Veenu Sandhu traces the collaboration between a reticent writer and an unconventional filmmaker in 7 Khoon Maaf.
The movie, which is based on Ruskin Bond’s story Susanna’s Seven Husbands, will see the 76-year-old writer make his silver screen debut. What has made the reclusive writer appear in the film? Bond and Bhardwaj were not available for comment. While the writer was travelling, the filmmaker was busy giving final touches to 7 Khoon Maaf. But others involved in the film know why it's happened. “Bhardwaj and Bond have known each other very well,” says the film’s creative producer, Vikas Bahl of UTV Motion Pictures. “Bhardwaj came to us with a short story (Susanna's Seven Husbands) written by Bond and we all instantly fell in love with it.”
Bhardwaj then approached Bond with the request to expand the story. In the end, the original four-page story turned into a 200-page movie script which had a particular character that Bhardwaj's casting director felt could be played best by Bond. But getting the shy writer before the camera was easier said than done. It took several months and a personal visit by Bhardwaj to Mussoorie to coax the writer to give acting a shot before Bond finally agreed. Those associated with the film say only Bhardwaj could have convinced the writer to do this.
Bond’s costar in his first, though brief, appearance will be Priyanka Chopra, in the role of the woman who kills each of her seven husbands over a span of 45 years. In the film, she tells Bond that when she's in his company, she feels “calm” and “comfortable”. But what about Bond himself; how comfortable was he when facing the camera? “Quite,” says Bahl. “He’s a one-shot artiste, though we did have to go for some retakes.”
For Bhardwaj, who has incidentally built a house right next to Bond's in Landour, another film based on a book is just a step forward in the journey he started years ago when he entered showbiz. Some of his very first projects, with lyricist and filmmaker Gulzar, were based on books: Jungle Book and Alice in Wonderland. His later films were also adaptations of books and Shakespearean plays — Maqbool (from Macbeth), Omkara (from Othello) and the critically-acclaimed The Blue Umbrella (again based on a Bond story).
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Any director will tell you that turning a book into a film is never an easy task. “Reading is not the same as watching a film,” says Shyam Benegal, the first director to make a film based on a book written by Bond. That was over 30 years ago, in 1978, when Benegal directed the Shashi-Kapoor-starrer Junoon, an adaptation of Bond’s A Flight of Pigeons. “Making a film from a book is a process of transformation and not illustration, wherein you would try to illustrate everything the book conveys,” he adds.
Benegal himself took some creative liberties with some scenes and characters in Bond’s A Flight of Pigeons. For example, in the book, when the characters played by Jennifer Kapoor and Nafisa Ali escape from captivity towards the end, they are rescued by Sikh soldiers. In the movie, however, they hide in a church. “The character of Shashi Kapoor in Bond’s book is boorish, but in my movie, he's not so,” says Benegal, adding that he took Bond's book “as a spring board and added other dimensions to it”. Asked whether Bond was bothered by this tweaking of his original story, Benegal says, “I don’t know, I never got to talk to him about it.”
This wasn’t the first time a story was tweaked in a film. The ending of Satyajit Ray’s Shatranj Ke Khiladi is not the same as Premchand’s short story. In the story, the two noblemen of Lucknow kill each other over a game of chess even as the forces of East India Company enter their defenceless city. In the film, the two noblemen, played by Sanjeev Kumar and Saeed Jaffrey, survive. Their lives had become so decadent, Ray argued, that they had lost the nerve to kill.
With 7 Khoon Maaf, however, this is one issue neither Bond nor Bhardwaj has to worry about. “In this case, the film's director has collaborated with the writer. So the writer’s participation is much greater,” says Benegal. Bahl agrees. “Usually a film is made out of a book. Here, it was the other way round. This was a book written for the film,” he says. Asked whether Bond had to travel to Mumbai often for the project, he says, “Not really, he just let his mind do the travelling.”
The movie releases on February 18 and it’s been a ride making it, says Bahl. “Even though it's the story of a woman who kills her seven husbands, it's not judgmental. It does not stick to any convention.” Something like Ruskin’s bond with Bhardwaj.