One of my ‘colleagues’ in the Committee is Matthew Robbins, an American (or Gringo, as they call it here) . I am excited by what I gather about him from the accompanying brochure and wonder whether I will ever get to talk to such a Hollywood big-shot. The brochure says (in Spanish, here translated into English):
Matthew Robbins is a director, producer, scriptwriter and script consultant. He was part of the group of filmmakers who turned around American cinema from within in the 1970s along with George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Spielberg, Brian de Palma, Cohen Brothers, etc. Founder of the American Zoetrope Company along with Lucas and Coppola, he collaborated on Lucas’ first film THX 1138. He won the Best Screenplay award at Cannes in 1974 for The Sugarland Express directed by Spielberg. He later acted and wrote Close Encounters of the Third Kind, wrote and directed the fantasy film Dragonslayer in 1981. In 1997, he started his collaboration with Guillermo del Toro for whom he wrote the script for Mimic, sci-fi horror film which marked the beginning of the brilliant Mexican filmmaker’s Hollywood career.
As we come out of the hall one day, he turns to me and asks, ‘Do you understand English’?
He suspects I am Indian but isn’t sure by the way I look. Physically, Latin Americans can often be confused with Indians (of India).
You are so much a part of American film history, I tell him as we sit down at the Cine Encanto Cafetaria.
Unfortunately, that’s true, he says.
I don’t really understand initially why he is so enthused about the fact that I am Indian and live in Bombay. I soon find out the reason. He has so many stories to tell and is almost dying to do so. Over the next hour and a half, I listen to all his close encounters of the Bollywood kind.
Nearly two years ago, he spent a long time (a total of 7 weeks) in Bombay and elsewhere and lived at the Sun n Sand Hotel on the Juhu beach. It is overwhelming to be in Havana and hear a blue-eyed American in an elegant hat talk about his experiences with Vishal Bharadwaj, Gulzar, Amitabh Bachchan, Ajay Devgun, Sanjay Dutt, Ramgopal Varma, Ronnie Screwala and so many more. As a close friend of Mira Nair, he had attended the Maisha (!?) workshop in South Africa and that is where he met Vishal Bharadwaj.
He immensely admires Vishal and appreciates him both as a human being and as an artist. He was also instrumental in putting Vishal in touch with the DOP of Guillermo del Toro (which I saw him filming in Whistling Woods) and also functioned as second unit director for Coppola who was hugely impressed with Maqbool and Omkara. If it wasn’t for Vishal, he wouldn’t have anything to do with Indian films. He has been taken to many screenings in Bombay multiplexes where he said he was subjected to Shah Rukh Khan’s Om Shanti Om which he hated with a passion as much as he disliked No Smoking. He disliked practically everything he saw and wanted nothing to do with Bollywood but got embroiled with it when Vishal told him that he always wanted to make a war film and so he wrote for him a film which was on a huge scale (possibly the most expensive ever made in India) with UTV funding it. The script unfolded nicely and since Vishal wanted good opportunities for composing music (with lyrics by Gulzar), he had the idea of a singer who comes to entertain the troops during the Japanese invasion of the Indian northeast during World War II. He called it Julia and was happy with the screenplay which he wrote at an astonishing pace, according to his own statement. For building up the story, Matthew said he used the biographical material of ‘Fearless Nadia’/ Hunterwali (Mary Evans Wadia, born in Australia with an English-Greek descent) – the swashbuckling heroine of 1930s to 1950s Indian cinema. Everything was set up at breakneck speed and the music was ready and then just a week before the shoot, the main star Sanjay Dutt - “the guy who was caught with guns” - quit the film without any rhyme or reason and any prior notification. In fact they had signed up the internationally well-known actress Franca Potente (of Run Lola Run and Che fame) on a ‘pay or play’ basis for a million dollars (which meant the producer had to pay the actress even if the film was abandoned or postponed for whatever reason). So UTV was in deep trouble and Vishal was heartbroken.
