because it just didn’t fit into the way anybody thought about cinema. And there’s a lot more we wanted to do. And I didn’t see myself as somebody who wanted to make a certain kind of an art — art cinema which only — for me there was an independent thought. And I felt an independent thought from an independent mind. And today it could be something and tomorrow it could be something else. It doesn’t have to be bracketed into one definition. And that was very difficult for us to explain.
One good thing that happened by then was a lot of public funds and corporate studios came into the industry. It really became an industry. It was not family-run business. But they also hired people from within those family-run business. So the good side was that we had multiplexes and studios. The bad side was that it was still being run by the same people. And until and unless any of the things that I was doing, not made money for them, they were not going to allow me to make films. And I got incredible reviews, people loved the films, but I was not being allowed to make films and that’s when Slumdog Millionaire happened.
And Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle came to India. He saw Black Friday, he was happy. He made Slumdog Millionaire and he talked about Black Friday and how it inspired Slumdog. And he’s a man who actually put me out there. Can we have the footage from Black Friday, please?
[Video Clip]
This was a film about the bomb blast that happened in Bombay. And there was this one chase sequence in Black Friday, which Danny Boyle’s opening sequence of Slumdog paid tribute to when he talked about it. And how it always happens in India is because people from outside India gave credit to someone, suddenly within India they allowed me to make films because credit was given to me by somebody from outside who won an academy award and people talked about it.
And then, in spite of that credit that allowed us to make films, also came conditions. So on one side we had all the money and all the support to make films but they also were telling me what films to make. So that went on for some time and within that fight what we did was we started borrowing money, we started going digital. I discovered the internet. I did not know anything about the internet. And I discovered the internet and there was a discussion going on the internet about what kind of film I am doing and I started participating in that discussion, and those people invited me to start blogging about it. And suddenly I found an outlet where I started just letting out everything. I started letting out everything, my angst against the system, about the industry, everyone, and that blog, which was called “Passion for Cinema”, it doesn’t exist anymore, but all those — if you go search for it, you might find articles. That blog became a kind of a rage and I suddenly realized I’m not alone. I just connected with a lot of Indian filmmakers, engineers, doctors, people not belonging to film families.
And within a year that blog had become a movement. And I was writing every day. The industry on one side started, they could not stand me because I was saying things that so far were not being said. Nobody dared to say those things. Suddenly the whole myth and aura of film stars was gone because there was an insider who was saying everything. And as almost like the whistleblower from the industry, and with which a lot of people started connecting together, a lot of young people they started coming over, working for free, and we started making films. At the lowest cost films. And it became a kind of a thing where we start — our film started representing India in various festivals from Venice to Cannes. The only film that went to Cannes or Venice, Toronto everywhere, all made at extremely low cost, with the support of lot of people who started collecting together.
We formed an office. We didn’t have enough money to pay anyone, but the youth, the young people refused to leave the office, so we made a kitchen. So anybody wanted to sleep, they could sleep in the office and get food, but we had no salary to pay anyone. And suddenly a workforce just went twice the size of any big studio in Bombay, and people who were working with us were being offered highest amount of salaries and they would not leave. And they would work for free in this office. We started making short films, and all this has happened in the last three years.
We started making short films which would go out, win awards. And the fundings that started coming our way, suddenly from outside people telling us: “do what you want to make”. We started doing international co-productions. And our whole office is running even today, we have zero money in our bank account. We still make breakeven films, we don’t lose money, but we have three international co-productions, three films in production, two films that were already released this year, and two ready films. And one which is directed by Michael Winterbottom, Trishna which we are the co-producer, and it’s all done in a way, with a lot of faith, from a lot of people with the kind of work we have been doing. We don’t fit into mainstream, we don’t fit into art house, but it’s in a very organic way, it’s just been going on and on, and I don’t know, it might just snowball into something bigger but till now it’s still a breakeven structure but we have the freedom to do whatever you want to do. And we are doing all kinds of films and we are not answering to anyone.
And at the time, TEDx invited me, also they have put together a bunch of my films, they are showing here sometime. But it’s been a very intense journey, it’s been 19 years, but suddenly the last three years – suddenly it feels like the earlier 16 years did not exist. And it’s just that we don’t have that kind of time anymore and we are constantly making films. And we have a shoot that’s starting in Sri Lanka and we don’t have money today. But the unit has left and people have gone on their own and the shooting is going to start. There’s another shooting that starts on the 5th of October in Bombay, and Pune and money has just got approved and while I was sitting here, I got a message, “We are sitting and drinking, where are you, we are missing you?”
So that’s how we are doing things, and in the last three years we have not just been breaking even at the box office, we have also been — our team has been winning awards all over, the popular awards of the country, and it’s been a great journey.
