Being: Kingpin Ram Gopal Varma

Mumbai: Rains threaten to wash it away, bomb blasts fracture it's spirit, dreams that come true and extremes that co-exist. Mumbai city evokes both insights and clichés with equal fervour.

Celluloid odes to it are common. But perhaps no filmmaker has been as constant in his affection as Ram Gopal Varma has been while depicting this city. So we bundled him into our car and took him for a ride.

Ram Gopal Varma:There is no doubt that I love Mumbai. I love this city more than I love women perhaps.

Anuradha Sengupta: Having said that, you have made some woman quite unhappy out there.

Ram Gopal Varma: I don’t think they would mind. I love the energy that the people in Mumbai have. In this city, you may have known a person for several years and yet you may not have any clue about his background.

In Satya the situations that I have shown could not have taken place anywhere else except in Mumbai.

Anuradha Sengupta: That is an interesting fact. In most films of yours Mumbai city is not just a backdrop but also the very protagonist.

Ram Gopal Varma: Well, I don’t think that has been done as a conscious effort on my part. Actually, Shyam Benegal was the one to have brought this fact to my notice for the first time. He saw Sarkar and Company and then called me and said,"You have set a reference point for any film based in Mumbai."

Anuradha Sengupta: But then why do you say that it was not a conscious effort by you?

Ram Gopal Varma: It wasn’t really. The only thing is that when you are making a realistic film with real characters in it, the ambience too has to look real.

Anuradha Sengupta: Why did you choose to live in Mumbai? You were making films in Hyderabad, 14-15 years ago. Then what made you leave that city and come to Mumbai?

Ram Gopal Varma: The main reason why I came here was because I loved Hindi cinema. Ever since I was a kid I was in love with Hindi films. I had always wanted to make Hindi films. And Mumbai is the big city where Hindi film industry is centered.

I was making Telugu films earlier, but that was only like a ‘calling card’. I thought if I could make Telegu films, perhaps Hindi film industry was not that far away.

It was the intention to enter the Hindi Cinema that drew me to Mumbai. The very first time that I came here was to buy video-cassettes as I used to run a video library.

This city has always fascinated me. I had my eyes wide open walking around and looking at the tall buildings. Coming from Hyderabad, it was almost like visiting an exotic foreign country to me.

Now, even after living here for so many years, I come across locations that I had not imagined to be there in this city.

Anuradha Sengupta: Dharavi was the first place that you visited when you came here, isn’t it?

Ram Gopal Varma: Yes. It looked to me as if there was just no space. The whole thing is under one roof. I was fascinated that so many people can actually live in such a congested place.

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Science tells you about hygiene and space and I have seen people in trains with kids barely five or six months old, crawling just about four feet away from trains that are running in full speed. These sights defy your imagination completely.

Anuradha Sengupta: It must have been quite exciting for you to become a producer and then produce a string of films. But somewhere down the line, do you think ‘The Factory’ has belied its own promise?

Because when you are doing a production, you have to guarantee a certain quality of maintaining those high standards that have been benchmarked by this industry.

Ram Gopal Varma: That is quite right.

Anuradha Sengupta: Have you been able to maintain those standards in all your films?

Ram Gopal Varma: No, I don’t think I have succeeded in that. I think the idea is to maintain high standards and it is very right. I hope to achieve it with my forthcoming projects this year.

That is the good and the bad part about myself. I have to get excited and charged to start off. That is how I have made most of my films.

I made Satya without having even a story in hand. I just went ahead and started it and that’s how it happened.

I feel that starting off so many films without a proper system can upset its creativity. I have limited time to do that quality control. That is why I stopped making new films until I get the system right. But I think I’m all geared up now.

Anuradha Sengupta: How are the systems in place now? What’s really different this time?

Ram Gopal Varma: Probably I have got my own sensibilities and moods back. The people surrounding me have not said this but it’s the feedback that I have got through proper channels about what’s working and what’s not working with my films.

