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Interview with Ashvin Kumar

Happy Independence Day to all my fellow Indians! I have a very special post for this very special day. What better way to celebrate India’s 60th year of Independence than with an exclusive interview with the man who brought independence to Indian Cinema.

Writer, Director, Producer and a true auteur, Ashvin Kumar took the world by surprise when he earned an Oscar nomination for his 2004 short-film ‘Little Terrorist’. He then went onto pick up over 15 awards and honours in over a hundred film-festivals around the world. His continuing pursuit to achieve high standards of filmmaking in India has led him to his upcoming debut feature-length film ‘The Forest’. Set for a release date in September 2007, ‘The Forest’ is a spine-chilling story of a man-eating leopard set in the Indian jungles of Kumaon and Corbett National Park. The film, inspired by Ashvin’s fascination with the tales of Jim Corbett and his own journeys through these jungles, is a big-budget thriller featuring the use of state-of-the-art special effects with real leopards, footage of the Royal Bengal Tiger captured for the first time on Super 35 widescreen format by The Bedi Brothers and a bone-chilling soundtrack by Matt Robertson and the 40-piece London Metropolitan Orchestra.

I had the pleasure of having a chat with Ashvin last week over the phone. Over the hour-long conversation, Ashvin had some very insightful things to say about his films, film schools, Bollywood and the future of Indian Cinema.

Ashvin, you’re upcoming film ‘The Forest‘ is a big-budget feature film. How was the experience working on this film after doing an independently financed short like ‘Little Terrorist’?

Well, one had a lot of resources that one could use as I make my films with a combination crew of international and Indian crew-members, so just organizing the resources and making sure that you have great cameras to work with and things like that came in. Of course, the production time is much longer and it doesn’t get any easier and the pressures are much more. It was a very ambitious first film frankly. Especially with an animal-thriller movie, it involved a significant amount of visual effects because we later discovered that we couldn’t film the animals in India, so we had to film them in Thailand. So to pull off a sequence like that, one has to use special effects and we managed to do a good job actually of the whole thing. Even though it is a big-budget movie by Indian standards, it is such a tiny budget movie internationally that we’re trying to make. There’s never enough money unfortunately (laughs).

Going back in time, what inspired you to drop out from London Film School? How did this move benefit you?

I discovered at some point in my life that I was very much a ‘do it’ sort of character and I like to learn by making mistakes, or try not to make mistakes rather. All the filmmaking that I’ve learnt was very much driving my own learning curve, so the London Film School was a break for me in terms of the fact that I’ve never actually worked on celluloid film. I had actually shot a couple of ads on film but the DP did everything and I didn’t really know what it was all about. And I was making a transition from a business background into filmmaking as a career, so I needed the London Film School to inject me directly into this field and frankly I knew nothing about films when I joined. The knowledge that I had was very peripheral and I was quite disappointed that the school itself wasn’t a good place. They teach you what you need to know in the first two semesters and then they just keep repeating the same lessons in longer versions in later semesters and your masterpiece at the end of the two years is going to be a fifteen-minute short. So I said well let me take the rest of the money that I’m going to put in my film school and put it in my next short-film. And then they have all these politics as to who’s going to write, who’s going to direct and who’s going to be the sound designer and of course nobody wants to hold the boom pole and everybody wants to direct, so I thought I’ll just go and make my own movie.

So instead of making a relationship movie somewhere in a studio-apartment somewhere in London, I decided to make a road movie in Ladakh which was a gruelling experience. It just shows that ignorance makes you do silly things but there is an amount of dedication that you require. Filmmaking is one of the hardest professions in the world, there’s no question about that. You have a lot of desperate situations and you should be able to get them all together and use them to compliment each other.

So do you recommend aspiring filmmakers to go for a more hands-on approach as opposed to attending film school?

Yes! I would say that would be my recommendation. That’s what I’ve done. It’s an unusual way of going about it but it is absolutely effective. And today’s technology allows you to have that, at a low amount of investment you can have your own laptop or workstation, you can have a digital camera and it’s possible to do a lot of experimentation on a short-film format. You really don’t need to go to a film school to learn how to tell stories. Most of the time, learning how to write a script can be learnt from reading a few good books or watching a few good films and then learning from them. And we have fabulous resources today in extended versions of films and dvds where you’ve got ‘behind the scenes’ and ‘the making of’. I constantly see what other directors are doing and how they go about designing their shots or how they make a decision to set a particular scene in a particular place. So if one has an investigative bend, then going to a film school for me, is a complete waste of time. You’re better off spending the money on making your own portfolio pieces and then maybe even a short-film.

How do you interact with your crew as a director? And how did it change from ‘Road to Ladakh’ to ‘Little Terrorist’ to ‘The Forest‘?

