Produced-director Bobby Bedi is back to making films after a two-year hiatus. One of these is a sequel to Bandit Queen.
The energy in Sundeep Singh “Bobby” Bedi’s plush office is palpable. Located in Delhi’s swish Khan Market area, this warmly-lit space is pulsating with excitement as scripts are being read, ideas exchanged and plans drawn up. In the midst of all this is Bedi, supervising the organised chaos. The dozen-odd members of his team seem to be extremely keyed up about the new projects on the anvil, one of them being the sequel to the critically-acclaimed Bandit Queen (1994). With this film, Bedi is all set to don the producer’s hat once again; the last time was in 2009 for the Rishi Kapoor-starrer Chintu Ji that sank without a trace at the box office. Bedi’s films have always had a mixed reaction from audiences and critics alike. Some of his films like Saathiya, Fire and Maqbool won critical acclaim, while others like The Rising: Ballad of Mangal Pandey managed to find commercial success but were panned by critics.
As he ushers us into his cabin, it feels like we have shut the doors on the flurry of activity outside. The colours here are more subdued, lit only by the sunrays filtering in through the blinds. They seem to match the thoughtful, preoccupied mood that Bedi seems to be in at the moment. This becomes obvious when he mulls over our questions for several minutes before coming up with a reply. The walls are adorned with the posters of one of his favourite actors, Raj Kapoor, that he had collected during the making of the four-part documentary series, Kehta Hai Joker. We ask him again about Bandit Queen-II but it seems he doesn’t want to give out much at the moment. “It is still in a developing stage. While it is a sequel, it is going to be an altogether different sort of a film. It is going to be about Delhi, urban Uttar Pradesh and bandits, and will look at how a woman, who has just got out of Tihar, gets elected to the Lok Sabha,” he elaborates. Will the successful duo of Bedi and Shekhar Kapur work its magic together this time around as well? “Well, Kapur is not directing the film but will be involved with the project,” says Bedi.
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Things are now beginning to look up for Bedi, who seemed to have gone silent in the last two years. The year 2009 was bad for him, when his plans to take his company, Kaleidoscope Entertainment, public had to be scrapped due to the stock market crash. “Normally a company that crashes at this stage can’t recover. But it all depends on how quickly you can dismantle your dreams, store them for the future and move on,” says the film-maker. At that time, Bedi was also working on a mammoth $10 million project with Star TV on the Mahabharata which too was dissolved. That’s when Bedi learnt his most valuable lesson about entrepreneurship— how to take such disappointments in your stride and move on.
In such bleak times, Bedi began to find inspiration in the people he met, the things he read and saw around him. “There was this one line from a Satish Gujral interview which really influenced me. Someone asked him, ‘What do you do when you are not painting?’ and he said, ‘I paint!’. It is the same thing with me. Even when I am not making movies, I am thinking and dreaming about cinema. This is what I was born to do,” he says. Another person who deeply influenced him was Francis Ford Coppola, who had seen so much celluloid success but still made money making wine. “He made films because they were his passion, not to make money. So I thought let me get my vineyards in place so that I can get back to making high-quality cinema,” says Bedi.
After all, there were people to be paid, bills to settle; so Bedi decided to settle on other, less risky activities for the time being. As fate would have it, he was approached at the time by the Punjab government to create content for the Khalsa Heritage Memorial Complex at Anandpur Sahib. “It sounded really exciting. The architect of the building was Moshe Safdie, the same person who did the Yitzhak Rabin Center and the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum in Jerusalem,” says Bedi. He and his team have created nine art films in three languages and used traditional painting styles such as Mughal and Pahari to create animation. “Then there are songs that take you through the entire history of Punjab in just eight minutes,” says Bedi who has just returned from Anandpur Sahib after having installed his share of the work.
While he was working on the Khalsa Heritage Memorial Complex, Bedi was approached by the Haryana government to work on the Krishna Museum in Kurukshetra. He decided to add to his skills by not only creating content but designing the building as well. Finally, the long years spent researching the Mahabharata for Star TV were paying off. He began to create comics and animation around Krishna for the museum. The project was not meant to be just a museum; it was meant to be a spectacle. This project too is now in its final stages, leaving Bedi with a newfound skill of museum design. “Now a lot of people are approaching me for this kind of work. Sometimes you create a solution to a problem and the solution turns out to be so much larger than what you had originally thought of,” smiles Bedi.
He is also helping his son Karan with his company, Content Flow, which provides a range of digital education services to corporations and educational institutions. “I realised it would be better if people could actually see how a sine wave moves instead of just reading about it. So I am providing audio-visual content for his company. My Saturday is usually reserved for his team,” says Bedi.
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Now with his vineyards firmly in place, Bedi has found the resources and the time to focus on cinema. His first move in this direction was to move to Delhi from Mumbai and open a studio in Noida. “There is so much cinema-related activity happening here as well. So I thought why not?” he says. Bedi is now working on a movie called Kutch that is centred on the theme of female infanticide. “Although I have directed many documentaries, this is the first feature film that I will direct,” he says.
Another project that he is excited about is an international collaboration with Germany and Canada, called A Fine Line. The film will be directed by Kaizad Gustad who has in the past directed films such as Bombay Boys and Boom. “I believe this is going to be his masterpiece,” says Bedi. The story revolves around a kidney that originates in a farmer’s body in Maharashtra and travels all across the globe. He is also working on a film on the Mahabharata from the point of view of Karna. This too will be an international project, something along the lines of the Gerard Butler-starrer 300 that used the novel super-imposition chroma key technique to create comic book style imagery. Bedi’s team is currently working on the pre-visualisation.
Bedi believes it is his ability to multi-task that makes it easy for him to concentrate on so many different projects. “Also, the problems that I have dealt with in the last two to three years have taught me how to create mental switches. That’s the only way I can deal with things and move from space to space,” says Bedi.