?If you make a film like Peepli, it can?t be Aamir Khan?s film. For us, it was a director?s film?

Anusha Rizvi, director of Peepli [Live], and Mahmood Farooqui, co-director and casting director of the film, were at the Express for an Idea Exchange. In this session moderated by Shubhra Gupta, The Indian Express film critic, they speak of the idea of the film and what it was to work with Aamir Khan

Shubhra Gupta: Would you begin by telling us something about yourselves?

Farooqui: I did history at St Stephen?s College in Delhi and went to Oxford and Cambridge. I worked for a year at NDTV. I used to do theatre before that, I also did some film work. Then I stumbled upon Dastaangoi, an art of story-telling in Urdu which is now extinct. I revived it. In between, I wrote for newspapers. Then, Peepli [Live], and my book that came out recently, The Besieged: Voices from Delhi-1857.

Rizvi: I have done pretty much nothing. I was offered a job at NDTV when I was 21. It was the best thing that could have happened: I could earn for myself and I didn?t have to do an MA! I was there for five years. I did a lot of production work and for a year, I reported from Mumbai. But I realised it was not something I wanted to do for a very long time. So I quit, did random stuff. This story idea came to me around 2004.

Shubhra Gupta: The film, the way it looks, has a lot to do with the casting because everyone is so perfect for the role.

Farooqui: There was a team effort behind the casting which included Anusha and Danish from Dastaangoi who were closely involved with the film. There was Sudeep Jabosi who was hired specially for this. So it was a combined effort; we were all following a common vision.

Coomi Kapoor: You did not use the usual Bollywood stars or TV actors. How did that experiment work?

Farooqui: Even if we had gone for known actors, I don?t know if it would have ensured box office appeal for us. We wanted to try and make the film in such a way that we capture reality as it is out there rather than manufacturing or fabricating it for the film. It was critical that we go out and find faces that had never been seen before. We wanted fresh faces that would look rural and authentic and fit well into the rural setting. We didn?t want well-fed faces from Lagaan, Swades.

Amitabh Sinha: The beginning of the film looked as if it was a satire on the media, especially on TV, but there?s a group of people who have seen it as a satire on politics. What was your original idea?

Rizvi: The starting point for the film was Dr Manmohan Singh?s 2004 visit to Andhra Pradesh where he announced a compensation for families in a district that had seen 100 suicides. But it is the accumulated anger over many, many years in all of us that translated itself into the film. Anger, frustration at the government, the state, the policies…

Farooqui: The idea she had came from a thought following the PM?s visit: what if there is someone out there who wants to use the scheme? Will he commit suicide because he needs that Rs 1 lakh? The narrative of the film developed as she wrote it.

Sharon Fernandes: Your film has done the round of film festivals. Now it has been selected as India?s entry to the Oscars. How was the response abroad?

Rizvi: I travelled to the Sundance and Berlin film festivals. A lot of people have been writing on the Net, there have been blogs. Once the film was shown, the reaction was to discuss what should be done next. The discussions would be on the economy, food, etc, not on the film.

Sanjeeb Mukherjee: The film focuses on a rural setting. Have audience tastes changed more towards rural films?

Rizvi: This is a very complicated question. First, how do you define audience? The films are not released on small town single screens anymore, they are only released in multiplexes which are for an urban audience. If we talk about an urban audience, audience tastes haven?t changed much. But language has certainly got lost in this English-speaking, hero-world of Hindi cinema.

MK Venu: Aamir Khan is generally perceived as someone who is more socially committed than other actors. It?s a surprise he could not persuade UTV to take the film to smaller town single screens.

Farooqui: It?s not about Aamir Khan. It?s the nature of film business. The differential in the ticket in a Delhi multiplex and Gorakhpur?s small cinema hall is so huge that we don?t go by just box office numbers now. In the ?80s, the box office was the only thing that determined the money the film made. We didn?t have music rights, product placements, overseas rights. Those returns have made it possible for us to cast out the masses. It?s still different in south India, in Tamil Nadu, but general cinema is no longer a mass medium.

MK Venu: After the success of the film, have you had a dialogue with UTV on its distribution?

Farooqui: The dialogue part was done before the release of the film. Those who wanted the money, fame and credits wanted it more than us, so we left it to them and returned to Delhi. A lot of things that happened took place without our participation. The acknowledgments, the credits, a lot of things had no participation from us. It?s a very tricky thing; it?s difficult to disassociate a superstar producer from the film. We had a huge debate with Aamir Khan about acknowledgments in the film. Also whether the producer has the right of veto in editing. Aamir said that it was there in the contract that he had the final say. He claimed he had the moral right to decide on the acknowledgments. Again, the film would not have reached where it is without the backing of this person. We don?t know what would have happened if it had been otherwise, but we do know that a Tere Bin Laden did well on its own.

MK Venu: The rights of the people who wrote the Mehengayi Dayan song got written off? How did that happen?

Rizvi: My assistant director found this village mandli singing many songs, out of which Mahmood picked up Mehengayi Dayan, a song that we both really liked. We decided we wanted it for the film, but we did not have it in our schedule. We decided to do extra work and the entire team worked through the night, without extra payment, and we shot the song. We had been telling the producers to draw up a proper contract with the village people on payments. That didn?t happen for some reason?we kept reminding them.

