Being Homi

Making films is one of the many things that featured on Homi Adajania’s bucket list. He checked f that box in 2006 after directing the delightfully quirky Being Cyrus , and hoped to proceed down the list, which included opening a café by the sea and writing a book. With the release of his third film, Finding Fanny , this week, Adajania says he is now here to stay. “After three films I can say, ‘ Chal yaar , I’m a filmmaker’. I can see myself as an old f****r sitting on a film set and still making a film,” he says.

Seated in his producer Dinesh Vijan’s Bandra office, Adajania laughs to himself while looking through stills of Finding Fanny on his laptop. The image of actress Dimple Kapadia bending over with her prosthetic derriere pointed to the camera seems to crack him up no end. Before we sit down to discuss the film, Adajania thinks it is only fair he warns me about what a frustrating interviewee he can be. “I just keep talking and talking. And I keep digressing. I will make your job very difficult. You’ll keep thinking why doesn’t this guy shut up. I’m just a stupid bawa yaar ,” he says.

There are some other ground rules as well. “I find it very difficult to talk without profanities,” he states. One of the longest conversations he’s endured minus cuss words was the two-hour script narration with actor Pankaj Kapur, the only member of his cast he didn’t know before. He remembers watching Maqbool (2003) but had “no clue” about the ’80s detective series Karamchand . “We sat through the entire narration and he didn’t change his expression even once. I cracked a joke and he showed me half his front tooth. I thought what a waste of time,” says Adajania. Within five days, Kapur committed to playing Don Pedro, a has-been artist obsessed with painting all things round and fat. In this case, Kapadia’s all too voluptuous posterior.

Adajania is an engaging storyteller. His whackiest anecdotes are usually chapters from his own life. He can rattle them off with little encouragement. Most of his tales begin with, “Once when my credit card had maxed out…” or “After I was arrested in Athens….” But the most intriguing hook has to be, “I was stranded in Ipswich near London after I missed my boat back to India.” For those interested in how that story ended, he did make it back to the motherland after five months and that too on an airplane. He juggled odd jobs like babysitting in London at £7 an hour to be able to afford the cheapest return ticket. “I wonder which mad parents would hire me to look after their child,” he asks. He now has two young sons of his own.

Of all his experiments, he was most pleased with his stint at an American adventure sports company. For a year, he travelled across South Asia, jumping off bridges, going on safaris and scuba diving. A certified scuba instructor, Adajania has camped in the Andaman Islands with groups of travellers, and made a living by training them to be divers. “Travel will never be out of my system. I have this thing for wanderlust. I find travel extremely educative. You feel alive because you’re not in your comfort zone,” he says.

Adajania’s forté is that he can channel this unpredictable, rather crazy, streak into his films as well; his earlier work Cocktail (2012) being the obvious exception. It took a fair amount of cajoling to get him to make a ‘regular’ film that reinforced every possible Bollywood cliché in the book. “I realised I was shying away from it because I was completely unfamiliar with that kind of narrative and the use of song and dance. It was pure fear. When I sat down and introspected, I said to myself, ‘C*****a you’re not doing Cocktail because you don’t know how to’,” he says.

With Finding Fanny , an English-Konkani film made on a far more modest budget, he’s back with his oddball characters, a world he feels more at home with.

At 44, now that he’s zeroed in on filmmaking as the profession he’d like to stick with, Adajania promises to make movies at a more regular pace. He has no dearth of stories. Even A-list actors, like the ones he’s roped in for Finding Fanny , are ready to take a pay cut to be a part of his world. The only hitch is finding a producer with the courage to bankroll his plans. “I’ve got hundreds of ideas that are considered too off-beat. I’ve had producers tell me, ‘Are you f*****g mad? Who will understand this?’”

For a while now, Adajania has been working on a story about a mental asylum from which everyone has run away except for one person. He even tried writing a book on the subject. There are no takers for it just yet. But if the film does see the light of day, I say it will be a mad one.

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