The most fascinating aspect of the preproduction was when Sanjay Dutt’s parole officer was sent by the Indian government and was acting like a private secretary, rolling out the shooting schedule on a table and indicating the dates during which Sanjay may be allowed by the court to shoot. The project was abandoned at a huge cost and meanwhile Vishal finished Kaminey with UTV where he supposedly got the rights of Julia back in exchange for the film he made for them. Matthew still believes that the project would be resuscitated very soon and he would be back in Bombay, the crazy city, but this time he would be there with his wife.
He was invited by Aamir Khan at his house in Panchgani. He had a new wife at that time and Aamir told him that a close friend of his was shooting a film but it got so messed up that he had to take it over as director. He was hugely distracted and apologized profusely for not being able to give him more time. He was shooting Taare Zameen Par, the story of a dyslexic child that would eventually become a huge commercial success and would also get considerable critical acclaim. Matthew didn’t know that and so he was very happy to know from me that Aamir pulled it off after all the distress he saw him going through.
He woke up one morning to find that Aamir Khan had left for the shoot while he was still living in his bunglow. He had his lonely breakfast in a huge dining table that reminded him of the dining table in Citizen Kane. The house was beautiful, overlooking the mountains and the furniture was all immaculate as well as the bathroom fittings, all of which dated back to mid of the 19th century. The bathroom, he said, was particularly huge. Aamir was quite a gentleman and was genuinely distracted and in deep trouble at that moment. Matthew was puzzled by the way the cooks and butlers treated him at Aamir Khan’s house. He was the maharaja to be accorded the highest treatment. He was never allowed to even open any car door. While he was at the Sun and Sand Hotel, Vishal sent over his car every evening so that he could have dinner at his place and not eat alone in the hotel. The cook was absolutely amazing and he enjoyed every bit of the Indian food he ate.
For location searching on Julia, he had travelled far and wide within India, particularly in West Bengal, Maharashtra and Moosourie. He was impressed how comfortable Indians were with technology and how Vishal continued to work on the music while still on the move. The roads in West Bengal were … well, they couldn’t be called roads. Once while travelling through a forest in Mussourie, his car stopped when they saw a beautiful small tiger cub smashed and killed in the middle of the road. His heart bled on seeing this. He wanted to go out and take a photo but the driver wouldn’t allow him as they thought that the mother tiger is certainly around and would attack anybody who would go out. Matthew’s family got the shock of their life when they saw the photo of the dead tiger which he also showed me from his laptop a few days later.
By this time as he was meeting more and more 'filmy' people in Bombay, many prominent filmmakers wanted him to write for them including Ramu (Ramgopal Varma) and even Bachchan. It was surprising that Bachchan wanted him to write King Lear with him in mind when in reality he must have just finished making The Last Lear with Rituparno Ghosh.
Strange, isn’t it, Matthew asked. Why did he want that?
May be, I said, he had read King Lear on the occasion of making that film (which revolved around the play) and was intrigued how much the character befitted him where he could hold centrestage without getting into plots of romantic stories with young girls as in Nishabd or Cheeni Kum.
During the shoot of Aag (or Ramu’s Sholay), he found it funny how Bachchan babbled for 3 minutes in front of the camera. The extremely noisy Arriflex started. He couldn’t imagine why they are doing this when a top star is talking.
The sound is only for reference, Ramu told him. You see all the noise around. Do you think it is possible to do direct sound on location shoots in India?
Rubbish, whispered Vishal Bharadwaj into his ears. Most young filmmakers these days prefer sync sound.
He was surprised that in the middle of the retake of the 3 minute dialogue, the reel snapped and the shot had to be cancelled. If you had a camera assistant like that in Hollywood who didn’t check how much reel was inside, he would have been fired on the spot and would not get a job again in his life. He would have to move to the East Coast. (Now that was a sweet but nasty joke about what he thought about indie filmmaking in NYC.) However, in Bombay, it was normal and they just moved to the next take.
