‘Cinema Is Not Mathematics’

Anurag Kashyap

We all have this need to understand everything. But for me, everything that I never understood has stayed with me. And I keep deciphering it, finding meaning in it. Every time I’ve understood something, it’s kind of over for me. Almost like the relationship between a man and a woman . . .

On No Smoking being a state of mind

I say that No Smoking is a state of mind because I was in a certain state of mind when I wrote the film. It had a lot of subconscious borrowing from things happening around and to me. I describe it as a ‘man’s descent into morality’. When I was writing the film there was an option of making the central character, K, a sympathetic figure, a nice man your heart goes out to, good to his wife, family and so on. But there was also the option to make him a man no one likes - arrogant, selfish, narcissistic, self obsessed - who does not care about anything or anyone around him.

Does a man like that have the right to say and do what he wants? Because we often allow good men some mistakes, but if he’s not a good guy everyone judges him. So I thought, let’s make him an arrogant man, a man no one wants to be, or be with, and start from there. When this man shows a sign of weakness for the first time - you don’t know why he’s vulnerable when his wife leaves him, whether it’s his love for her or his ego, but it’s a sign, and for the first time he gives in, and gets himself into the trap and his feelings for his brother, his family all start surfacing and pulling him down. He starts living not for himself but for others, to fit in to society, to feel secure and safe. That’s why I call it man’s descent into morality.

I have always been perceived as an arrogant asshole in the industry. That’s how they describe me.

We love to talk, we Indians. This was originally said by Amartya Sen. If you’re not always expressing what you feel towards others, people feel insecure around you. If you don’t verbally express how much you care for them, they don’t feel cared for, if you don’t tell them how much you love them they don’t feel loved. Society wants everything in black and white. So I say it’s a state of mind, which reflects in the film - in the architecture of the film, the colour tones. The house and everything - if you see the way it’s shot, it’s always in black and white. If you see it from a distance, it’s smoggy, almost grey; the blacks and whites merge into each other. And when the man steps into the underworld, it’s the colour of shit. You step into shit and then you get drawn into it.

On space and architecture in his films

I like exploring space. In Black Friday, for example, through the chase sequence you also see a way of life, of the people, where the terrorists came from. You see people living on the pipelines, and when they’re walking, it’s so slippery they have to hold on - that’s a way of life. In the script, there was no chase sequence written in, just various arrest scenes. After shooting the third arrest scene, I felt it was getting too repetitive. However different the situations they were arrested in, eventually it was a man getting caught. We needed to show what the police went through trying to pick these guys up, how these guys ran away from the law.

We needed to show a way of life and we needed to show the geography of the place where they came from. We decided we could do all that through one chase sequence. It was almost like six people catching a rat in a room, but what if that room was Dharavi? What if it was a maze like Dharavi and you see how they eat and live. And we decided to let the camera be free. Other than the key characters, everyone else’s was a natural reaction to the chase, because we’d go in there, do it once, and leave. At one point they actually caught hold of the guy who was running and he had to escape them rather than escape the actor playing the cop! And then they started following him on the side, and I let the camera be for some time while they followed him.

My father would call me up, more troubled than I that my films were not releasing, and he would say ‘beta ek love story banaa de. Sub theek ho jayega.’

In No Smoking, when you see where K lives, you also see the kind of relationship he has with his wife. There’s no warmth. Even though the place looks expensive, it’s cold. The whole descent of K - you see a man who’s on high ground, and when he goes down, when he lets go of his stable being and starts falling into that pit, it’s both physical and architectural. The intention was to show a descent that was complicated. You don’t know where the stairs are coming from or going to. Every time he tries to climb up the woman says not there, neechey. Go down. We wanted to show a man falling into a deeper hell hole, just by bringing in that element, where every time he tries to climb up he is sent back down. And you never see his exit - you see him entering Prayogshala, but never leaving it.

