Art & Entertainment

Magic On The 23rd Parallel

<i>Stanley Ka Dabba</i> took shape from the pell mell of openness as credo

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Magic On The 23rd Parallel
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In the year 2008 I was all ready to go on floor armed with an A-list dream team—Vikas Sivaraman on camera, Nitin Desai for production design, Deepa Bhatia on edit, and Excel to co-produce, with Farhan Akhtar and Bipasha Basu in the lead—but the film just did not take off. After knocking on all, except one, A-list star doors and getting refusals—with hardbound scripts sent for but returned with unturned pages—I understood the realpolitik of “jolly-bolly”. It was a lesson. Taare Zameen Par didn’t matter to the A-list. You are what you eat.

In the interim, sessions in theatre and cinema with children is what kept me sane. The ease of my young friends on the rehearsal floor while performing extended soliloquies was very fulfilling. There was not a hint of pressure in their body language!

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In one such session I merely conjectured: how about bringing into a theatre session a script and shooting it raw and pulling out a feature film? Guerilla intent and lots of spirit! I had already written a script about school life, a cache of my own childhood memories with the tiffin box as a metaphor for hunger—Stanley Ka Dabba.

I decided to begin a cinema and theatre class in the very school from where I had extracted the memories. The script would begin to breathe then. Also necessary was a guerilla crew of volunteers that you could count on the fingers of one hand—Hum Paanch.

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My namesake Amol Gole came with a proposal: the just launched Canon 7D, with his own collection of wonderful lenses. We quickly assembled a sessions crew—Faraz Ansari, all of 23, Archana Phadke, also 23, Jeetendra Rai, theatre volunteer, also 23, petit Sheetal Baapardekar, art director, also 23—God, how many 23s! Add to them Nyla Masood and my five-man army was ready. Not one of them doubted my model and stood with me in this most fun-filled weekend filming endeavour.

So, the rules were laid out. Shooting for not more than five hours on Saturdays, no school missed, no Sundays, no pieces of paper to mug up from, no focus marks for children to walk towards. And, most importantly, no jibs, no cranes, and the miracle of miracles—no lights! Too many NOs for senior technicians to buy into!

In other words, every technician, including me, would have their hands tied, or be working with restrictions but the children would be free. My young team happily lapped up the rulebook and never compromised on the philosophy. The film would emerge, but with a set of values and ethics that would be at its base.

Gole’s skills were up for a hitherto untried test—the rehearsal was the take! Children had the freedom to move at will. And that’s a cameraman’s nightmare. In fact, I strictly forbade him from communicating directly with the child actors. I merely narrated and enacted the scenes to the children, like an oral rendition of an episode from the Mahabharata. Then, it was their turn to enact the scene—and 90 per cent of the times, their first take found its way into Deepa’s edit. The surprise of those moments was pristine! At times, none of us really knew which child would be speaking and what! There were times when I told him to roll the camera and Gole would scream, “Sir but what’s the shot?”, and I would whisper, “Observe the children, and settle on the most non-conscious child”. And I think Gole always did the right thing because he has a child-like innocence and honesty in him that made him connect with the children.

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Another achievement is that of “location sound”, recorded delicately by Madhu Apsara, who, just like his name suggests, is a sweet angel: so non-obtrusive, so friendly, so invisible! And his counterpart, sound-designer Dwarak Warrier, equally gentle, just like his soundtrack. And young music director Hitesh Sonik—a zen master in mental make-up—and his music, mature like the best of wines. What a debut album!

And the last chapter belongs to Deepa Bhatia, who gave birth to Stanley. An incisive mind, a film-surgeon par excellence; the best collaborator any artist would wish for, Deepa is cutting-edge film editor, a filmmaker I am married to—the wisest thing I have done so far! Stanley formed on her edit table, hours and hours of impulsive material crunched into a racy 90-minute film—finding the note and hitting it.

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A bow to this young team that is family to me—Stanley belongs to us all!

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