For me it is very important that the crew shares the common language of cinema. I shouldn’t have to explain my aesthetics and my sensitivities. The biggest difference that I find between me and the people in Bombay (Bollywood) is the fact that they don’t understand me and I can’t understand them. That is not a right situation for a good creative environment because rather than spending time bouncing ideas off each other, you’re spending time explaining the ideas to each other. Co-incidentally, what happened with me was because I had to make these films on such a low budget, I had to make everybody work for free, so only the most dedicated people actually showed up. As far as crews on my films are concerned, they are all on a learning curve. It’s better to grab someone early in their learning curve and then learn with them. Make them part of your core team. When you have an experienced professional, there’s always an adjustment period that takes place. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s just much better to grow with somebody. So, I’m constantly on the lookout and despite people coming in and going out, I’ve managed to retain a similar number of people. But are they the best people in their department? Maybe not, but they are the best people for me.

The way I deal with my crew is that basically I expect everyone to be creative in their own fields. I don’t impose; I create a sort of a paddock or a little area of operation for them. For instance, with the designer for ‘The Forest’, I told him I want the house to go back to the turn-of-the-century. Now how he does it, what colours he uses, what props he uses, what elements he uses are his own. I mean, if I hire a guy then I expect him to throw things at me which are his own original ideas that I should be able to mould. But once I’ve given him the brief, then he should be able to get on with it. That’s the kind of crew-member that I’m interested in.

I say the same thing to my actors. I am going to make the movie together with you so please entertain me. I tell my actors that if I want them to walk two steps and turn around, then I don’t want you here, that’s not my job. My job is to sit there and watch the performance; if you can entertain me, you can entertain the audience. I want you to make me cry, make me laugh, make me do whatever and in a slightly different direction in each take. That allows me to have a choice on the editing table. You actually have all the nuances that you only see once you start putting all the shots together on the editing table. I’m an actor myself, so I understand the process and I encourage actors to improvise and really take risks and do crazy things.

The same goes for cinematography and for sound design also. And when it comes to composing the music, the amount of manipulation that you can do in terms of lifting a mood or delaying a certain moment is amazing. And we were working with a 40-piece orchestra. It’s an emotional journey that the audience takes with you. So I say ‘can we have more suspense here’ or ‘can we have more aggression here’ and we speak in such kinds of story terms.

So we have a very interactive process where I expect the various departments to give me their ideas. Instead, if everyone is just obeying my instructions and following my orders then that’s not moviemaking for me.

Apart from the role of the director, you’ve also taken up the roles of the writer, producer and editor. How do you meet the requirements of these four very different profiles?

Well, writer-director is what I am, producer is what I’m forced to be (which I would not do at all if I could help it) and editor is how I got into filmmaking. The next project is set in Kashmir, it’s going to be a big film and I think for the first time, I’m going to be working with an editor. Because I think that is one thing that breaks the back. After a long schedule of shooting, it’s the last thing you want. After 14-18 hours of shooting on ‘The Forest’, coming and sitting down to watch assemblies was just not possible. So, on the next film, we’re going to do it properly with an editor. And also after the end of the shoot, I want to see a first cut. It maybe two, three or five hours long, but I want to see a final assembly cut with some sound effects and some amount of temporary music. So I’m going to go about it in a more traditional way now.

So producer is something that I hate being, writer-director is what I am and editor is something that I want someone else to be.

You’ve constantly stated Abbas Kiarostami to be among your favourites. Considering the fact that Iran and India have so much in common with regards to the culture and the people, then why do you think India doesn’t have its Kiarostami?

I’m sure we have a Kiarostami sitting around somewhere! I think the Bombay industry is not really a film industry. Due to some quirk of circumstances, after the sixties, they seem to have stopped making films. They started making pageants! And these stage-shows became our films. For me, in the last 4-5 years, these first glimmers of proper filmmaking started coming out from Bombay. Sadly, places like Hyderabad and Chennai haven’t taken up the challenge of making alternative films. Either of those two places could easily be like how New York is to Hollywood, the centre for independent cinema. But I don’t know why that hasn’t happened. Filmmakers, especially from Bombay are not a sophisticated bunch of people, they really dumb down their audience. A few years ago no one would’ve thought that Indians would take to coffee and today you can’t go to a city without seeing people at coffee bars like Café Coffee Day and Barista. Well the audience is there and they’re ready to accept! I mean even films like ‘Khosla ka Ghosla’ and ‘Bheja Fry’ are now doing very well and the audience is desperate to see Indians interacting in realistic situations.