All the Prayogshala designs were done by Wasik Khan, the production designer. My contribution to the design was only the description of how this man goes down a maze of stairs. I also said that the images of Prayogshala were the Holocaust images, because I had written it while watching Schindler’s List, and I wanted to use the real images of the Holocaust as well.

On the symbolism of the characters

I saw a lot of myself in K, and also a lot of how I was perceived by others. This duality is there in the film. Duality is a conscious motif throughout - the glass and the reflection, you see that throughout the film.

I don’t ever use theory while making a film or writing a script. Cinema is not mathematics. You need theory, but only to analyse your script after writing it, or to understand your film after making it.

Baba Bangali is a throwback to the dictatorial or guru figures who have a cult following, who tell people what to do and how to live; and their followers obey them blindly, they don’t question. This kind of a person thrives on people who don’t have minds of their own, and because of these followers it becomes a movement of sorts. Which is why, when you see the world of Baba Bangali you see three definite kinds of people. You see these women outside before K enters who are extremely poor; when he enters you see the women in wheels - to me they represent the minorities; you see dwarfs - to me they represent the underprivileged people. You see the henchmen, to me they represent religious fanatics. Baba Bangali is not a Hindu or Muslim, he is that omnipresent figure who thrives on people’s lack of education and poverty. He uses them, and he uses their power to be powerful. He says that the whole idea of democracy exists up there on earth, and K has come below that. I wanted to put across that we have come to that level, where the idea of democracy is lost. We don’t know our rights, don’t fight for them, just follow people blindly.

On the ‘star’ John Abraham

I respect John Abraham a lot. He’s a fantastic human being and a very intelligent man. Look at the choices that he makes. He chose to do films like Water, Kabul Express. Those are the kinds of films he watches. He was the first actor who five minutes after reading the script, said I want to do it, and I don’t want you to change anything about it. He took his own time to understand the film and he was the only one who understood the film when I was making it. It takes courage for an actor, who is the sexual icon in the country and has such a macho image, to play a character who’s an asshole. Most actors would say, what is this, he’s such a bad human being, make him better, I don’t like him. They don’t understand that you don’t necessarily have to like a character. They all want to be loved. Actors want some sort of sympathy, some sort of justification, and in the end which is his scene, where he explains why he’s like that? John Abraham doesn’t ask these things. I did not have to sell this film to John Abraham.

On his next film

We are probably the country with the most songs about self pity. Which is also why the novel which Saratchandra said was his worst, Devdas, is his most celebrated. The film I’m doing next is on Devdas. I’m making this film called Dev.D. I’m using Devdas, a novel I really do not like, because Devdas is applicable in our country. We love feeling sorry for ourselves, pitying ourselves. I wanted to make a film on the youngsters of today, the 21 year olds, how they look at sex, relationships, commitment, the world around them. I thought, what better way to tell a story like that than by using Devdas, just using the characters and not the novel. In it Chandramukhi tells Devdas, you’re such a slut. And Devdas cannot understand how a man can be a slut; in our country it’s not a term used for men. In the end he goes and tells Chandramukhi, you’re so right, I’m such a slut.

But I can’t see beyond two years. I know what I’m doing now, I know what I’m doing after this. I’m constantly toying with ideas of things I want to do. There’s no set oneline message I want to give out through a film. I’m reacting to things - sometimes it’s like holding a mirror, sometimes wanting to say something. When I make a film, I’m on a high. I’m literally dancing on the sets.

When I get a good shot I kiss everybody. The moment I’m happy about a shot my cameraman disappears because he knows I’m going to kiss him!

