Reality Check for Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu

The effort to dramatise Imran Khan’s hygiene obsession, the trouble with sparse scenes and how director Shakun Batra tried keeping it real

About four years ago, an aspiring director and a hairstylist with “natural instincts of a storyteller” met on the sets of a film full of young people and forged an unlikely alliance. Shortly thereafter, they partnered on a film script, much of which was drawn from their personal experiences. The fact that they didn’t “kill each other during the process of writing” simply means each survivor can tell his or her side of the tale. This is Shakun Batra’s.

For the director of Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu, this is as much his film as co-writer Ayesha Devitre’s, celebrity coiffeuse, his colleague from Jaane Tu… Ya Jaane Na days, and one of the “funniest people” he has ever known. “There was this phase where I had read a few scripts and had met some writers, but it turned out to be such a pointless exercise, really. I realised I didn’t need a professional or technical writer who would be writing just because s/he was getting paid for it, but someone who could do it out of genuine love for writing; somebody who has life. That’s when Ayesha and I, both people with no similarities, decided to give it a shot,” says Batra.

While writing the film, Batra and Devitre frequently found themselves at loggerheads, and the contrast in their personalities only enhanced the character sketches of their lead actors, Imran Khan and Kareena Kapoor. Consider this bit from the trailer: Imran and Kareena are asked if they have had sex. He says ‘no’, she, ‘yes’. “Not with him,” she shrugs, by way of explanation. He says he feels lonely, she says she wants to live alone.

“There are so many jokes between us that made their way into the film,” says Batra, “For instance, one where Imran calls her a hajaam (barber) and she takes offence to it.” Since the script was written keeping Imran in mind, the character of Rahul eventually became a lot like how Imran is in real life—orderly, well-behaved, awkward in the presence of strangers and, above all, dictatorially obsessive with hygiene. “You should see the extent to which he is organised; the remote on his house table is always kept at its place, and the way his toothbrush is kept and things like that make Imran stand out,” says Batra. “We have added dramatic value to some of those traits, tweaked them, you could say to make them more cinematic.”

Kareena, too, in some ways, is representative of herself—the kind of person she is in her private space. She, like Devitre, is a hairstylist in the film, but she mustn’t be viewed as her alter ego, insists Batra. “The energy Kareena has brought to her character is her own. She’s spunky and impulsive and you can see how close this girl is to what she is like in real life. Every piece of line we wrote for her, Kareena has made it sound like hers.”

Comic flourishes aside, Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu is fundamentally about human nature, and Batra, aware that he must create situations and see how his characters react, wanted to keep things simple and real. His focus was to capture emotions, and much of the film’s flavour lies in its dialogue. “To me, it’s always about the characters, their emotions and what they say. I have always enjoyed watching films where characters hold centrestage, and what happens to them is important and worth knowing.” For obvious reasons, Batra is not the sort of director to make an action or a sci-fi flick, and you might see him probe deeper into the depths of human emotion as he goes along.

Trained at Vancouver Film School, Batra’s way of preparing for his own film was by watching screen classics endlessly, and it is through the movies of Billy Wilder, Cameron Crowe, Alexander Payne and especially Woody Allen that he learnt the inner grammar of moviemaking. “I am drawn to the way these directors handle their subject matter. They keep it subtle and never overdramatise a situation. In Cameron Crowe’s book, Conversations With Billy Wilder, there’s a nice line: ‘How would it feel if it happened in real life?’ That was a big lesson. To look at a scene and wonder how it would feel if something like that happened in reality.”

Batra discovered his first wave of Woody Allen cinema at film school, and while his snooty colleagues were impressed by Bergman and Kubrick, Batra instantly knew he had found his voice. “Watching Woody Allen opened my eyes to what cinema can achieve. I said to myself, ‘This is what I have to do and get better at making my films more real and more about life’.”

Batra shot Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu in a little over 75 days and tried to keep the emotion going, “without it getting boring at any point”. The toughest scenes were not the ones involving crowds, as is usually the case. “A crowd scene is easy. It’s physically exhausting, not mentally.” The real challenge was a rather sparse but intimate scene in which Imran and Kareena are lying in bed and talking to each other. “In such a scene, the only recourse you have is the content. The challenge was to get into the soul of the characters.” The climax, which features the coming together of half a dozen characters at dinner, was difficult for its coordination, eye movement and technical detailing. “Keeping the characters involved and justifying their presence was a test,” he says, “To get everybody’s reaction is not easy. In real life, you can keep an eye on everyone, but in a movie, there are limitations in [how] you shoot people. How do you do that without losing out on the energy of the scene?”

A major portion of Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu is shot against the sin-city backdrop of Las Vegas. “There is a plot point in the movie where Imran and Kareena are sloshed and get married; where else would that happen but in Vegas?” Since that part of the US has been recorded in other films like Kites and Anjaana Anjaani, Batra’s hunt for the unexplored Vegas led him to the nearby Boulder City. “Vegas looks very pretty when you see it from a distance, but when you get closer, it becomes plastic and neon. It’s like a Disneyland for adults. We decided to stay away from that and use the Vegas skyline instead.”

He admits he was a nervous wreck throughout the filming. “Mostly, I was running around. There was no time to relax. A few times I went ice skating, and that wasn’t bad. People have this perception that making movies is fun. Come here and see how it is like.”

Ek Main Aur Ekk TuImran KhanShakun Batra