It’s not necessary that the people around me have been lying so far. May be they all got psyched along with me and could not figure out the real picture.

Anuradha Sengupta: May be these ‘people around you’ just wanted to please you by giving a wrong feedback, isn’t it

Ram Gopal Varma: Yes, whatever the reasons are. Now I have set up a system where to keep a check on myself, which is the most important thing.

Anuradha Sengupta: It’s a fact that when you give people their desired opportunity, they start swearing by you. But once that the project is over, the fallouts come up— perceived or otherwise. Do you agree with that? Isn’t this what happened with Road and James?

Ram Gopal Varma: When a film is not being made the right way and I as a producer intervene, the director feels I’m spoiling it. Because he thinks that that he is right in his place, and he does not likes being corrected.

Actually, nobody knows exactly what could be the right and what could not be right when you are making a film. There could be many reasons why a film won’t work.

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Secondly, I don’t think they owe me anything or that I owe them anything for the failures and the successes that we may have seen.

In today’s times, I don’t think that directing a film is such a great deal. When a person has been hired to direct a film it’s the individual’s choice for him to work or not to work with me.

As far as I am concerned, I decide on my own whether I would work with a particular director for a second time or not depending upon the given situation.

Anuradha Sengupta: What was the best film that came out of that phase?

Ram Gopal Varma: If you ask from my productions? Nothing.

Anuradha Sengupta: Not even a single one?

Ram Gopal Varma: No. See some might have worked like Ab Tak Chappan but I think it could have been done in a far better way. I wasn’t happy with that project either.

Anuradha Sengupta: Do the people who have got their first break by you, get annoyed when they hear statements like this?

Ram Gopal Varma: By making these statements I am only being critical of their work.

I am critical of myself as well. Eventually if I’m making the film, endorsing it and taking responsibility for it not doing well, I have every right to say what I think about the film.

Anuradha Sengupta: would you call yourself an obsessive person? I mean you get obsessed with certain themes that you want to do, it’s there playing in your head, isn’t it?

Ram Gopal Varma: I think so, yes.

Anuradha Sengupta: You did a lot of films with Urmila Matondkar and Antari Mali. There is a sense that Ram Gopal Varma, the filmmaker, in some of these films, took a backseat to Ram Gopal Varma, the man. Do you agree?

Ram Gopal Varma: It is my personal choice to chose the actors that I like and recommend for my films. If made four films back to back with Manoj Bajpai playing an important role in Satya, Kaun, Shool and Road . But because he’s a man, nobody asked me as to why have I done so.

I made eight films with Sandeep Chowta that too way before he even made a successful track. So if it’s a woman, it’s easy for people to point fingers like this.

Anuradha Sengupta: Is it also because there is a sense of the artist in the muse, isn’t it?

Ram Gopal Varma: That’s not true. I stay focused on the vision that I have for my films. I have my team of hardworking technicians and actors who would always be working with me.

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And it’s similar with many other filmmakers as well. But because I talk so openly, people don’t hesitate to raise such questions. But it’s fine and perhaps a part of life to be confronted with different types of situations.

Anuradha Sengupta: Though you have experimented with genres, your specialty remains violent films based on cops and criminals. You have given a genre to Hindi cinema that it can call it’s own. Do you agree?

Ram Gopal Varma: Right from my teens, I have been influenced by this kind of cinema. I was a huge fan of James Hadley Chase, Fredrick Forsyth and Godfather. Godfather has been the most influential book in my life. This is one of the reasons that I chose the subject of cops and criminals for most of my films.

Secondly, I was a kind of toughie in college when I was doing my engineering. I am not saying that I was into gang fights and things like that but I used to have always had this illusion that I was a tough guy.

So I think there I got to know the mindset of people who live by violence.

I made my first film Shiva when I had just got out of the college. So the experiences I have had while in college and the real life characters that I came across inspired me to create the same in that film.

Anuradha Sengupta: So does that mean that the central character Shiva which was played by Nagarjuna was actually autobiographical?

