A film reveals its maker's worldview, says Gully Boy director Zoya Akhtar

Every movie has changed her, but Gully Boy more so than any other, Akhtar tells Urvi Malvania & Arundhuti Dasgupta

It’s cold no? Can we reduce the AC please?” Zoya Akhtar is on the dot for our rather late lunch appointment at San:Qui, a restaurant at Four Seasons Mumbai that describes itself as a “dramatic dining room” and promises a “pan-Asian culinary tour”. Whatever that may be, when it comes to the freeze factor, this restaurant is no different from the rest in the city that dial it up to Arctic levels. The plusher they are, the worse it gets (yes, it is a pet peeve). But unlike our rants that are usually met with a studied glance into space, Akhtar’s words result in action. A few suggestions on seating and a word with those in charge of the cooling and we are set. 

Akhtar speaks very fast, but with the assurance of someone who is used to her words being taken seriously. As a director and a woman among a large fraternity of male professionals, she has probably had ample practice. 

“And a green tea please,” she halts the retreating back of our attendant with a firm command. No lunch for me, she announces much to our dismay. On a diet, she wants just green tea and water. Her aide obliges us with a meal while we decide to tuck in later.

For the 46-year-old director who has directed four feature films and a couple of movies for Amazon and Netflix, Gully Boy has been a sublime rush of emotions. Akhtar is just back from Berlin, her first grand showing at an international film festival and she is blown away by the scale of the festival and its audience. The experience of watching her film in an 1,800-seat-theatre on an 80-feet screen is incomparable. “It was just so big and like so weird,” she says sipping her jasmine tea. Much like the experience of making the movie, like a sucker punch to the gut. 

From the people she interacted with to the poetry they exposed her to and the manner in which their lives intertwined, Gully Boy has been an explosive thrill. Akhtar, who is an avid hip-hop and rap fan, says that she was tuned into the American rap scene, but barely knew any in India. “I would never have met these guys if not for the movie,” she says. The young boys who inspired the movie grew up in the slums in Mumbai and in the outskirts of Delhi, listening to Eminem and Tupac Shakur on YouTube. So did she but in a world so far removed from theirs that it could almost be a parallel universe. “The internet is just an amazing shift,” she says. Without having ever stepped out of their localities, leave alone the country, the rappers in India have taken what is primarily an American angst-ridden art form that references local racial inequalities and made it their own. And poetry drew Akhtar to the movie, to the rappers.

Akhtar is a closet poet. Largely thanks to her father, she says. Javed Akhtar who has worked with her on Gully Boy has a poem for every occasion and can still recite large verses from memory. All her growing up years, she says, her father was introducing poetry to her and Farhan (her actor-director brother). She writes, but vows she will never pub lish her verse.

Mother Daisy Irani was their introduction to world cinema. She watched everything from Italian and French to Bollywood staples with her. The love for the craft of movie making is probably her mother’s doing as is — and Akhtar rolls her eyes — a set of rules. “She is a Parsi. So we were told, never be late. Respect money and your work. Switch off the lights when you leave a room.” Even today, she is always the first to a meeting in an industry where hardly anyone turns up on time. 

Akhtar says the four films that she has directed so far have been great learning experiences. Luck by Chance (2009), her first movie did not quite set the box office on fire but it gave her the confidence to take on more. And then came Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (2011) that brought commercial and critical success.

Money is important, she says. At the end of the day, the producer or whoever is putting his money into the venture must get a return on the investment. But what she does not get is the all-consuming obsession that even critics and audiences have developed with the Rs 100-crore club. “Why should it matter how much a movie makes on a weekend? You like it or you don’t. I can understand trade getting interested in movie collections but why the viewer?”  

The digital universe, of Netflix and Amazon and others, liberate her from such constraints. A movie is watched, liked or disliked without its financials being dragged into the conversation. “There is no box office or money pressure. That’s a huge positive.” 

Film making is an expensive medium and it takes deft management of finances and people, apart from, of course, a gripping narrative and competent actors. Art does not thrive in a vacuum or an echo chamber. When she made Dil Dhadakne Do (2015), Akhtar said she learnt a lot about managing people. “It was a huge ensemble cast, taught me a lot about handling relationships. It was also my most nuanced film, and I grew a lot professionally on that set.”

What draws her to a script? How does she choose the story she wants to tell? 

It is always the story first and then everything else. Once the story hooks her in, the rest take shape, the characters and the locations she shoots in, everything. “My locations speak too, they are like characters in the movie.” For Gully Boy, Dharavi, the slum where she shot in Mumbai was a crucial part of the film. She says that the slum was a revelation in many ways. For one, it was the smoothest experience she has had shooting outdoors in a metro, she says. No one really has time to stare or upset a movie crew’s rhythm. They don’t have the time and they just don’t care. “They are just so cool,” she says. But the slums must have been a huge shock for someone who is ensconced in the privileged world of Bollywood. Akhtar bristles at the insinuation but masks her irritation with the practised ease of a professional. “I am not alien to the place (Dharavi). I live here, I know these places. I have shopped there for leather like anyone else.” 

Despite the familiarity, what never fails to shock her is the inequality that is sewn into the fabric of the city. Working on Gully Boy drew an even starker picture of the harsh truth. Many have said that this is perhaps the most political movie she has made so far, also the most boldly and openly so in recent times. 

Akhtar does not respond directly to the observation. No movie can really be apolitical, she says. Be it an entertainer, a thriller or a biopic, a film reveals everything about how one looks at race, gender, love, equality and whatever else you can think of. So in that sense Gully Boy is political but so is every other film. And it is as much about politics as it is about an ordinary human beating the odds to keep his hopes alive.

As a woman and a director what does she make of the odds stacked against women in her industry, in the wake of the #Metoo movement? She feels that Bollywood is unfairly singled out in this case; other industries have worse stories. It is all part of the national narrative around women. “We (women directors/writers) put out a statement that we won’t work with proven offenders. Today, we are in a position to employ people and that is the best way to ensure a safe working environment.” 
 

Akhtar has another appointment to go to and the restaurant is about to close and hunger is gnawing at our insides. We look hopefully at the gentleman who has materialised by our side. He smiles ruefully, the kitchen has closed.