The audience may not always discuss what the filmmaker is saying but one hopes they will.Deepa Mehta to open the festival. I try to use the craft of filmmaking for that. But who will prepare them? The audience may have a delusion about themselves we are often scared to point that out but that’s the job of an artist in its basic form. We are told the audience is not prepared to watch this. The bigger challenge is bringing people into the theatres. How do you navigate that terrain as a filmmaker then? It reinforces rather than questions our primary beliefs. Cinema is the most right-wing of mediums all over the world. The films promote that and don’t rattle people because there is money to lose. The mainstream is polite, it doesn’t make you feel uncomfortable. It’s not intentional but rebellion is brought to the fore in my films more because our cinema is conventional, traditional even. When the extreme form of rebellion in our films is getting married to the person of your choice, anything seems like a rebellion (laughs). Rebellion is at the core of all your films. In fact, my hero, played by Sushant Singh Rajput, is addicted to lozenges. They aren’t your stereotypical cool bandits smoking a beedi in style. So instead of showing bravado, we show fear and, through that, we show their strength. Their motivations may have been more than that of a thief but, in a battle, all you do is save your ass. And if they struck a good deal, they would use a part of the money to build a temple. The good ones were known to keep their victim well. Their primary way of making money, more than looting, was kidnapping. There were battles with the police, who they viewed not as law enforcers but oppressors. The trailers suggest that the men with guns are also vulnerable and afraid.īasically, bandits were fighting for some kind of honour theirs were mostly revenge killings. You see their lungs getting punctured, you see them dying horrible deaths. Sonchiriya doesn’t glamorise action like, say, Ek Tha Tiger (2012). Everything was about life, death and honour.
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Yet, it’s larger than life because the stories of the real bandits were indeed that.
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But why would you want to live such a life? Because you believe it has a purpose. You cannot escape what awful lives the bandits led. It has certain tropes and elements that define the genre, like the quest for a treasure, journeying through harsh lands, trying to save someone’s life.īut the Westerns romanticised the outlaw life. Sure, we have had Sholay (1975), Mera Gaon Mera Desh (1971), Khote Sikkay (1974) and so on, but they were primarily derived from the Westerns. That’s something I couldn’t wrap my head around. Yet, we only have two films on the subject. India’s modern bandit culture lasted for at least half a century. How do you manage to incorporate the genre of the Westerns in such a film? What if you have spent all your life believing in it, defending it and fighting for it but are proven wrong? It’s about finding your inner truth, and that is the treasure in this film, not a bag of gold. The film digs deeper, to explore how caste is connected with a person’s identity. We wanted to go beyond stating that the caste system is bad. But what happens if, all of a sudden, you begin to question what you have believed in? The film isn’t a commentary on caste. They also considered upholding caste their duty. The former were often pious, they would take revenge but not rape the women. So, there were good bandits and bad bandits. The film doesn’t look at the caste system from our lens but theirs where caste is preordained, it’s a law of nature. Gangs of bandits were closely aligned with their caste identity. How does Sonchiriya tread this territory? There have been powerful films on caste recently. But it’s not action that makes violence look nice. This allowed us to talk about issues of today, like caste, and do it in the garb of an action film. We thought let’s make an action film that’s not about a bag of money but one where what they think is more important. They didn’t view themselves like bank robbers they had an ideology they followed, which gave a meaning to their lives.
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I found their lives fascinating, that they thought of themselves a certain way. What about the research made you focus on bandits? Since we had done so much work on the bandits, we chose to focus on it. But after some months of research, we realised it was turning into an epic saga, whereas we wanted to do something leaner. But we started with a different story, a political film where the Emergency had a direct role to play. When you attempt to explore that space in India, Chambal or Rajasthan becomes a natural choice. I started with the idea of making an action-adventure film that is a take on the Westerns.