Ram Gopal Varma: Not exactly autobiographical but yes, there was a guy I knew who was a lot like that. But the real character had many negative shades, which I cut out to create its reel-character. I edited him.

The underworld fascinated me because of the organizational complexity and people being a part of it. My first thought of Satya was a famous person being shot dead.

Someone who I was with at that time, a producer, told me about the gentlemen’s recounting details before he was shot dead at around 10 am.

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Anuradha Sengupta: Are you referring to the T-Series head, Gulshan Kumar?

Ram Gopal Varma: Yes. I kept thinking in my mind as to what that killer must have been doing before he killed him? Being a filmmaker I was thinking of those inter-cuts.

Did he wake up early that morning? Did he ask his mother to wake him up? Did he have his breakfast before he kill him? Or he had it after he killed him?

These were the questions popping up funnily in my head. Then I realized that you always hear about these killers either when they have killed someone or after they are dead. But what is it that they do in between?

I started reading magazines and articles that were based on these criminals. It was interesting to see that the criminals arrested with their faces hidden behind black clothes had really thin arms. They did not even look like the proto-type gangsters that you see in films like Agneepath.

Anuradha Sengupta: Is it the psyche of a guy who commits violence that draws your interests?

Ram Gopal Varma: I definitely am not interested in simple people. I have a child-like fascination towards things larger-than-life. I like power. I have always wanted to be powerful; I like women to be sexy and so on.

Anuradha Sengupta: So you believe in ‘basic instincts’.

Ram Gopal Varma: Yes, you can call them ‘basic instincts’. My hero would essentially be like the one in Sarkar or Shiva. I look at this from an altogether different angle because the characters that I’m dealing with intimidate me.

My intelligence is to suck the audience and their psyche into my films. I want them to feel what the character is going through in the film. For example, in Satya when people call it a realistic film I wonder how do they know its real? They don’t know anything about underworld neither do I.

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It’s not so much about the realism in the depiction of the underworld. I think they connect to the character’s realism. When Bhikhu Matre comes home and his wife nags him, they connect to that emotion. It is because of the same emotion that when he goes out and kills someone, it seems real.

Anuradha Sengupta: What is your take on crime and the criminal mind? We are standing at the Juhu’s Centaur hotel, the place where one of those bombs went off in 1993. What is your take on these things?

Ram Gopal Varma: Lot of people say that I seem to be empathetic towards criminals. The way I portray their characters in my films, it seems there is so much of life in it.

But the point is to understand a person’s mind and his psyche where it is coming from.

I see everybody from human angle does not mean that I’m empathizing with criminals. Seeing everything in terms of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ is a very superficial way of looking at things.

I am a very non-violent kind of person in real life. I can’t even stand the sight of someone bleeding. I am scared of injections; I hate the very sight of blood. I can’t even see somebody getting slapped.

Anuradha Sengupta: Then please explain how have you gone through all those violence based films that you have made?

Ram Gopal Varma: I guess, because I fear violence so much, I understand it more than anyone else. Even while shooting, in rare times when we have to use blood, I shut my eyes completely.

I can’t see it. But I have also heard that a similar person, Adolf Hitler, the Nazi chief could not stand the very sight of blood.

Anuradha Sengupta: So just when we thought we have known you, it seems we don’t know you.

Ram Gopal Varma: Yes, may be.

Anuradha Sengupta: Your latest film, Shiva is a remake of your former prodigy, James. What is your take on that?

Ram Gopal Varma: If you look at my films, most of them have been remakes of some earlier work. For example Satya was a remake of Drohi and Bhoot is a remake of Raat.

I think we all have a few ideas in our mind, that we want to be recapitulated again and again. You might have read a lot of books, but you develop some as your favourites and can’t have enough of it.

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Anuradha Sengupta: The point is perhaps that you do what you want to do. Isn’t it?

Ram Gopal Varma: That is exactly the point.

Anuradha Sengupta: But the question is, how do get people to back you? Because you are one person who has never been at loss of backers.

