The Hindu Business Line : RGV: The Remake

Why UP, does he really know the State intimately? His answer is classic RGV: “I don’t know anything about the politics of power (his backdrop in Sarkar Raj), nor does the audience. I make movies to create drama: isn’t that the primary purpose of cinema?”

S. Subramanium

Filmi factory: Ram Gopal Varma

Shubhra Gupta

Some people have an uncanny ability to stay in the news. Ram Gopal Varma is one such, who gets talked about for what he does as much as for what he doesn’t. Why did he cast all the three Bachchans in Sarkar Raj? (The film starred Amitabh, Abhishek and Aishwarya). Why didn’t he end it differently? It has Aishwarya crooking a finger and saying ek chai laana (bring me tea, she tells someone not in the frame), all set to take o n the mantle of Sarkar. It is an unusual ending leaving loose ends and unanswered questions, just right for the movie and wrong for a section of the audience who need their Ts crossed and their Is dotted.

Contract controversy

His next film, which followed soon, Contract, about the mafia and terrorism nexus, gets discussed not so much for its tepid performance, but for how it ‘inspired’ the bomb blasts in Ahmedabad soon after. A bearded terrorist in the movie orders his minions to plant bombs in hospitals, so that the doctors are killed too. And that’s what happened in Ahmedabad, as well. Of course the film was conceived and completed much before the event, but the talk spilled over into national newspapers and prime-time television.

Macabre coincidence or planned malevolence? This is the sort of debate that Ram Gopal Varma thrives on. He is no longer involved with the movie once it is on screen, but wants to know if certain elements work, even if it is in an after-the-fact kind of manner: interested, yet remote.

I meet him the morning after Contract’s celebrity-fuelled premiere in Delhi’s swanky PVR at Select City Mall. He has half an hour before taking the flight out and our chat is peppered with his questions (Do you think that the way I killed off Sultan — the terrorist — worked?). He compares my answer with the ones he’s received, and muses, in an intrigued fashion, on how different people react so differently to the same things.

Currently, Ramu appears to be in a good place with Sarkar Raj having done reasonably well, and Contract having made him a talking point again. Much better than the phase after his Sholay remake, the awful Aag which was savaged by critics and audiences. The battering was so intense that he went underground and stayed there for months. He’s back on his feet again, his production house is humming and new films are in the making.

Production at ‘The Factory’

For the first time, he speaks about the rank films his production house, The Factory, has been rolling out. “The Factory was started without creating a proper model, so it went quickly out of control resulting in a lot of bad work.”

The whole process of picking up any old idea, and remote-controlling from outside, was disastrous. It reached a nadir with last year’s Go, a rehash of everything really ghastly from RGV’s stable fronted by talentless actors.

Not that he doesn’t re-make films. Shiva, his first smash Hindi hit, was a remake of a Telugu film of the same name; Bhoot was a remake of Raat: the only danger of doing this is that the director can actually make a much worse film, apart from being accused of laziness. Luckily for RGV, both Shiva and Bhoot were much better than their originals.

And then he made Satya, the first mobster movie which brought us up close and personal with the rank and file of the mafia and it quickly turned into a contemporary classic. He also tasted success with Company, in which he turned his attention to mob bosses: for many, including this writer, it’s been his best film till date. Even better than the popular of Rangeela, and Satya.

Coming soon

Right at this minute, he’s very excited about the film he’s currently making on the life and times of ‘Veerappan’. But wasn’t that the theme of his Jungle too? Not really, he says, any brigand and his unkempt cohorts can be passed off as that infamous lord of the jungles, now safely dead. And another one in which he will focus on politics and fashion in today’s UP.

Authenticity, or the lack of it, is clearly not his primary focus. Attenborough made a superb movie on Mahatma Gandhi and he could do it because he was an outsider, he says. So what if Sayaji Shinde is Maharashtrian (he played a Bihari villain in the RGV-produced Shool)? — “I chose him because he was just the actor I wanted for the role.” Such blitheness can sometimes result in a crisis of believability, but equally clearly, Ramu seems ready to cross that bridge when he comes to it.

Next up is Phoonk, a horror movie to out-scare all the scary movies he’s made before. The filmmakers are wagering that you cannot see the film alone in a theatre (the adverts are all over the place). Try it, if you dare.

While you are at it, Ramu is at work, busy notching up more numbers on his already crowded belt. “I am the Factory and I am working continuously.” That’s as good an exit line as any.

shubhra.gupta@gmail.com