His father runs a hotel in Kolkata and his family has lived in Ballygunge Place for over 40 years. Meet scriptwriter Anuvab Pal, who having penned the scripts for Manish Acharya’s Loins of Punjab Presents and Kunaal Roy Kapur’s recent film, is all set to direct his debut feature film on scriptwriting in Bollywood movies.
I don’t understand why directors say that their films are nonsensical when they make it: I’d be ashamed to do that. The audience may or may not like it but it seems funny to know you are about to embark on a movie that you know from Day I is nonsensical and then do it too. Good scripts are being written in Bollywood. I don’t think enough people read scripts. Those who do, make films that work. The audiences and critics are way more intelligent than we give them credit for. But we still live in a culture where the hero is the hero, aka the star, and the script is the script and the two haven’t met yet. And most films get green lit because a star says yes not because a script is brilliant. Screenwriting in India is a bit of cheating really because reality or observation is so much more interesting and gives you so many possibilities. Why come up with a story about an Indian pop singer set in Germany (a Bollywood movie I saw sometime ago) when no such thing exists in reality and when interesting characters exist in one’s backyard?
My directorial debut is titled How To Write A Movie: I’ve cast Kunaal Roy Kapur and Manish Acharya in it. Besides being very good directors themselves, both are outstanding comic talents as actors. While Kunaal will play a struggling screenwriter, Manish will play a
character who quits his job to become Kunaal’s agent. For other parts, I’ll speak to Soha and Konkona. My film will explore who the actual hero is when the whole culture of entertainment in India is not original. Is the hero the copycat or the man trying to write an original? Of course, the film will be a satire. Shooting should begin in the middle of the year and the movie should be ready by 2011.
Writing scripts on films that make fun of the West is interesting, specially when the West is always making fun of the Indian clichés: Even though Loins went onto become a hit in the US, there was always a sort of odd “how can they make fun of us?” feeling. It’s often assumed that taking a Western structure and format, like a mock documentary for example, and making fun of an American person, we are somehow crossing some line we shouldn’t cross. All films that had India in the subject, either made in the US or locally, somehow had to also be a cultural tour guide of the land, speak of its ills and its beauty. My kind of movies don’t do that. And so unlike Monsoon Wedding or Water or Bride/Prejudice, there are no visibly “Indian” pointers like marriage or dancing or caste. To the Western audiences, there’s less of a reference because it seems almost like their stories with Indian people. We had a screening for some US senators for my recent film. While most loved it, one walked out saying, “I’ve seen whatever I had to see”.
I am interested in the symbols of the new India: I often write movies on subjects I’m trying to understand. Young India is restless, ambitious and frenzied and I wanted to bring all that to a script about nothing but a handshake. The way people compete on television to live in a house and want to outperform on reality shows makes one wonder how far a ridiculous handshake is from what we actually have people fighting over.
I want to stay away from the accented, forced English that populates our English movies: I’m fascinated by how Indians speak English and use the cadences of the language. To me, English is an Indian language, not in a way that Victorian English was spoken at the Calcutta Club culture but post-liberalised India’s English. Post 1991. Post the media freedom and the cell phone. To that end, it was important to hear how the characters would speak and hence if some would use bad language, as we do in real life, it was there.
My next scriptwriting assignment is a French-Indian co-production called Alliance Francaise: It’s set in Kolkata. In 2010, I’d want to direct a film titled The Chatterjees of Circular Road. It’ll be a comedy in English and Bengali. It’ll be on the lines of Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums. I’ve also been fond of Moliere’s The Imaginary Invalid. It’s something to do with decaying wealth and people wanting to inherit it. As for Bengali films, I like some movies by Rituparno Ghosh and Suman Mukhopadhyay. Though Bong Connection was enjoyable, Anuranan didn’t make much sense to me. I wonder if anyone in the movie business in Kolkata know that I write movies in Bollywood. I’m open to new ideas and would want to contribute by writing films in punch language that are set in Kolkata.
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