The Art of Telling 20 Stories

Akira Kurosawa told him a filmmaker should have at least 20 stories to tell. The year was 1987 and Sudhir Mishra was one of the 20 directors from all over the world who were at the Second International Tokyo Film Festival. He had just made his first film, Yeh Woh Manzil To Nahin, and among those in attendance was a young Aki Kaurismäki and Oliver Stone. They were part of a Young Cinema Competition. Mishra said, “Kurosawa told us, ‘If you’re a director, you should tell your own story, and often, if a producer doesn’t like your story, you should have a second, third or fourth story ready.’ Then he looked at me and said your director Satyajit Ray wrote Ghare Baire first and made it almost last. We were the generation of hero worshippers of Kurosawa, so I’ve always had scripts or at least ideas ready.” There’s another great man, Bernardo Bertolucci, he said, who told him that a film director is one who can get money to get a film made. “After that, we’ll figure if he is good or bad,” he added. Bertolucci was in Mumbai to scout for locations for Little Buddha (1993) and he had a 15-minute meeting with him, Mishra’s late wife Renu Saluja, and a couple of friends, which lasted for six hours. It ended with them going to dinner at Mumbai’s popular seafood restaurant Trishna and playing a cinema quiz. “The industry is a graveyard of scripts, many of which have been resuscitated. The trick is to stay afloat. Sometimes you work on material that is not yours, sometimes you do, but you do it with the same dedication,” says Mishra. Now is a good time for him. He has directed the soon-to-be-released movie Afwaah, starring Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Bhumi Pednekar; mentored the makers of SonyLIV’s forthcoming series Jehanabad; and is making another show for SonyLIV called Summer of ’77: Children of Freedom. He’s been enabling other filmmakers unofficially for a long time, he says, now he just gets paid for it. What about his scripts like Mehrunissa and Nawab, the Nautch Girl and the John Company? The latter will finally get made as a show in January 2024, as perhaps the first series that looks at the East India Company’s takeover of India from the Indian point of view. “It’s about time we told our own story as opposed to someone coming from outside and telling us how we were scr****. Everytime someone writes me off, I come back,” he says. Indeed, and much of it, he says, is thanks to his former assistants and long-time friends, such as Nikkhil Advani and Anubhav Sinha, who have now adopted him.

Sarah’s Lehenga

After Sarah Jessica Parker’s (SJP) Falguni and Shane Peacock lehenga in And Just Like That which she insisted was a sari, there has been much excitement over Jennifer Aniston wearing Manish Malhotra’s lehenga choli in Netflix’s forthcoming Murder Mystery 2, which is set in a lavish wedding on an island. And since no one does lavish weddings better than Indians, it is said to be that of a maharaja, played, ironically, by British actor of Pakistani-Kenyan origin, Adeel Akhtar, who was in the first movie as well. But again, the Netflix film was shot in Hawaii rather than India, just like the Apple TV+ series, Shantaram. But with a cash incentive of up to 30 per cent with a cap of $26,000 for audio-visual co-production and shooting of foreign films in India and an additional bonus of $65,000 for employing 15 per cent of manpower in India from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, the idea is to make India a hub for all Asian productions, like Dubai.

Scene and Heard

Remember Gormint, the Amazon Prime web series announced as early as 2016 by AIB for Prime Video? What was meant to be a satire on the ways our politicians govern ended up being the last thing Irrfan Khan shot before he announced he was suffering from cancer. He had shot half of it, and when he was briefly in remission, he filmed Angrezi Medium, his last film. Many things changed—AIB was dissolved, Manav Kaul was cast in place of Irrfan and, from all accounts, the series was completed in 2020 but it is yet to be streamed. Perhaps it is a little too hot to handle for a streaming platform that was scalded by its attempt at a modern political thriller, Tandav?

About The Author

Kaveree Bamzai

Kaveree Bamzai is an author and a contributing writer with Open

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