On Location:
Hollywood has seen quite a few behind-the-scenes documentaries about the making of films, which have mostly been included in the DVDs of those films as bonus content, and some made their way to streaming. Documentaries like Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven’s Gate, Burden of Dreams, Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner, give fascinating glimpses of the filmmaking process and how a director’s vision shapes a movie. In India too, Chale Chalo: The Lunacy of Filmmaking was produced, on the making of Lagaan. It goes without saying that this would work only if the project has originality plus intrinsic value, and is not a regular potboiler. Though, it must be said that hard work and sleepless nights also go into the making of bad films.
Digital cameras and high end phones have obviously made the process easier; a designated person can follow the director and crew around and get the footage for making a documentary. Vidhu Vinod Chopra has gone a step further and made—or, rather, facilitated, Zero Se Restart, the making of his hit, 12th Fail to be released in cinemas. Chopra is evidently proud of this film, because as he and the crew members interviewed say, it was the kind of film he had never done before.(“No fights, no murders?”) In fact, he ended up directing it because every director he sent the script to—even newbies– turned it down. The fear was, who will see a film about a poor guy struggling to pass the tough civil services exam and become an IPS officer.
It falls to Jaskunwar Kohli (co-writer and co-editor of 12th Fail) to shoot the footage, and edit (with Chopra) the arduous process of making the film—and it would surprise audience not familiar with the process to discover that a realistic film is even more difficult to shoot, and sometimes more time consuming and expensive, than a fictional love story or revenge saga. The journey of Zero Se Restart (a song in 12th Fail), starts during Covid, when meetings were held on Zoom. The script underwent too many changes to count, and every new version would be returned with Chopra’s red ink scrawls.
12th Fail was based on a novel by Anurag Pathak, which was inspired by the story of real-life IPS officer Manoj Kumar Sharma, played in the film by Vikrant Massey. It follows his back-breaking, heart-breaking struggle from a background of utter poverty and hopelessness, to achieve his dream of wearing the khaki uniform.
The crew found the location for Manoj’s house in a Chambal (Madhya Pradesh) village, and using a mix of professional actors (Sarita Joshi, Geeta Aggarwal Sharma, Priyanshu Chatterjee) and locals, that part of Manoj’s life was filmed with relative ease—heat and dust notwithstanding.
The bigger challenges came while shooting crowd scenes with actual students, on crowded Delhi streets with real people—a major hassle being to get them not to look at the camera. What is equally riveting to watch, is how much effort went into hunting for the right space and recreating a railway canteen, then timing shots to capture a train passing in the background. Or getting the flour mill (where Manoj lives, works and studies) just right so that the reference to a “hell hole” in the script, gets visual representation. New or lesser known actors like Anant Joshi, Medha Shankr, Anshuman Pushkar mingled with non-professionals and gave the film its gritty feel.
Chopra’s assistants and unit go through the grind in getting what he wants, when a lot of the time, he does now know what he wants till he sees it. It is not clear how much of Chopra on the screen is candid and how much is performance, but watching him at work—cheerful, angry, confused, affectionate, harsh, but also uncompromising– and seeing a film’s trajectory from page to screen, is educative and enjoyable. A must for cinema students, but also, perhaps for the layperson who has never been on a film set, and is curious about what goes into the making of a movie.
(This piece first appeared in rediff.com)
