Is your film a slap in the face of Bollywood and the kind of films that have been made?
No, it’s just the story I wanted to tell. It was never meant to be some sort of comment on anything. As a writer, I’ve written for Bollywood films and some studios. But I’ve always wanted to be a director and I felt I could write a couple of successful stories to earn my break, but I spent about five years of my life writing scripts that never got made. That’s when I decided that I should make something in shoestring budget such that I don’t have to go in search of a producer. We eventually made the film with the help of our friends. The film wasn’t born out of any other need apart from the fact that we wanted to make a film the exact way we wanted to make it
How much of the film is inspired from your own journey as a writer?
I think it’s based on the journey of this generation of scriptwriters I’m growing up with. This is probably the first time you’ll see aspiring writers sitting in air-conditioned coffee shops and discussing scripts. If you to the place where this film was shot in Bombay, you’ll find so many coffee shops with people who would be discussing about films. I really liked this idea of people with so many stories. My film is about them, about their dreams and their journey. Lot of incidents and characters in my film are based on so many people I’ve heard about from this industry.
In that case, would you like to call Sulemani Keeda a tribute to all the aspiring writers?
It’s not a tribute per se. It’s just a story about friendship. It could’ve been set in any industry, but the only reason I’ve set it against the backdrop of film industry is that because I’m familiar with it. And I was aware that nobody had made a film on writers, and I made it.
Did you find direction challenging as you’ve been only writing all these years?
I really enjoyed direction because I was always directing for other mediums like ads, corporate films and even television. It wasn’t like I was doing it for the first time, but of course I hadn’t done anything on this scale. Everything I had directed in the past was smaller and I never got to work in fiction as most of my work was on corporate films. This was definitely a big challenge for various reasons. Your biggest fear when you write a film is when you see the rough cut on the editing table and wonder whether is it going to be coherent or not? Because you see so many films where the script was good but then something went wrong in the final product. My major fear was that we’ve edited and it’s looks really bad. But when that didn’t happen, I was relieved.
Anurag Kashyap recently said at NFDC Film Bazaar that ‘it’s easier to find money to make a film in India’. Do you agree with him? How challenging was it to find producers for your film?
It might be easy for him, but not for everybody. Right now, the kind of films being made by Bollywood is mostly remakes of south hits and the big-budget action and superhero films. The middle level cinema is disappearing. You either make an extremely low-budget film or a high-budget film. And if you make a small film like ours, the making is not difficult, but how do you release it? It took us so long to release. The film was premiered at MAMI last year (2013) and it took us a year to get it out. It takes that long because people like it and some even try to push it, but it’s always the marketing and distribution people who are a little skeptical because there are no stars in the film. It’s ironical that people in the industry say script and content are important in a film, but when you give them good content, they ask where are the stars.
Do you feel the success of The Lunchbox and Ship of Theseus has helped indie filmmakers?
It has, but to be honest, distributors go by figures. I’m sure it (success) has helped us creatively. For example, I was in Europe last year at a film festival, and everybody there spoke about a Bollywood film they saw. When I asked them, they said it was ‘The Lunchbox’, which has done phenomenal business overseas. ‘Ship of Theseus’, on the other hand, pushed the envelope subject-wise. The very fact that there was an audience for these films and they were actually talking about it on social media proved that there’s market for different content, regardless of what traditional distributors and studio marketing people feel. But indie films have to be tapped in a new way. The reason why it’s difficult for a film like Sulemani Keeda to release is because marketing and distribution teams have a set pattern to promote films. But when you get a film like Sulemani Keeda, they don’t know how to promote it because it needs to be innovatively marketed to the target audience. In that case, they have to change their style of functioning but big corporates are resistant to change. You need a very dynamic marketing company for releasing and distributing films like ours. I think that will only happen if films like Sulemani Keeda will do well commercially.
Your film is also one of the rare Indies with songs. What led to that idea?
I personally like music. Moreover, songs were needed in the film as it’s the story about friendship and romance. The songs actually helped us enhance what we were trying to say in a particular scene. It has been used to push the story forward, unlike the way Indian films use it.
Everybody enjoys watching comedy? How challenging was it to actually write and direct?
It’s extremely tough to write and direct comedy. When you writing comedy, you’re always unsure whether it’s really funny for everyone or just for the writer. And there’s always this temptation of writing something just for the effect of being funny. This is something I completely avoided in my film.
Why do you most Indian independent films need that foreign stamp to get noticed by producers and buyers in India?
That’s so unfortunate, but here’s what happened with our film. The first thing that made these people notice us was the fact that even before anyone was ready to invest money in India to release the film, Channel 4 in UK bought the television rights of Sulemani Keeda. And they bought the rights even before our film was complete. They saw the rough cut and paid us money. When that happened, people here started noticing. I think film festivals give you a big stage to present your film to large audience. In a way, film festivals do help films.
