The Re-making of Agneepath

An argument with Hrithik Roshan, the monsoon cycle that set up the perfect backdrop for the climax, and other adventures on director Karan Malhotra’s sets

One minute before the appointed time, three Fridays before the release of the promisingly blood-flecked Agneepath, Karan Malhotra calls to ask if it is okay to do the interview now. Over the sounds of  6 pm traffic and noisy gasps of wind when his vehicle moves, Malhotra is polite, patiently hearing out the questions, but he himself speaks in a great hurry, no pause between sentences, a bit like those mutual fund investment disclaimers squashed at the end of beaming TV commercials. In all fairness, though, the debutant director is unexpectedly gracious, apologising for having missed a call earlier, the pause-free sentences being the only giveaway to his “routinely” 20-hour days.

He doesn’t need to be so accommodating. In Agneepath, Malhotra has a film that is pretty much on every ‘most anticipated film’ list, a striking cast of Hrithik Roshan, Sanjay Dutt, Priyanka Chopra and Rishi Kapoor, an unreasonably catchy item song called Chikni Chameli, and a generous and supremely influential producer in Karan Johar. He also has the benefit of remake pedigree: his Agneepath is a reworking of the Mukul Anand-directed Agneepath, which got Amitabh Bachchan his first National Award for acting. When the film released in 1990, it was considered a flop at the box office, but garnered a reputation for being gritty, extravagantly yet interestingly violent, and memorable in its characterisation and lines. The film is now considered a cult classic, much like The Big Lebowski, and closer home, Raj Kapoor’s Mera Naam Joker and Rajkumar Santoshi’s Andaz Apna Apna. As it happens, the original Agneepath was produced by Karan Johar’s father, Yash Johar, and generally considered a trophy film in a career of mostly middling, lacklustre products. For his son, Karan Johar, who speaks often of his father’s “legacy”, this must be something of a prestige project then. It is also, possibly, the only ambitious remake of a Hindi film that didn’t do well in its first outing: Don, Devdas, Sholay were all robust hits.

Karan Malhotra is himself a graduate of the big budget school of filmmaking, having assisted on Farah Khan’s Main Hoon Naa, Ashutosh Gowariker’s Jodhaa Akbar and Karan Johar’s last, My Name is Khan. Still, this is his debut, and he made the debutant’s mistake of fastidiousness. “When Om Puri came on board to play the good cop who advises Vijay (played by Hrithik in his version and Amitabh in the original edition) to give up his life of blood and crime, I started working out his look, police uniform and accessories in elaborate detail. I was insistent especially on a particular model of revolver for the character. My team of ADs (assistant directors) sourced a number of models that were actually quite close to what I had in mind, but I was stuck on this one particular pistol. They took a couple of weeks to find it. On the first day of Puri’s shoot, we had a scene in which he needed to use the revolver, but it just wouldn’t fire. Then, there was nothing to do but shoot with one of the alternatives because film shoots are tightly-planned affairs and actors have a fixed number of days that they can allot a film,” says Malhotra. Now, when he sees the scene, he knows how small a detail that revolver was, and how easily supplanted. “The revolver we used is perfectly fine, I don’t know what had got into my mind.”

The arc from script to reel can be a frustrating affair, especially the first time, and beloved details and virgin conceptions can account for much heartburn and insomnia. Some of these attachments, such as the revolver, are more easily given up than others. But Malhotra was far more possessive of the blueprint he’d drawn up for the crucial scene where Vijay meets his mother after a gap of 10 years. “In the film, Vijay’s mother serves him a meal she’s cooked, and he speaks with her while eating. Overwhelmed by the moment, he chokes as he eats, the food serving as an obvious frame of reference for his emotions. The way I picturised the scene was that Hrithik would break down gradually as he ate, bite by bite, building up to the big moment. But Hrithik broke down on the first bite itself. For me, that was too early. It changed the architecture of the scene. We had a difference of opinion about this. He read the scene differently. As it happened, this was the scene he found the most exhausting to realise—I won’t call it difficult—and we took a whole day to okay it. Eventually, I went along with his version. Of course, he is a great actor, and he’s been deeply invested in the film, shaping the character with his bodily mannerisms. I asked him to change his walk because he’s got a natural swagger, and Vijay Dinanath Chauhan is such a tightly wound-up character. He did this, and it’s superb to see how he became the character,” says Malhotra. “There’s all of this, but it still wasn’t easy to let go of that scene.”

The most exhausting part of the film was the shoot at Diu, where the unit had constructed the village of Mandwah. This took up a substantial part of the 150-day shoot, and wore the cast and crew down. Mandwah is where the central action in the story takes place, the scene of the original injustice and the final, bloody retribution. The terrain was fierce, the temperature touching 48⁰ celsius at one point, and the action sequences punishing. They shot from 7 am to 7 pm every day. “Me and the ADs and a few of us worked four to five hours more to prepare for the next day. I think I left the shooting of the climax till too late in the schedule because the unit looked so spent towards the end. Somehow, they managed to summon surprising reserves of energy,” says Malhotra.

But some help came unbidden. Somewhere around the middle of the shoot, the sky grew grey and surly, the waves raged, and the wind howled.  This was the time Malhotra and unit were shooting that part of the film where the story returns to the village of Mandwah. “We start the film with a happy and colourful Mandwah. But in the second half of the story, the village is taken over by the villain Kancha Cheema, and falls into discord and ruin. The anger and hurt of the village was being mirrored magically by the elements,” he says. Malhotra actually worried that the weather might run out on him, so he did a bit of research. “Actually, Diu was entering the monsoon cycle at the time, and this was perfect for us. We had that angry weather for pretty much the remainder of the shoot. It created great texture.”

The hardest thing for Malhotra was to remain convinced about his script. Once a film is on set, the script is public property and Malhotra found himself listening to a lot of opinions, many of them well-intentioned. But the script, especially when a director has written it himself, is the original vision and worth the faith. “The thing is that I couldn’t do this film without my cast and crew. No director can. But this is my script, my film. A director has to take the crew along with his vision.”

Still, he feels, a film takes final shape only on set. The script is important, critically so, but it doesn’t account for the niggles of real life. “Like my revolver,” says Malhotra, with a short laugh. “But there’s also the happy accident. The moment when a hat falls off by chance, or the monsoon rolls onto your set unbidden.” Moments of unappointed loveliness, unscripted, unformatted, pure and shining.

Pre-premiere is a series in which filmmakers talk of their pre-release jitters

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Sohini Chattopadhyay