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The USP is Indian-ness

Suparn Verma

Nagesh Kukunoor. Click for bigger pic!

Nagesh Kukunoor looks the serious, academic type, the kind one finds in a library, boning up on his Chaucer. But looks, we all know and have been reminded ad nauseum, often provide an incomplete picture.

Kukunoor did excel at his studies, even winning a full scholarship to pursue an engineering degree at Georgia Tech University in the US. And since going to the US was his dream anyway, he seems to have accomplished all in life. The US, he says, was where the doors to free thought opened up. But still, soon after he got a job there, he found something more than work to interest him.

"I started to lead a dual life," he says. By day he was an environmental consultant; in the evenings he would attend the Warehouse Actors Theatre, where he learnt direction and the technical aspects of film-making. He spent three years at the workshop, also making a short film with his classmate Julie Lee, a second generation Indian.

That was when he made a film called One Culture at a Time, a 14-minute film shot over a weekend, about two immigrants in the US who fall in love and split.

"It was shot in a very MTVish style... It was a very bad film," he admits. But the bug had bitten and he gave up his job and returned to India do something for Indian cinema. Appalled by the lax standards of the Telugu crew he worked with, he hastily retired to the US again.

"I went back and worked on my script. I wrote the 96-page script in seven days," he says. And though he was also working at that time, he was putting away every cent he could to make his dream film. "I even cancelled my life insurance policy to save as much as I could," he admits.

"The only thing I bring very unique to my films is my Indianess, and that is what I'm going to use as my USP... The West is simply fascinated by the simple Indian things," he says.

The film again takes up the issue of arranged marriage. But Kukunoor has avoided making any of the parties involved look bad. He points out that since he was working on a very tight budget, he had to depend on empathy for the characters keeping the film going.

He had a reading of the script with his theatre group and, just to make sure, also got Ben Taylor, a professional who used to write extensively for German television, to check it out. Kukunoor relaxed only after Taylor sent back the script with a small note attached saying, "Good dialogue".

The cast and crew of Hyderabad Blues. Click for bigger pic!

Kukunoor's Hyderabad Blues, which was on show at the recent Mumbai Film Festival, was made with $ 100,000. Naturally, perhaps, it is chock full of new actors, including the director himself. Vikram Inamdar, who plays the friend of protagonist Varun (Kukunoor), is surprisingly good.

"I take complete credit for Vikram's performance. He was totally new. In fact, he was supposed to play a smaller part, but before the shoot I just asked him read out the lines of the other character and he seemed totally in character. But he had no idea of where to look, how to go about the scene... He has done a terrific job."

Kukunoor had some trouble deciding on the ending, not knowing whether to let the hero and heroine separate or get married. If the latter, he didn't whether to ship them off to the US or let them hang on in India. Finally, he decided on a happy end, without deciding where they'll finally rest in the east or wing off west. And he picked that end, he claims, only as a dig at Indian cinema.

The director admits he made Hyderabad Blues essentially for an American audience, and so was quite surprised with the reception it received in India, "The fact that Indians loved it is an added bonus. The educated Indian audience is so starved for something normal that my film couldn't have been timed better," he asserts.

His next project is about a young school boy studying in south India. "It's going to be a light-hearted, Wonder Years kind of look at children, with humour as the backbone," promises Kukunoor.

Part of his plan "to sell my Indianess and put myself on the map. I finally plan to make films with American themes. After all Hollywood is the Mecca of every film-maker," he smiles boyishly.

The American dream and the Indian dreamer. Often spelt success.

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