Good films need good casting. A simple truth that has given rise to a new profession.
Abhimanyu Ray was hooked to movies when he worked as art director on Pride, a Japanese film. The Delhi-based artist moved to Mumbai in 2001 as an assistant director while working on J P Dutta’s Line of Control. Soon after came Rakesh Mehra’s Rang De Basanti, for which Ray did the casting. That is when he found his calling. Ray figured he enjoyed the entire process of filling real people into the characters of a script. So in 2004, Ray decided to become a casting director; and Chak De India, Rocket Singh, Kabul Express and Teen Patti, among others, followed.
Ray’s journey is not unusual. Many of the others who have recently ventured into casting, come from arts or mass communication backgrounds. Alternatively, they are assistant directors (ADs) who have traditionally doubled as casting directors.
However, several factors are making casting an important function and, therefore, profession. The changes in the film business in India have unleashed the demand for good films. The largest part of the Rs 14,000-odd crore film industry, by value, is the Hindi movie segment. This has seen an amazing amount of experimentation as audience tastes sated by TV and other media have evolved. So, there wasn’t just the need to tell a good story, but to tell it well with characters audiences accepted and enjoyed. It isn’t enough to have a best friend or college jerk, but have really good ones, like the onces in Wake Up Sid or 3 Idiots.
Casting, hence, is becoming critical to the whole process of organised film making. But is the money good? Each film could bring in anywhere between Rs 1.5 lakh to Rs 5 lakh for a casting director. This combination of deep involvement with the creative process and decent money is enticing young people like Ray or Atul Mongia to focus on casting as a profession.
Mongia, another Mumbai-based casting director, reckons only 20 per cent of Hindi films use casting directors. It is even rarer for non-Hindi films to use them. Much depends on the studio, the director and how much they believe in professional casting. But, typically, this is the way it goes.
UTV, Yash Raj, Eros or any other studio that produces films usually has a script in place long before the project is finalised. The lead stars are chosen by the director and the studio, since that is a commercial decision. But there are, in any film, a large number of ‘speaking parts’ as they are called. These were traditionally filled by getting ADs to ‘find someone’.
But two things are swinging the argument in favour of hiring professionals. First, it has been proved that the support cast can really make a difference. Watch Love, Sex Aur Dhokha; Black Friday; Luck By Chance; A Wednesday or even Rocket Singh and you know what we mean. Some of them worked, others didn’t. But the fact remains that not one character in any of these films seemed like he was not meant to be the person on the screen.
Can you imagine Chak De India, without any one of those 16 girls who play the down and out Indian women’ hockey team? A thousand girls were auditioned over four months before Ray found what the script and director had in mind.
Second, a good supporting cast that doesn’t necessarily include famous names (say the usual Anupam Kher or Paresh Rawal) could push down costs for a film, so professional casting pays. Mongia reckons that studios find it worth their while to sign, say three-film deals, at lower rates with fresh or upcoming actors. Since a huge chunk of the budget is in any case eaten by stars, any saving on the other front helps.
It is, however, a tough profession for now. There is no formal training that casting directors get because there isn’t any available, even in Hollywood. It is a profession where you learn on the job and work by instinct and the director’s vision. The latter, in fact is the first step to getting good results.
Mongia,32, operated a acting workshops in Mumbai before he got pulled into casting. He hit it off with Dibakar Bannerjee and ended up casting 75 speaking parts in the critically-acclaimed Love, Sex Aur Dhoka (2010). And though that sounds easy in a country where almost half the population is dying to go into acting, it isn’t, as Ray points out. “The complication begins with the society and its diversity. In Hollywood, the same man could be a Texan ranger, a head honcho with the mafia, or even a gardener. You literally need to change his clothes and work a little on his accent. Here, class and ethnicity creep in. Then there is dialect, skin colour, feature, behaviour, religion, even social strata,” says Ray.
Mongia agrees. “When I get a list of, say 30 characters of different looks, ages etc to be cast, the first question is where will you find them?,” he says. He usually picks up aspiring actors who leave their portfolios with casting directors and co-ordinators, or from acting and drama schools. The best casting directors have the best databases.
Mongia reckons that a good database would have 5,000 to 10,000 names. But that is not enough, these have to be clustered – on age, looks, and so on. Once you select a list of people to audition for the part, the actual physical work of auditioning begins.
The ultimate kick, of course, is “getting the right person for the right job”. “I feel happy even if the watchman is well cast,” says Nandini Shrikent. Shrikent, 35, has cast for several Indian films such as Luck By Chance and Lakshya and helped with casting on some Hollywood biggies like The Darjeeling Limited and The Bourne Supremacy.
Not all films, however, are fun. “Certain scripts are extremely star-oriented. The rest are simply to fill in space. For instance, where you require the typical friend who does not have much to do or a standard father or mother. They, too, need to be cast but it is not challenging enough,” says Ray. He continues, however, to stay hooked to this new uncharted profession.
