The director's cut

LUNCH WITH BS

" and we immediately get down to the serious business of choosing our starters.

The order for dim sums, steamed prawn with coriander chicken sui mai dumplings and prawn with sesame given, the conversation moves to his school and college days in Hyderabad when he wrote the script for the path-breaking Ankur.

Of course, he had a long way to go before he achieved his dream of becoming a film-maker. One of 10 children, whose father ran a photo studio, Benegal worked in advertising for several years "" he helped create campaigns for Lux during his stint with Lintas. But he always wanted to make films "" cousin Guru Dutt was probably an inspiration "" when Mohan Bijlani of ad distribution company Blaze agreed to finance Ankur.

That was way back in 1972, and Benegal thought the film would probably run over a weekend. He says he was "pleasantly surprised" by the overwhelming reaction "" Ankur went to become a silver jubilee hit in several cities.

"Ankur was crucial; it gave me a reputation for not losing. Otherwise, I could have ended up as a one-film wonder," he says. How does Benegal account for Ankur's success, given that it was such an offbeat film? "People must have got emotionally involved," he reasons.

"If a film works well on an emotional level, it usually succeeds. If it works only at an intellectual level, you can be sure that it will fail."

Our main course arrives "" sauteed chicken in black bean sauce, light egg fried rice and mushroom with bamboo shoots. Benegal incidentally, loves Hyderabadi Mughlai food, too "" and remembers with delight the kachi biryani and lagan ka gosht of his college days when he devoured the films of John Ford, William Wyler, Goddard, Vittorio de Sica, Kurosawa and, of course, Guru Dutt and Satyajit Ray.

"The person who seemed to who liberate one from the shackles of one's own mind was Ray, with Pather Panchali," he says. "I think that was the turning point for me. It liberated my mind as to what was possible in cinema."

The admiration was very evident in Benegal's much talked-about documentary on Ray, but Benegal considers his television series Bharat Ek Khoj more of a challenge "" even though TV is less satisfying than cinema. "We were traversing 3,000 years in two years. It was probably the first time I truly learnt about history," he reminisces.

What about his films? After Ankur, Benegal was virtually unstoppable; he made film after film "" 25 movies in a 32-year career; an oeuvre that gave parallel cinema an altogether different hue making it more appealing to the common man.

Whether it was the Portuguese-Goan mystique of Trikaal, the novel narration of Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda, the fairy-tale romance of Zubeida or Manthan, where the country's milk co-operatives came together to fund the film that told their story. Which does he consider his favourite? Benegal doesn't name one, but admits that he really enjoyed making Bhumika.

"It gave me an opportunity to go into a whole period, which was so interesting and in some ways a history of the film industry," he says. He also worked with some of the best names in parallel cinema "" Smita Patil, Shabana Azmi, Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri and Kulbhushan Kharbanda "" in a close-knit circle that spanned cinema after cinema. "For many years it was a kind of family," Benegal says.

The camaraderie between the actors and director was the good part. Benegal recalls how during the making of his latest film Netaji, he had to improvise to deal with the shortage of raw stock, especially colour stock.

"I worked out a whole form for the film "" part in black and white and the rest in colour "" different kinds of colour, according to the period. Although it was not my original thinking, it eventually worked out well. In fact, the film might not have been as good if it had been fully in colour," he concedes.

The conversation shifts to Benegal's contemporaries and the younger crop of film-makers. Benegal is all admiration for the craft of Govind Nihalani (who was his cameraman for the first 10 feature films) and Adoor Gopalakrishnan, who he believes is probably the best film maker of his generation.

"I like Rituparna Ghosh very much "" a lot of what Aparna Sen does and some of Gautam Ghosh's work," he says. He also admires Mani Ratnam. "He is an intelligent filmmaker, with a good control over the medium, and Nayakan is my favourite."

What about Ritwick Ghatak, with whom he did a long interview for a magazine called Montage in the late 1960s?

Benegal observes that Ghatak's mind seemed to be always alive and that he had an ability to inspire young people. "He was a fascinating human being and probably found his metier more as a teacher than as a film maker. It is difficult to judge his work "" a lot of his work remained as potential rather than having got realised," he feels.

Among the younger crop, he mentions Ram Gopal Varma, Mira Nair and Gurinder Chadha. Chadha's account of multicultural life in Los Angeles, What's Cooking, he says, was an exceptional film, although it didn't do too well.

Benegal also likes the work of out-and-out commercial directors like Karan Johar, even though they may be completely different in style. What is the appeal of such films? "Even if they don't have a strong storyline, the important thing is that they make for enjoyable cinematic entertainment," he says.

"Younger directors," he continues, "are looking at cinema in a entirely different way. Their attitude is different." How so? "For the older filmmakers, tradition was not be touched and whatever you did, ultimately you had to accept tradition. This is particularly true of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. But the younger lot grapple with tradition, much like they did before Independence."

Why is it that nobody makes the delightful films of the genre that Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Basu Chatterji represented? "The problem," Benegal explains, "is the level of risk. Films like these may not lose money but in India you want to hit the jackpot; so financiers won't find such propositions exciting. Essentially, the cost of exploiting a film has gone up tremendously, since you need to buy so much more media space to market the film."

Is that why most films seem to be catering to the lowest common denominator, I wonder. "It happens in most parts of the world. There will always be that kind of work and there will be the kind of work that tries to break through," he reasons. But isn't there more of it today?

"No, it's just that there's more media so it gets projected more. Also, when mass media and, therefore, mass culture take over, things tend to becomes standardised and cater for the growing middle class, whose values have changed."

Still, don't filmmakers have a responsibility? "Many are possibly not aware of the kind of influential power that they have. And each individual filmmaker says, 'I am only making my one brick, why are you blaming me for the edifice?' This is the problem. You do have a responsibility, which is to be aware of the power of manipulation you have. That should be a sobering quality. These days, sometimes they leave it to censor board; it's a kind of game they play."

As Benegal declines coffee or dessert, I ask about his magnum opus Netaji, a three-hour 40 minute film that is is slated to hit theatres shortly.

"As a child, the Indian National Army caught my imagination. There was a great sense of adventure and I had an uncle who was in the INA and won the Mahavir Chakra. His stories about the INA played on one's mind. Besides, Bose has been a fascinating figure in Indian politics "" a person you associate with adventure."

At 69, Benegal still has the enthusiasm he had when he made Ankur. Even now, he's working on two scripts "" a comedy and a musical, operatic in structure. Is there any film he wishes he'd made?

Several. "Who would have not wanted to make Citizen Kane or the Godfather trilogy? Who would have not wanted to make a film with the incredible freshness of Pather Panchali "" even after 50 years?" True. But a man who has made an Ankur, a Manthan and a Charandas Chor, set a new trend in cinema, and captivated audience for a quarter of a century, need not feel he is any less.