Kanu Behl: Manoj Bajpayee wakes up with the same hunger every day

New Delhi, Nov 23 (IANS) Like every Kanu Behl film, even this one operates on multiple levels and boasts diverse layers. His latest ‘Dispatch’ was conceived from a two-pronged thought process: a deep dive into a real journalist’s life and not treating him/her as some sort of hero out to break stories for the greater good in the world.

It was important for him to take a human look into this world and see Joy’s character with as much depth as possible, given all his frailties, hubris, and greed at play. “So the desire, together with my co-writer Ishani Banerjee, was to do a Faustian piece on Joy where we explore the individual’s responsibility in creating the world we live in today”, Behl tells IANS.

With the steller Manoj Bajpayee playing the lead, Behl says what amazes him each day about him is that even after a stellar career like his where he has broken several cliches and played multiple characters with rich aplomb, he wakes up with the same hunger every day and comes to set devoted to playing the character he’s deep diving into next.

“That coupled with his total support of the film he is working on, and not any of the other trappings that come with being a star, is frankly like seeing a unicorn”, says Behl. “As soon as I had finished the script, I knew there was no one else who could successfully play this part. It was a dream team, having Manoj Bajpayee and then Ronnie Screwvala as a producer by my side on the

film, who stood by us like a rock”, he shares.

This movie is coupled with the disturbing larger context that we live in today where the wealth gap is increasing and a certain part of the ‘haves’ are hidden beneath this opaque, almost foggy screen, where it’s almost impossible to know who is doing what and for what reasons. Inequality and its manifestations almost seem like they are beyond our realm of understanding now because of the power centres the rich have built around them.

But why a film on journalism? The filmmaker behind critically acclaimed movies like ‘Agra’ and ‘Titli’ asserts that ‘Despatch’ explores a fast-changing print world where news is going digital and a middle-aged crime journalist, Joy Bag, finds himself quickly becoming irrelevant. In his desperation to break the next big story, and fulfill his desires, he becomes part of a world he comes to dread. And the film takes on this journey with him right to the end where Joy’s gaze

becomes a searing gaze into the mirror.

“The world of crime journalism becomes the perfect setting for this sort of a journey as it is in these types of worlds that we can explore the margins of human apathy and desire for survival over everything else”, he says.

Behl undertook extensive research for more than 18 months before the first shot was taken, meeting scores of journalists, lawyers, supari shooters, cops and many other people involved in the tapestry.

“Speaking to each one of them multiple times and trying to create some pictures of what happens on the street. The idea was to explore the multiple instances of journalists doing their jobs and understanding their hurdles and yet having the freedom to look into the ‘real’ lives they lead, understanding their compulsions and pressures. We were aiming to take an empathetic yet objective look at this microcosm”, he says.

Considering his films are screened at the best of festivals across the world, does he feel any ‘pressure’ with ‘Despatch’ too?

Stressing that he does not look at any of his films as vehicles of personal aggrandisement to have the desire to be at a particular festival, he adds that the root reason for being at a festival is to always make a small film bigger for it to be able to fight the heft of more ‘commercial’ fare.

Beyond that, the film is a beast in itself and has its first fidelity to its audience and the need for it to be shared with the people it’s meant to be watched by.

Talking about his process of the film, he says it was seeded by the initial thought are all heroes born out of lack? And the moment we started to explore that thought, why are only certain people out to ‘prove’ something to the world and not some others, that ‘lack’ started to rear its head up.

In a country of over 1.4 billion people, everyone is trying to survive, even if it means stepping over another human being.

“The moment we had this individual gaze on the film, everything else got informed by it. Whether it was the cinematography by Siddharth Diwan, Production Design by Shruti, costume by Fabeha Khan or the sound design by Pritam Das, everything in the film was seen through that lens”, he says.

Talk to him about the fact that even though some international films have been emerging out of India and leaving this mark in the best of international film festivals, but seldom get a theatrical release, and the director feels it is the larger system that we have created for ourselves. He also does not feel that the advent of streamers has helped because it has led to a false, reductive,

narrative of making films by numbers and data.

“Film is and will always be an individual form of expression – even the most commercial film – as it’s led by a group of people coming together to create an image of a specific time and space. If data could reflect emotion then we would be living in a very different world. To truly get people back to the theatres and reinstall the audience’s belief in the non-plasticity they’re engaging with, we need to have better producers, better distribution and better execs at streamers, who are not looking at streaming as TV++”, says.

—IANS.

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