He had seen Bachchan’s pictures everywhere and one day saw him in the front page of Times of India in the clothes of a bandit. That very day, he was invited to Ramu’s set and found Bachchan sitting in exactly the same dress and same pose that he had seen in the papers that morning. He was utterly confused.
Later when he told AB that he was surprised that the 100 Rupees note didn’t carry his picture in it, Bachchan’s response was graceful.
‘He gave a very aristocratic smile’.
I know, Bachchan said.
‘This guy must be so used to adulation’.
When he saw the shoot of Ramu’s Aag, Matthew said he knew it was going to be the worst film ever. Later he was again invited to the set of Nishabd where Ramu wanted to show him about to commit suicide. The way the camera moved in that scene was utterly hideous. But Matthew had a brainwave. He called Vishal to his side and told him what if before he commits suicide, his hands travel to his pocket and there he finds a paper in which is written one of the poems that this Jiya girl wrote. Vishal said it’s a great idea and went ahead with how the whole scene could evolve. When they got very excited with it, they called Ramu and ran it past him though they knew obviously it was too late and can’t be shot anymore.
Ramu kept saying, ‘I don’t understand, I don’t understand’.
And then when Vishal explained the entire scene to him at length in Hindi, Ramu suddenly said, ‘Great’.
Matthew was amazed how Ramu instantly called his assistant on his cell and asked them to arrange a shoot immediately on a terrace and he saw the scene being shot right away. He was very impressed with the dynamism.
Since I do not recall seeing any such shot in the film, Matthew concluded that the scene must have been deleted later.
I told him about the furore over Ramu during the Mumbai Attacks and he had nothing but contempt for his sensationalism.
He had great admiration for Gulzar. He had been invited to the house of John Abraham and Bipasha Basu. He had little regard for the acting skills of either of them.
‘She is sexy and knows how to use it’.
He was amazed how they had a balcony, secluding themselves from any possible human being watching them.
While travelling by train with Vishal and Supratik Sen (a Bengali like you, he said, – how did he know that!) in a first class train, he found himself with two ‘middle class businessmen’ who didn’t recognize Vishal. With some trepidation, they asked him at some point where he was from. When he said he was from California, they asked him, are the other two men also from California? Matthew was hugely surprised by the oddity of the question and I provided him with the cultural decoding that the awe that these gentlemen evinced had perhaps less to do with race than economic status evoked by ‘California’ and further reinforced by their association with a white man.
A few days later at a beach-house party, Matthew narrated some other amusing incidents of his India experience that involved a jewellery shopping-spree at a private house guided by Vishal Bharadwaj’s wife (that made him extremely popular that Christmas) and her ‘strange’ behaviour at the dining table where she never ate with the guests but only served them. 'I want you to explain this to me', he said; 'Why did she do that'?
Some more cultural decoding followed from my end and he looked a bit demystified.
'But why did Sanjay Dutt do that to us? Why did he abandon the project at the last moment?'
Was this a matter of cultural decoding, I wondered. What do you think?
'I can only guess', he said. 'I think at some point Sanjay realised that the film was not exactly about him and that disappointed him.'
Didn't he read the script in the first place? Didn't he sign the contract?
'I don't know'.
I felt ashamed to tell Matthew that Indian stars (as against the actors) rarely read screenplays unless they have to, at the last moment. It all depends on the pitching and the narration. At the time of narration, the director narrates the story differently to get the star excited about his role and give his nod. Sanjay, who is particularly infamous for not reading screenplays, must have read it precisely a week before the shoot, under duress and with some degree of seriousness and that is when he may have felt that he was not the centre of the universe.
Will Julia ever be made?
Now that Kaminey has released today to rave reviews, let's hope that it is made now. And that would bring Matthew back to Bombay!
'This time I will definitely go with my wife', he said. 'She is particularly excited about the jewellery shopping spree'.