Unni Rajen Shanker: When Aamir Khan makes a movie, it?s an Aamir Khan movie, when he acts in a movie, it?s an Aamir Khan movie, when he directs a movie, it is an Aamir Khan movie. When he produces, it?s an Aamir Khan movie and if Peepli [Live] gets an Oscar, it?s will be an Aamir Khan movie. How does it feel to live with that?

Farooqui: It would have felt awful and highly unjust. But it?s like getting upset about the fact that people run after celebrities and stars. Should you get upset about it? I mean it?s the nature of the capitalist film-making industry, it?s the nature of how films are embedded in TV. Cinema now is not an independent entity, it?s deeply embedded in TV news programmes, TV, ads, celebrity events. You could make a five-episode series on Aamir Khan or any superstar producing a film, give it to any channel, they will run it free of cost, they will run it as programmes. In that scenario, of course, we are hurt and upset. It?s not possible to blame any one person for it.

Rizvi: There were options: we could have been out there, but we decided not to be part of this because once you land up on news channels, you become monkeys for them. We chose to make this film, but we chose not to be part of the whole tamasha.

Farooqui: Our idea about the film was not to make Rs 40-50 crore. When we were making this film, our shooting expense, as far as we remember, was about Rs 6 crore. We didn?t have any contract, how much we should get paid, etc. We went there with a kind of woolly-headed Delhi University mentality that we were going to make this realistic film. Believe it or not, that?s what we have ended up doing.

Unni Rajen Shanker: When did you get ejected from the movie?

Rizvi: We removed ourselves. There were two points after which we decided not to continue any longer. One was the placard (at the end, the film shows a placard saying a certain number of people had migrated to urban centres. While the producers wanted the placard, Rizvi and Farooqui thought it was stating the obvious). The other was the titles and the way the acknowledgments happened.

Farooqui: We made this film over four to five years. There were a lot of people who helped us without asking for money. Lots of friends, lots of people in the media, so we wanted to thank them all. We were not allowed to do that by the production house. We were asked, whose film is this, the director?s or the producer?s? That?s the point: if you make a film like Peepli [Live], morally it can?t be Aamir Khan?s film. He should not be even wanting to morally own it. As far as we are concerned, it is a director?s film. Secondly, there was the placard at the end. We didn?t think the placard should have been there, they thought that one should tell people what?s going on. Now if you have to write it down in English for that purpose, something is terribly wrong with the film. That was something we didn?t want to do. We moved out when the Mehengayi Dayan song was removed from the album. The production house felt the song was not good enough; it should not be in the CD as it would bore people. Instead, there was a dhinchak redone thing. This was the point when both of us left the film.

Anmol Arora: You chose to disassociate yourselves from Peepli [Live] after its production. Will you be more careful next time or will you make compromises?

Rizvi: The journey of the film, from the scripting stage to production, is a very long process where you are interacting with hundreds of people. You deal with 150 people on a daily basis. Directors have to do a lot of management work in terms of people, negotiating spaces, but as far as content is concerned, I don?t think we will compromise on that.

Farooqui: There?s something that needs to be clarified: working with Aamir Khan did give us certain advantages. The script remained largely as Anusha wrote it. We managed to cast the film the way we wanted to. And we managed to shoot the film largely the way we wanted to shoot it. Given how Mumbai is, a lot of people expected us to celebrate this non-interference or celebrate this absence of negative interference. But it depends on the way you want to see things. By Mumbai?s perspective and from the perspective of people who have been struggling out there, perhaps we got a very good deal. But given that we had been used to working independently before and faced such a different scenario, just the absence of something doesn?t mean you would want to go out and praise it.

Coomi Kapoor: There was criticism that you trivialised a rural tragedy like farmer suicides. It was a black comedy.

Rizvi: I am aware of these things but I choose not to answer because there is still no serious debate about the film. This is the style we have chosen for the film. You may have problems with the content, but you can?t ask me why I chose that style of telling a story. At a lot of levels, I find the film has not been read. You have to also read the images in the film to understand it.

Farooqui: If there are people out there who think our overall intention was to trivialise the issue of poverty, the urban migration or the rural-urban divide, then they are wrong. You may say that we haven?t shown a lot of problems that farmers face or that we showed too much of the media. But our intention was to show all these issues and we have succeeded in that.

Shubhra Gupta: Tell us about your Habib Tanvir connection.

Farooqui: In 1989, I read about Habib Tanvir?s Agra Bazaar being revived, so I travelled from my school to Delhi to see the play. I was totally bowled over. Subsequently, when I moved to Delhi, I saw him once at Pyarelal Bhavan with a pipe in his hand. He was such an impressive personality that you were drawn to him. Anusha?s grandfather was a renowned Urdu poet named Ghulam Rabbani Taban and for many years he was the general secretary of the Progressive Writers? Association. Habib saab was also part of it. I made a documentary on him, and during that documentary we developed a great friendship with him. When he read this film script, he wanted to do a play on it. He was very supportive of Dastaangoi as well. He was such a wonderful man, he had a zest for life.

?Transcribed by Richa Bhatia For the longer version, visit http://www.indianexpress.com