Ritesh Sidhwani’s excel films has changed the bollywood game - and now he’s ready to step on the gas.
Young, lean, with regular features and a fashionable close crop, Ritesh Sidhwani, founder-director of Excel Entertainment, is good-looking enough to be in front of the cameras himself. But, unlike his friend and partner Farhan Akhtar, who stole the show with his rock-star act in their production Rock On!!, Sidhwani’s not biting. “No, no,” the suggestion is shot down with a wave of the hand — “I haven’t thought about it. I don’t think I can act.”
Is it modesty? Or just plain self-awareness — knowing what you can do and what you cannot?
A bit of both, it would appear. We talk about music, and Sidhwani claims he doesn’t understand music much — even though the music of Rock On!! has been acclaimed by everyone for its fresh-sounding track. “I enjoy listening to music, and listen to everything from rock-’n-roll to Hindi film music, but I’m not the kind who comes back from work every day and has to put on something.... and you don’t want to hear me sing.”
But despite — perhaps because of — his ignorance of the nitty-gritty of tune and beat, Sidhwani is a regular at the recording studios. “When I am in the recording studio, I may not be aware of which note is going wrong where, but I know when something is missing. And that’s important feedback because for the music director, I’m like the audience, which too does not have specialised knowledge, but knows when something is not quite right,” he explains.
He’s right, of course, but then success is a great propeller of self-belief. And Sidhwani, only 34, has had success — even if it has been more the popular and critical kind than in terms of moolah flowing in — of a rare order in the nine years since he and Akhtar founded Excel in 1999.
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“We were at school together at Maneckji Cooper in Bandra,” Sidhwani recounts the familiar tale, “and one night — it was a Saturday, I remember — Farhan asked me to come over to his house, said he had a script he wanted me to hear. My first thought on hearing it was that Farhan had not written it — I mean, he hadn’t been doing much until then and there was Javed uncle and Honey auntie [Javed Akhtar and Honey Irani, Farhan’s parents]. I thought Farhan would want to act in it; after all, he had acted in plays throughout school. Incidentally, another friend from school Sharman Joshi directed all those plays and he is a director now. What a role reversal!”
That film was of course Dil Chahta Hai, a pathbreaker, which changed the rules of the Bollywood game in more ways than one. It didn’t just give a fresh lease of life to the careers of its lead actors, Aamir Khan and Saif Ali Khan, but it also brought in a number of technical innovations — sync sound, shooting in a single schedule from a bound script, styling the look of the film — that have since become the norm in the industry.
But if it’s not specialised creative inputs in filmmaking that Sidhwani brings to the table, he more than makes up for it with his shrewd understanding of marketing and the value of the intellectual property of his films, including monetising avenues that future technologies would open up. To give an instance, Sidhwani never sells all future rights to his films, and has never shown his films on cable. “At the time we were selling the video rights for DCH, there were only videocassettes and laser discs,” Sidhwani, who comes from a business family which had a successful home appliances business under the Marlex brand name (since sold to Teflon), recalls.
“But T-Series had inserted ‘DVD’ into the contract. When I asked what DVDs were, T-Series said that it was a new technology. I told them to take DVDs out of the contract, even though they said that they would give me Rs 3 lakh for it. Two years down the line, I had an offer for DVD rights for Rs 25 lakh.”
Excel’s later films have been as hatke (to use that much-abused Bollywood term) — be it Lakshya or Honeymoon Travels or Don and now Rock On!!, which is still going strong at the BO. The film, which released with 224 prints, managed around Rs 21 crore (gross theatrical receipts) in the first two weeks, which is decent, but Sidhwani is immensely kicked at the “emotional connect” that the film has had with audiences. “We had five films releasing with us, plus Singh is Kinng and Bachna Ae Haseeno were still going strong at the theatres. We had a thousand shows in the opening weekend, but on the Friday of the second week we had 1,300 shows. In Delhi, 45 shows were added.”
So what comes next? After producing four films in nine years, Excel is finally ready to step on the gas. “You see, with DCH and the other films Farhan and I were both learning the ropes,” says Sidhwani. “Now we have a team of technicians who understand our sensibility, actors who know our track record and are ready to give us their time and undivided attention.”
The line-up for the next year is ready. “Luck by Chance [Zoya Akhtar’s directorial debut] is ready and we’ll be releasing it by January next,” Sidhwani reveals. “Farhan will begin directing Voice from the Sky early next year. This is a period film, set in 1905 in Calcutta when the telephone first came to India, a children’s film also featuring Akshaye Khanna. Then we have a really fabulous script — Crooked is its working title — to be directed by Abhinay Deo, an Agatha Christie kind of murder mystery of the kind that we’ve not yet seen. We will be looking at a mainstream international release for this.”
International seems to be the next frontier for Excel. “I want to make a superhero film, a real kick-ass one, for the mainstream international market,” says Sidhwani. Given his track record, Excel may just make that one film that will have audiences everywhere sit up and take note of Indian cinema.