I don’t know who would’ve been the Kiarostami of India but I’d imagine people like Vidhu Vinod Chopra could’ve gone down that road. There could’ve been more meaningful, artistic cinema but it just didn’t happen! You even had the arthouse cinema movement in India, when the time was right for people like Shyam Benegal. I find that many directors who were making films that came out during this time, with a few notable exceptions were very self-absorbed and created a scene where art cinema had to be non-commercial or it wasn’t art! Arthouse doesn’t necessarily mean non-commercial. I mean, Satyajit Ray after all couldn’t have made over 35 films if he didn’t cater to an audience, no matter how niche and fragmented that may have been. Ray’s producer didn’t mint money but he must have made enough to finance the next film.

That’s why we don’t have an Abbas Kiarostami. You must know what kind of limitations that man has to work under in his country. He has to make films about children because they wouldn’t allow him to make films about adults. And look at all the wonderful films that he has made! I think creativity has to be met with limitation and only then it will really be creative. So if you can’t make films about adults, then make a film about children and convey adult issues through them. And that’s the challenge! So if the arthouse filmmakers are not going to take up such a challenge then you surely can’t expect the commercial filmmakers to do so! Unless, what’s happening now is that the box office is showing a clear preference, at least this year for non-starry films. It’s been a total upset of age-old Bollywood formulas! This year all the smaller independent films are the ones that have been making the money. Now that’s a wake-up call. Sadly, the initiative hasn’t been taken by our filmmakers, it’s been taken by the audiences. And whenever that sort of situation occurs, it takes a long time for things to come around.

How do you think a film like ‘The Forest‘ will change Indian Cinema?

You’ll be surprised to hear me say this but I hope ‘The Forest’ makes a lot of money! I think it’ll somehow show everyone that it is possible to make a movie on a 2 million dollar budget and make it so that an audience can really appreciate it. And this will be the same audience that will go to watch Shah-Rukh Khan, Preity Zinta and that lot.

This is the reason I made a thriller as a debut, just to demonstrate that it is possible to make a film of a certain quality, which will be able to run commercially and be successful in India. If I succeed, then I think it will change the way films are financed in India. The new parallel-cinema movement that started with films like ‘Page 3′ and ‘Khosla ka Ghosla’ have done well at the box office. With the same concepts, it is possible to make high-quality films that will sell internationally.

Do you think that a film’s quality and inspirational factor should be judged by its financial success more that its aesthetic appeal?

No, not really. I don’t think like that at all! One has to be very clear. Films are made primarily for an audience and it’s up to you to find your audience. Like David Lynch for example, or ever Abbas Kiarostami. Both these men, like Satyajit Ray, have managed to find their audience that was giving them enough money to make their next film. So the commerce is very important and also the commerce is not important! It depends on how you want to look at it. The point is that if you have success within your genre of filmmaking, that success is in someway measured by the number of people who come to see your film. Unfortunately, in our age it is dependent on marketing and other such peripheral methods that actually have nothing to do with the content in the film. In India, they expect you to recover the budget of your film in the first two weeks of its release whereas internationally they are more lenient. They can wait five weeks, ten weeks or longer! That’s why you see different kinds of film being made. If you know you can recover your budget in 12-15 weeks, you would focus less on the film’s marketing and rely more on word-of-mouth. Distributors these days are not willing to take that risk.

So I think it is wrong to say that the artistic appeal of the film should be judged by the number of people who see it and it is equally incorrect to say that the other way around for arthouse films. I mean if no one’s going to come and watch your masterpiece then there’s really no point! You are making movies for yourself. The balance has to be there and I try very hard to achieve it and make sure that it’s not a loss-making venture for the investors.

One final question; what is next on your agenda?

Well, a bunch of things. I’m making an urban trilogy set in Delhi, Bangalore and probably one set in Calcutta. The ideas for Delhi and Bangalore have been frozen upon already. Delhi is going to be a movie about young people losing their track in life but they don’t feel they’ve lost it, they just feel like they’re celebrating. So it’s about crime and sex and drugs and all those things which make it an urban film. Bangalore is more about short-cuts, just a slice-of-life kind of film with inter-weaving stories.

But the one that I’m working on immediately, the one that I finished writing is about Islam and Kashmir basically. It’s about terrorism, and it’s about Sufi Islam, radical Islam and fundamentalism but it’s actually an action-adventure. It’s a very entertaining film which is based on the westerns of John Wayne and Sergio Leone. So we’re using those western genres to explore these themes and the tragedy of Kashmir really. Then I’m working on a travel documentary that I did 8-9 years ago, starting from Trivandrum and ending up in New Delhi. I shot footage of three and a half months just travelling. That’s a movie basically about globalization and my own observations of my country. So it is like going into the past, digging out this footage and making a real connection.

Thank you Ashvin! It’s been more than a pleasure having this wonderful conversation with you. I wish you all the best for your continuing efforts to elevate Indian Cinema to global standards.

Ashvin’s debut feature film ‘The Forest’ will be released next month. You can view the trailer here.