First ever article on Directors' Diaries in a 'film' magazine. Written by Ali Peter John; Super Cinema. July 12 2015.
RAKESH ANAND BAKSHI- STILL WALKING WITH HIS FATHER.
I am writing this piece after reading the book written by Rakesh Anand Bakshi, the son of the renowned lyricist Anand Bakshi soon after I have read the last line of the last chapter of his first book, “Directors’ Diaries”. I must admit that it is one book that I have read like a hungry man who has been craving for some food for thought. I have known Rakesh as a young man with multiple talents. I have also known him as an entirely restless man with an unbelievable passion for cinema. I have seen him at work as an assistant director, I have seen him being consumed by his own scripts which he wanted to direct but couldn’t. I have seen him making some of the most creative and inspiring short films. I have seen him as a fan of his great father, Anand Bakshi. I have seen him as a man who has always loved to give more than he has received. I have also seen him as a man who has had to struggle his way through a storm of tormenting emotions but who has never let his innermost turmoil show. I realized he must have been a man who could inspire others when my young daughter, Swati Ali worked with him in the writing department of Subhash Ghai and how she who was not carried away easily by people held Rakesh in esteem and still does even though she is now married and has settled down in America where she still tries to keep writing and following her fascinating passion for photography…
I had heard about Rakesh coming out with a book which was a compilation of in-depth interviews with some of the leading directors of contemporary Hindi cinema. It had taken him almost four years or more to get his subjects to give him the time for the interviews he wanted to do his own way, but not once did he think of giving up or losing his passion to complete the book. I was moved when he drove down to the Lilavati Hospital where I had gone for a check up to present me with a copy of his book, signing a copy which humbled me, his words are on the copy of my book but they will always be etched on my heart, soul and mind. He wrote, “For Dear Ali Peter John, a man who is a loved legend in film journalism. A man of intensity, honour, passion and sincerity”…
It was after a very long time that I had only a short lunch break and a shorter dinner break while I read all the interviews in Rakesh’s book. It is truly a labour of love and intense passion, even the work of a mad man in today’s plastic times, if I may say so. The kind of interviews he has conducted with a wide variety of directors covering their lives and their careers is something unheard of in the kind of shallow journalism that is followed today and are treasures that will have to be kept under the highest kind of security by all those who care for cinema...
I wish Rakesh could have had the privilege of interviewing directors like V. Shantaram, Raj Kapoor, Guru Dutt, K. Asif, Mehboob Khan, Bimal Roy, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Basu Chatterjee, B.R Chopra and other great directors of another time and another generation, but alas!
I was so carried away by the sincere efforts made by Rakesh that I asked him to do a very difficult job. I asked him to write about his own experiences while writing this book for all time…
I wish his father, my friend Anand Bakshi who was always anxious about the future of Rakesh was around to see what Rakesh has accomplished and dedicated what he has done to his father. I for whatever I am worth give Rakesh the permission to write many more books like this at a time when churning out pulp books on classics and master filmmakers has turned into a money-making business. I hand you over to the method in the madness of Rakesh Anand Bakshi...
- Ali Peter John. @ Super Cinema.
“You have to write your own breaks. You got to write your own biography.” - Anand Bakshi and Directors' Diaries
I believe, people are like letters. Those letters want to be words. Words want to be stories. And stories want to be shared. Welcome to my world of people and their stories.
I am often asked, now that I have met nearly 28 directors for our book, Directors’ Diaries, “So, how was it meeting such a variety of directors, most of whom are iconic, and some legends?” And some ask me, “So how would you describe a director from the many you met?” And some even ask me, “So what is filmmaking? Can you direct a film now?”
First of all, even if I had met 100 directors and publish another 40 books on them, I will never be an expert on them nor filmmaking. You can learn filmmaking by film-making. By making them. Like you can learn writing by writing, or learn swimming by swimming in the water. None of these directors said ‘I know it all!’ None of them said ‘What I am saying is gospel.” All of them said “I am still making mistakes, Still learning and discovering the craft and myself with every success and failure.”
Though I was surviving on savings during the four years it took me to meet and interview and edit the book, each day I woke up to a beautiful dream of our book seeing dawn, because each night I had slept enriched from having met and spent time with these amazing directors. Either having met them that day, or then having either hearing their recorded interviews or editing their words, expressions or metaphors on filmmaking and life. I felt as rich as billionaire Richard Branson these four years.
