Indians sweep Hollywood off its feet

Mumbai: He's the poster boy for how the West was won. His eerie films with their trademark twist in the tale may have no desi touch, and technically he may be an American citizen, but India still cheers Pondicherry born M Night Shyamalan's Hollywood road to fame.

He is one of the few to have claimed his share of the Hollywood entertainment pie after filmmaker Mira Nair put India in the spotlight with her Oscar nominated film, Salaam Bombay.

Nair has consciously used her Indian experience in her most popular film Monsoon Wedding. And it's this Indian experience that everyone is tuning into.

So much so that Hollywood studio Fox Searchlight has greenlit Nair's American remake of the Bollywood blockbuster Munnabhai MBBS which she will film in 2008 with Hollywood actor, Chris Tucker in the lead role.

“It's a big thing for us politically - West buying a film from Bollywood. The name I cooked up immediately - Gangsta MD. Gangsta with an ‘A’. The script is written for Chris Tucker,” Mira Nair says.

Meanwhile, Bollywood's very own Shekhar Kapur, who shot to fame in the West after his Elizabeth snagged a bunch of Oscar nominations in 1998, and followed that up with the mega-budget Four Feathers starring Heath Ledger and Kate Hudson. But, that tanked at the box-office.

Currently, Kapur is filming The Golden Age, his sequel to Elizabeth, once again starring Cate Blanchett as the Virgin Queen.

While he is glad that the West is finally recognising popular Indian cinema, he hints that the attention may be coming a little too early.

“Everyone's looking at us. India is the buzzword. But they're looking at us when we're not ready, when we're still getting dressed. They can buy our animation studios. They have to stop thinking of us as just a new market, they have to think of us as equal collaborators,” Kapur says.

Taking the next step forward towards that collaboration is Ashok Amritraj. He is the producer of American films like, Bandits, Raising Helen, Original Sin, and Double Impact.

Amritraj has recently signed up with Adlabs Films to produce and collaborate many Hollywood pictures.

Meanwhile, some Indian filmmakers have been making films on subjects close to their home and heart.

Deepa Mehta was invited by Hollywood filmmaker George Lucas to direct the final episode of the Indiana Jones Chronicles, but it's her most recent film Water, based on the lives of Indian widows in the 1930s, that has emerged as the highest grossing Hindi film in North America, beating such local superhits as Rang De Basanti and Fanaa.

And despite the cold shoulder America gave to Bride and Prejudice, there is excitement towards Gurinder Chadha's movie version of the hit TV series Dallas that she's set to direct, with Jennifer Lopez and John Travolta.

Perhaps, we can expect an Indian summer in Hollywood sometime soon.

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