On his creative process

I trust my instincts a lot. I write in a flow, very stream of consciousness. I write all my scripts in two to three days. But before those two or three days arrive there’s a lot of reading. I do an exercise with all my team members, where we all read the same kind of books or comics or watch similar kinds of films, and get into that frame of mind. A few days before the shoot I bring everyone together and we all watch lots of films. I pick and choose those films, and I know what kind of an impact they will have. And then I let things flow freely. I don’t do my shot divisions. I like the camera to breathe, I like everybody to breathe. I choose my locations very carefully, I do my casting very carefully. As for the necessary impact scenes, I design them totally. It becomes a very obsessive two three months, when I’m with the film. I’m living, breathing, eating that film. We stay together, the whole crew becomes one large family. Somehow everyone, the cameraman, the art director, by the fifth or sixth day they’re thinking the same way. The assistants will go out and figure out props without me asking them. We all discover the space, keep our eyes and ears open, if something is extraordinarily cinematic but not part of the script, we go and capture it anyway. So the film also starts opening up, it breathes, it goes beyond the script.

I have a very strong photographic memory, so I remember everything I shoot. I keep editing in my head. I know exactly what it’s going to look like. And I try to get the natural moments, so often I shoot the rehearsals without the actors knowing. In Black Friday, in many of the long distance shots, the actor didn’t even know where the camera was. Actors have a tendency to perform for the camera, and they don’t stay in the moment. Black Friday was shot with hidden cameras. We didn’t want people to be conscious, nor did we have the budget for so many junior artistes. So I thought, we’ll shoot with our actors in between the ‘real’ people.

I don’t let the editor on the set. One person has to stay completely objective because I’m completely subjective. So the editor stays out. He goes through every single shot and all the footage. The first cut is always the editor’s. Then I sit down and make my own version of it. We experiment a lot. It’s like constantly rewriting a film. My films don’t get locked till everything gets locked on the last day. What remains the same is what I call the mood of the film, the impact we desire, what we want the audience watching it to go through. We maintain that.

I love the process of making a film. It is straight from my state of mind. Conversations I have had find their way into the script. If I had my way I would always be on my set or doing post production.

The prints that we took of No Smoking have an entire shot between him evaporating in the end and him waking up. I took it out at the last moment. It is of him and his wife, the bodies which have left the Prayogshala, and they’re driving back. And suddenly there’s a truck that comes out of nowhere and bashes into them and drags them on the road. And his fingers are there on the wheel. And in the next shot, he wakes up and goes and sees his fingers are missing. It was kind of becoming multiple climaxes, so I took that out. This was on the last day, just before the print was about to come out.

On the influence of Kafka and others

Kafka is definitely an influence on me, partly because The Trial was the first piece of literature in English that I ever read. Till I was 19, I spoke in Hindi and read only Hindi literature. A friend I was staying with became an editor with Rupa and Co. and he gave me Trial. I started reading Kafka and Jude the Obscure and Camus before I read Sidney Sheldon and Jeffrey Archer! I wrote a play when I was 20 and after the first performance Mr Govind Nihalani called me and he gave me these books. I remember it so clearly. He gave me Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, The Just and Kafka’s Trial. He told me, I’m doing this series of films for television and I want you to adapt these; I saw your play and I think you can do it. He told me to begin with Kafka. I had tried to read Trial and left it halfway because I couldn’t figure it out. So again I picked it up; and because of it I went into a shell for quite some time. I felt, I can’t write. And I started reading a lot.

The whole Kafka-esque situation of not knowing what is happening around one, or why, is there in No Smoking. We chose to call the character K so that half the things were explained. The audience immediately thinks of Kafka and is already prepared for the film. The character of K drew a lot from me, from Catcher in the Rye - these were all subconscious sources from which I drew.

Many of the influences in the film are subconscious. Though my journey started with De Sica, you can’t see De Sica in any of my films. But it led me to other filmmakers. There’s a huge influence of Fritz Lang, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. I have chased his films as far as Switzerland, and now I have almost all of them. He has played a very important role in my life, as has Martin Scorsese. That whole sense of loneliness in a city finds its way into all my films. That’s the kind of relationship I too find with the city. It was there in Paanch, it was there in that chunk of Black Friday where Badshah Khan is just floating through the country, the whole longing that he has to connect.

There are lots of problems that have no solutions. If there were solutions it would be boring to live. The magic is in the fighting, not once the fight is over.