After having met them and hearing them on the kind of efforts they make to see their films through, I thought a director is a proactive tennis ball, bouncing endlessly between the players’ rackets (his or her crew, unit) and ground, doing everything possible to never miss the rackets, always bouncing within the court and never hitting the net and coming to a standstill. A director will bounce endlessly until he gets what he needs from them or from the Gods for his film.
A director is a bubble maker. A master bubble blower. Because to begin with, a director blows a bubble. He or she then invite selected people to journey in this bubble for a duration of time. Together, these people travel in that bubble, with the director at the helm, whose atmosphere and environment they help him create from his vision of ‘the world of that bubble’ - his film.
They float together in that bubble building her day by day, until a day arrives when the wind will carry her to her destiny, the cinema screen. Where their bubble will explode, exposing her world of images and sounds that until then only those travelling in her were privy to experience.
When a director and his or her cast and crew are making a film, only they can ‘see’ the world they are creating for the director. Because this world exists only in their heads until the film is processed and post-produced so it can be viewed of those beyond. Until then, no one other than them has been seeing this world created primarily by the writer and the director. Cinema being a collaborative art, the director brings them all as close as possible to what he is seeing in his head while they making the film. It is like being inside a balloon and the air trapped inside will naturally have an atmosphere unique and different from that outside.
Just like a bubble is temporary, almost fleeting like dusk or dawn, the life the director and crew live while making their film is temporary too. The world they lived in, transforming their visions to celluloid, for a period of a few months or a year or more is as temporary as a child blowing bubble gum. When the film is made, all those who came to live in that world with the director leave, many to travel to another bubble belonging to another director. The bubble the director blew air into first, the others followed and blew some more making it grow in size and travel further, will cease to exist. Just like we see soap bubbles living out their destiny seeing a child run after them in joy.
After some disasters, some of my own creation, personal and professional, I have come to believe, they happened because I believed relationships and friendships are atomic Clocks, and not Clouds; Clouds are always changing, evolving, formless, shapeless, and yet we think they can be as fixed, as perfect, as precise and predictable as Clocks are meant to be. Same for filmmaking. Every day of shoot can be a cloud. How much ever you well prepared and perfected, problems and trouble can come in any shape and form, from any direction and arrive unpredictably and stay for long or dissipate quickly.
The choice of whom I should choose to interview was made by me from the directors and films I had admired and liked, irrespective of their box office fate or the judgements and opinions by some critics. No man nor woman is an island. We are all connected. So, as I have a few younger friends, aspiring filmmakers, actors, writers and some not in the film profession, the films and directors they liked helped me reaffirm my own choices. A few directors I had desired on board did not respond to my hundred messages, and very few refused. I never asked them a reason. I have believed never push creative people. Unless they show even one spark of interest. The ones who responded positively, I chased them till they got fed up of my messaging and even though many of them met me over four to five sittings over two or three years, I persisted and they responded with equal passion. This happened with those directors who could not complete their interview and got sucked into their next film’s scripting or preproduction. Its best to let them go then, and catch them post release.
From the many people and books that inspired me, The Readers Digest is one book that had inspired my father, lyricists Anand Bakshi, immensely. And me too since my childhood. The first draft of my questions to ask these directors arrived from the notes I had made reading articles of successful people who were featured monthly in Readers Digest. When I decided to interview these directors, those notes I had made for over two decades was my template I began with. So thank you Readers Digest.
Just like for each of these directors, some choices they made or somethings that happened to them pushed them in the direction of filmmaking, I realized in retrospect, had my marriage and business (and not me) not failed, I would not have written this book. The simultaneous failure of my business and marriage, and not me, made me make the firm choice that I want to be a writer and filmmaker. I was an introvert until then, and was shy of being in a profession where the Sun had shown continuously for over 40 years on my father, and my father had not wanted me to be in films. Thanks to my business and marriage failing, my father understood its time he supported me in me wanting to do something in filmmaking. Because earlier he has not wanted me to be in films. It is he who then introduced me to my first film director as an assistant, Subhash Ghai. One of my gurus he too is. I joined him during Taal in 1999.
One cloud does not bring rain. There were many reasons that lead to me writing this book. Though I am mostly a positive and proactive person, at times I did feel like angry and frustrated that I could not get my first film going. I got very curios how the established directors arrived and succeeded in this profession, even though most of them were not like me born in a film family. My father was the lyricists Anand Bakshi. I must have lost hope one day, because I decided to write a book that some less privileged than me or privileged person somewhere will read and hopefully be inspired to come here and succeed in making his or her first film. And if he or she did, even one person did so, I thought that day I will have made my first film. His success will be mine. I am not happy my book has seen the light of day. I am glad she did. I will be happy the day someone informs me that this book that the 12 directors wrote gave them the courage to take their first step towards their dream, even if its not filmmaking and or motivated them to persist in their struggles which helped them last or reach the threshold of their first film, or first show factory, or first job. Because I consciously attempted to write it non-technically, more as a story that even a non-film person can read and relate to and possibly be inspired. A woman writer named Dew, she really inspired me when the thought was a feeble humble seed in my mind.
