Like many things in my life, this too was fortuitous or, if you prefer it, being in the right place at the right time. Some eight years ago, I was loitering without intent at the Bandra Bandstand in Mumbai, when I received a call from a line producer I was acquainted with. He wanted to know if I was free to meet Steve Barron, as he was looking for someone with both British and Indian sensibilities to assist on a project that he was directing. Pausing only to catch my breath, which had escaped in a rush when I heard Barron’s name — he’s the man who invented the music video as we know it; his credits include Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean , A-Ha’s Take on Me , Dire Straits’s Money For Nothing , the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, and so on — I walked the five minutes to the Taj Lands End, where he was stationed. We hit it off immediately. The film was called Prakash , a beautiful tale of adoption, pollution and unchecked urban growth. I convinced Barron that the latter two aspects of the tale would be best located in my former hometown of Bengaluru and we proceeded there. We were there for a few months, casting, reconnoitring locations and performing all the usual film pre-production activities.

Since leaving India for foreign shores, this was the longest stretch of time I’d spent in Bengaluru and every evening was spent consuming alcoholic libations in the company of friends from the good old days of my youth, many of whom were of the quizzing persuasion. Barrron was a fly on the wall during these evenings, quietly observing our bawdy humour and soaking up our tall tales of quizzing and raging hormones.

Sadly, the global recession happened and the financing for Prakash fell through. Upon returning home to London, Barron called me and said that the stories he’d heard in Bengaluru would make for a very funny script, heavily fictionalised of course, and I should write it up. I agreed and thought nothing further of it. The very next day I received a contract and the third day an advance. That’s when I realised that Barron, and his company Riley Productions, were serious.

Now, at that stage in my life, I had written some 20 scripts, just one of which would get produced. I was just coming off the high of writing my first book, Lights, Camera, Masala: Making Movies in Mumbai , which was released by Amitabh Bachchan and Ramesh Sippy at the IIFAs in Dubai. So my inclinations were more literary than cinematic. I dawdled on the script until I received a call from Barron’s associate Rose Garnett (she’s now the head of development at Film4 and her credits include a few films that you might have heard of: Black Swan , Suffragette , Room and American Honey ), reminding me of the concept of deadlines. With Barron and Garnett as very useful and vociferous sounding boards, within two years we were very happy with the script, which we christened Brahman Naman .

I decided to name the lead character after me because he is an epic loser and I did not want any innocent to be branded with the name. The idea was to recreate the lives of these quizzing nerds in the 1980s, a slower and altogether more innocent time, where even the quizzing moved at a stately pace with direct questions and passes, as opposed to the insane ‘pounce’ system deployed today. Painfully socially-awkward and tongue-tied around desirable girls, the boys’ only refuge was in their immense store of esoteric knowledge. Also, the only stimuli the hormonal boys had at that time was worn-out soft-porn VHS tapes or a single dog-eared copy of a girlie magazine, since this was long before the advent of the internet and smartphones. Bearing these in mind, it was also a deliberate decision to make all the girls in the film strong winners, juxtaposed against the epic loser nature of the boys. This was easy enough to do as I have strong women in my life: my wife, sister and mother, and pretty much all my bosses throughout my career.

Barron then set about the difficult task of raising the finance for our English-language Indian film. The process took years and, in the meantime, I was commissioned to write Rajinikanth: The Definitive Biography for Penguin. The book released on 12.12.12, on the superstar’s birthday, and immediately afterwards I got the heart-warming news that a group of like-minded people and companies had loved the script and were ready to finance it. Barron was supposed to direct Brahman Naman but then he watched Gandu and Tasher Desh at the London Indian Film Festival and was struck by Q’s (Qaushiq Mukherjee) amazing visuals and raw intensity. He asked me if Q would be a good fit to direct and I agreed wholeheartedly. Steve sent Q the script and within hours he called and asked where he could sign up.

With Q on board, we began a year-long process of casting. The first person to be cast was Royal Academy of Dramatic Art graduate Tanmay Dhanania. We cast a young south Asian actor as Naman, but he pulled out to act in a play at the National Theatre. That’s when we watched Titli and noted Shashank Arora’s fine performance in the title role. Q auditioned him and thus Naman was cast.

It was sometime in October/November 2014. The production team had hired a house in Mysore for workshops with all the actors and heads of department. Dhanania was leading the actor workshops. We lived together as a big happy family in that Mysore suburb for five weeks.

The mornings would begin with yoga, followed by breakfast and a bucket bath. Then I would go through the entire script, line by line, with the actors, while Q would work out the shot divisions and composition with the cinematographer. After lunch, Q would conduct a masterclass with the actors in order to acquaint them with the ethos of the 1980s. At dusk, the actors would spend an hour on the terrace, sans mobile phones, in character, mostly in silence, in order to get accustomed to the slower cadences of the period the film is set in. And later on, accompanied by libations, we would watch reference films like Sarat Rao’s quizzing documentary Furiously Curious , the Marx Brothers’s laugh riot Duck Soup , and Ravichandran’s ’80s Kannada hits like Premaloka .

My wife flew down from London so that we could celebrate our wedding anniversary together; and the next day, December 15, we did the pooja for the film at our first location — the Purple Haze pub in Bengaluru, which had retained its ’80s décor, complete with stained glass images of Ian Anderson and Jim Morrison. It was a demanding shoot, completing an entire feature film in just 22 production days across Bengaluru, Mysore, Kolkata, and two villages in Bengal. We were on a train for 24 hours and that was a 5 am–5 am shoot. We managed to top that with a 36-hour shoot at a studio in rural Bengal.

The funniest incident happened on a night schedule at a Bengaluru suburb when Q, normally the coolest and calmest of cucumbers, had to raise his voice with a group of supporting cast who did not match his exacting standards. One of them fainted on the spot! Turns out that the lad had low blood sugar and hadn’t eaten all day.

The other amusing incident happened at the Bengal studio, where a crew member who failed to understand the concept of sync sound spoke during a take and our delightful sound engineer TK sent him on his way, pelting him with stones.

A surreal aspect of the shoot was when we had a two-day break in the Kolkata schedule and I could participate in the local quizzing championships, alongside the many stalwarts of Indian quizzing who had flown in from all over the world.

Film done, nothing prepared us for what was to follow. Being in competition at Sundance and Edinburgh, amazing screenings at Los Angeles and New York, and, above all, the Netflix deal, enabling us to bypass the tortuous global distribution process and being available day and date in 192 countries in 20 languages. The global positive reactions and reviews aside, what really mattered to me was how the quizzing community would take to Brahman Naman and I am very pleased that the reactions from them have been nothing short of ecstatic.

Naman Ramachandran is an Indian writer and journalist

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW