Book Excerpts

The Making of a Cult Film | Bullets Over Bombay EXCERPT

Speaking to the people who made the iconic Satya a landmark film, Uday Bhatia tells the incredible story of how it all came together, how it drew from the gangster and street film traditions, and why it went on to become a modern classic. Read an excerpt:

As a recent resident of Mumbai and a lifelong watcher of Bollywood films, Varma spoke adequate Hindi by the time Satya was made. Still, there were phrases, idioms that eluded him. Sometimes, when the director vetoed a line, the writers would try and sneak it back in, hoping he wouldn’t notice. Varma knew how to read a crowd, though. Kashyap said that because Varma didn’t always understand the humour, he’d get them to read the scene aloud and see how the people around them were reacting.

One bit of writing that emerged from this unique screening process was the ‘Ram-Shyam’ joke. Bheeku, Satya, Yeda and Chander are sitting along with a few other gang members in a room in an under-construction building. Malhotra, the builder whom Kallu Mama had threatened over the phone, has gone to his car to get the money he owes them. While they wait, Chander offers to tell a joke. By the time he’s reached the punchline, Bheeku’s doubled over with laughter. No one notices they’ve been ambushed till a shot is fired.

‘I want some lines to be written for the construction site, just before the gunshot kills one of them,’ Varma told Kashyap on the morning of the shoot. The writer remembered a bawdy joke* a friend had told him and, figuring it might be the sort of thing gangsters enjoyed, mentioned it to Varma, who asked him to narrate it to a small audience – apparently to cloak the fact that he didn’t understand the Hindi punchline. Everyone cracked up, and the director asked Kashyap to get it down on paper.

Varma remembered the day almost identically – minus the language problems. ‘I wasn’t interested in what the lines were,’ he said. ‘I just wanted to divert the audience’s attention, so that when the gunshot comes, it’ll be a shock. Anurag has a habit while narrating, he’ll get very emotional and speak the lines the way the character should speak. When he wrote and narrated it to me, I wasn’t even listening to the lines actually, I was seeing Anurag’s face. My mind was preoccupied with where to put the camera and when the gunshot should come, but I registered that he was enjoying. I thought, more or less this will work.’ He said he only understood the joke later, during the edit.

Through design and luck, planning and instinct, things started to cohere. Frequent rewrites and additions to the script meant the actors could hardly look rehearsed even if they wanted to. They were encouraged to improvise, so they added tics and phrases that seemed right in the moment. The writers weren’t old pros, so they were happy to have their words played around with. The camerapersons worked quickly, determined not to slow the actors down, bottling whatever lightning was on offer. Varma talked to everyone, considered what they said and took what he needed.

Then there was the location shooting. Apart from the realistic visual qualities this lent the film, it also tied in philosophically with everything else that was going on – the natural flow of dialogue, the minimal use of artificial light, the fluid approach to scene-building. As Hooper said: ‘I think the idea of placing realistic characters in realistic scenarios, realistic settings – all of this accumulates in a certain shared aesthetic among everybody.’

‘The only thing I was really conscious about was that we should stay true to what I was hearing from (these) sources,’ Varma said in an interview in 2018. ‘The fact that we took the decision to shoot in real locations made a difference … If we spent a lot of money and made a proper production design and location, I doubt the film would be the same.’ The absence of studio sets must have helped to relax the actors, most of whom were struggling and broke, and therefore lived in places similar to the ones shown in the film. The characters seem to blend into their surroundings, whether it’s Mule, inscrutable, leaning against a blank blue wall, or Satya and Vidya, looking out at the rain from their respective flats, her view open and green, his through the jail-like bars found on the windows in most middle-class Mumbai homes.

‘This film is integrated in the DNA of the city,’ Asrani said. ‘It’s in the construction of the city. It’s locked in there.’

The set didn’t have a lot of visitors. Word on the circuit was Urmila Matondkar had ‘de-glammed’ for the role, and no one was lining up – then, as now – to get a glimpse of Manoj Bajpayee or Chakravarthy. Occasionally, there’d be an infusion of celebrity from outside the unit. One day, Sabir Masani was waiting outside Baba Bungalow in Bandra. He was feeling a bit short-changed – here he was, shooting his first Hindi movie, but where were the stars? Someone walked up to him and asked in a heavy voice, ‘Ramu kidhar hai?’ (Where’s Ramu?). Masani looked up. It was Sanjay Dutt.

 

To read more, order your copy of Uday Bhatia’s Bullets Over Bombay!

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