Once the seed was born, it was nurtured not just by my own passion to see it through, (and I did not approach a publisher for more than a year of interviewing 20 to 22 directors) but it was the passionate reactions of the directors I interviewed that helped me increase the number of directors I wanted to interview. Many were a bit shy and apprehensive too speaking deeply and candidly about their lives so far, however, around 20 to 30 minutes into the process, in retrospect I can say now, they eased up and opened up like flowers open their petals to dew.
I felt so inspired and emotionally fulfilled hearing their varied experiences and expressions, on reaching home I would seek the blessings of my departed Mother. I have her last worn slippers right under my writing desk and I would touch them to my heart every time I returned home inspired, and touch my Dad’s last worn reading spectacles. Because, it can only be with my parents blessings that I could have possibly reached so close to these directors whose movies and life stories I admired, and most of whom most people cannot get past their house or office security.
Each director gave me different threads to weave my narratives, yet those threads, I realized while simultaneously introspecting why I was hearing or later editing, I had carried within my own fabric. Its just that some of their colors had faded because we all weave new threads daily. Deep down, we are the same. However, because they were unique, by way of geographical and social background, culture, some came from editing, some from acting, some from cinematography, some from choreography, naturally every one of them had me enthralled while listening to them. I found them all equally interesting.
I must add, while they spoke and when I edited it later, both times I introspected my own choices since childhood and I felt then some things I did not do could have helped me make my first film earlier. However, its all good, because if I had made my first film I would not have written this anthology and attempted to help someone else make their first.
Though all the directors enriched me in varied ways, some things amongst many others that I thought about long after meeting them were - Anurag Basu’s love for his father inspired him unknowingly and he knew he will defeat cancer; Ashutosh G’s pursuit for perfection made him see and accept his shortcomings as an actor; Farah Khan’s love for her father for whom she suppressed dance through her childhood and teens which I believe caused her passion for dance to erupt to the surface as her natural career path at youth; Govindji for how the combination of two words cinema and photography fascinated him to choose cinematography; Imtiaz Ali’s childhood memory of discovering the reading room in his house and failing the ninth class transformed him; Mahesh Bhatt Saab for his deep insight into himself from his teens itself and as his as deep insight into humanity; Santosh Sivan for how he ‘understood’ light while being made to look out for rain during the hockey games his friends played but did not include him and how he dedicates his work to someone to remain motivated and inspired; Prakash Jha did not take money from his father and was working in a restaurant to gather money for his survival in Bombay and pay college fees and cooking meals for his teachers so they mark his presence; Tigmanshu’s years at NSD and his grit during the seven years his films did not release he kept asking for work to write; Vishalji playing harmonium during food festivals at Pragati maidan and reinventing himself as a director so he can give himself work as a music composer; Subhash Ghai for when his mother left his father she had a choice to take him with her to her rich maternal home but she chose to leave him with his father who was financially not well because she believed that will make him the man she wants him to become someday and cinema became his escape from his childhood sorrows.
As for the ‘new’ directors I had interviewed, I interviewed some directors who had made excellent first films and were yet to make or release their second or third film. I interviewed them and valued them as much as the others, because I know the value of making even one, as I have yet to make that one. I hope in Volume 2 we can include one chapter that that have these one or two film old directors, under a chapter “On the Horizon”, because, though they had made fewer films that did not mean their journey here was not amazing and not inspiring especially for people and film making aspirants of their very own generation.
Reading about the earlier lives of these twelve directors can help us discover where we are today, and reveal to us why our connections to each other and the path we chose to walk is very precious. Because, our yesterday made today which makes our tomorrow.
Need or desire creates purpose, which creates intent, which creates will, which creates action or deeds, which creates mistakes or success, which creates experiences, which hones talents and skills, which eventually creates our destiny. I think, not just film people but people from other professions will make connections to their stories and how they make movies.
And it is through this sharing of their moments, anecdotes, their experiences from childhood, and the process of how they reached the threshold of and made their first film that readers will relate, revel and find hope in their own struggles. And no one will give up easily or early.
- Rakesh Anand Bakshi.