You have had a good relationship with Jhamu Sugandh, Bharat Shah, the Ke Sera Sera association and now the Adlab Films. They all seem to be backing you, while all you are doing is pleasing yourself?

Ram Gopal Varma: When there is no sure-shot formula as to what is going to work, why not just do what you are willing to do? I don’t think I am taking a risk myself or at the cost of my ‘backers’.

Anuradha Sengupta: But are you not at the risk of repeating yourself ? Because you keep pre-visiting themes thinking that there are ideas that could be reworked in a better way.

Ram Gopal Varma: The very fact that Satya and Bhoot were remake of my earlier works and they worked, clicks me. I think re-visiting things seems to be working for me. I don’t think people watch stories. I think they look at way of telling the story.

Anuradha Sengupta: Don’t you think it is rather a case of running out of ideas?

Ram Gopal Varma: No, I don’t think so. The plot line of shiva might be the same old cliché of an honest cop in a corrupt system.

But the characters, and situations that I have created in this film are completely new. When people see the old version and the new Shiva, they will realise its value.

Anuradha Sengupta: But how many people would really do that? I mean how many of them would get that deep into the craft of your cinema?

Ram Gopal Varma: I am sure they won’t, but they would feel it. Though they may not feel consciously about it.

Anuradha Sengupta: Nach was a film about a woman as a normal human being and yet there was a dissonance about it, isn’t it?

You as a filmmaker were as uncomfortable with this concept as the main protagonist Abhishek Bachchan was with the woman.

Ram Gopal Varma: There was a confusion in that project. Perhaps I have never dealt with a strong character like the one in that film.

It is perhaps because I have always looked at women as sex symbols. Mixing up the glamour and the song element, which was there in my mind at that point of time, was to drive a larger audience. I think there a huge mistake there.

Anuradha Sengupta: Why are you always taking chances, revisiting old themes and making out-of-league films?

Why are you being this ‘dog with a bone’ that you can’t let it go?

Ram Gopal Varma: I guess that gives me a high. Like this film Sholay that I have always loved all these years. I have seen it 27 times and I remember every dialogue and every frame in that film.

Anuradha Sengupta: What is the most riveting dialogue from that film?

Ram Gopal Varma: De jitne gali de sakta hai Thakur is perhaps my favourite one. As long as you are in control of the situation and have the guts to bear the consequences of what you are doing, you can do anything. Somewhere that line symbolizes my ideology.

My well wishers are worried because they think that I might not be able to create a remake of Sholay matching up to the same standard of the original film.

While my enemies are tense because they fear that I might create history with its remake. So, I think moré or less everyone is tense about this project.

Anuradha Sengupta: Are you tense about it?

Ram Gopal Varma: I am tense only for the reason that since I respect and love that film so much, I want to be alert enough to see that I don’t end up making any mistakes.

Anuradha Sengupta: There are rumours at various instances about people not getting paid fully, or not on time. Why is that?

Ram Gopal Varma: I think it can happens in any company in any industry. If someone really thinks like that why is he working here in the first place?

Naturally when I have five films on floor, with so many people working together, some confusions and rumours can arise at times. Unless the people who are facing these problems come up to me directly and discuss it, how can I help?

Being a high profile industry, these things are talked about a little more. I think its not fair for anyone to spread such rumours. It’s not even worth my time to be pondering over these things.

Anuradha Sengupta: You have said that when you look at strong, powerful men the way they are, you feel attracted and inspired. Today as the filmmaker, director and producer that you are, do you feel powerful?

Ram Gopal Varma: I am very strong and powerful. Being strong and powerful to me is to be able to get up in the morning and doing what you want to do.

As long as I can remember I have always done what I have wanted to do in life. No one including myself can stop me from doing what I have wanted to do. What more can I ask for?

Anuradha Sengupta: In the context of Bhoot you said that "it’s the walk to the door and not the resolution that is the exciting part." We hope that you always enjoy the walk to the door.

Ram Gopal Varma: Thank you.