Kangana Ranaut’s name has become almost interchangeable with Simran, the doughty character she plays in director Hansal Mehta’s new film which releases this Friday. Ranaut is being celebrated, reviled, and ignored in equal measure for courting controversies, allegedly for the promotion of a film on which a lot is at stake for her. In this hubbub, the sensational story of Sandeep Kaur, the real-life NRI thief, on whom the film is based, is getting overshadowed.
Real to reel
So when did the story of Simran begin? Screenwriter Apurva Asrani started working on the script when he was editing Mehta’s last release Aligarh (2015). Asrani had also written the screenplay of Aligarh based on a story by Ishani Banerjee. “In April 2015, a story came out about a girl [Sandeep Kaur] who was arrested for robbing a series of banks on the West Coast of America,” says Asrani. “It was a fantastic story that Mehta and I agreed had potential to be developed into a script.” The screenwriter travelled to California and researched girl, who had earned the sobriquet of ‘Bombshell Bandit’ by the FBI for her fashionable disguises and her cool-headed modus operandi.
In 2014, Kaur, a 24-year-old nurse working in California, had amassed large gambling debts and decided to rob banks to repay a loan shark from whom she had borrowed money. She wore wigs, oversized sunglasses and fitting tracksuits when she approached bank tellers and claimed to be carrying a bomb, demanding cash in return for not detonating it. Kaur’s five-week crime spree across Arizona, California, and Utah was short-lived as she was caught in July the same year after a high-speed chase across three states and two time zones, befitting a Hollywood biopic. She pleaded guilty to four bank robberies and was sentenced to serve 66 months in prison in April 2015. “During my research I realised that many simple people rob without planning a heist, says Asrani. “They work on fear psychosis where they basically claim to be having a gun, making people quickly turn in whatever they have. I found a couple of such cases. Taking Sandeep Kaur as the pivot I decided to expand the story.”
The original story for Simran was set during recession, about a young girl wanting an easy life. But it soon began to form a bigger arc. “The American culture —what money means to them, what fear means to them, and why is a person compelled to take the easy route out,” says Asrani. He did try to contact Kaur’s family for research but they had banned the media. So, to flesh out her character, Asrani took inspiration from several people he had met on the trip, one of whom was a woman working as a housekeeper in the hotel he was staying at. “She had so many insights about her [own] life and marriage, so suddenly Simran became a story about that woman,” says Asrani. “Like the story of every other ordinary woman trying to make ends meet.”
Kaur, an irredeemable criminal had to be shoehorned into the ordinary every woman in Simran. How did that happen? “Yes, initially there was a struggle to find redemption for our film’s character because we thought that was what probably would translate [well for] a mainstream audience. But we gave that up after a couple of drafts. We don’t have to absolve Simran,” says Asrani. The realisation of her wrong doing was enough.
Knock-on effect
With Ranaut coming on board, a lot more changes were incorporated into the script. “Sandeep Kaur was 24 years old when she committed these crimes,” says Asrani. “When Kangana came into the picture as the lead, she had a lot more maturity as an actor, and as a person, so the whole motive of the initial character Praful Patel, who later rechristens herself as Simran, changed,” Asrani says. The motive of a 24-year-old girl who wants money to party and gamble changed to that of a 31-year-old woman who is divorced, single and wants to regain the hold on her life.
Kaur, who is an Indian-origin woman living in America, had to be modified to fit Ranaut’s Indian roots. “I don’t think that Kangana could have played an American girl, language-wise it defeats the whole purpose. The whole genesis of the character is [that of] someone fresh off-the-boat from India [who has] spent a few years in the US,” says Asrani.
The 39-year-old writer-editor is, however, all praise for the leading lady. “Kangana has upped the whole physical comedy element in her performance. She has brought a Chaplinesque physicality,” he says. “I even told her after the first cut that she reminded me of Sridevi in a sequence from Mr India, where she dresses as Charlie Chaplin and takes on the goons in a bar.” He adds that the actor brought a few things from her own life into the character. “A certain sexuality that she wanted to explore, which was completely new to me and Hansal [Mehta], and we went ahead with her inputs.”
As an editor, Asrani worked on the first cut of the film but parted ways with Mehta after the controversy over writing credits erupted with Ranaut demanding her share in screenwriting. Editor Antara Lahiri replaced him. When contacted, Lahiri said she was contractually bound not to speak about the film till its release date on September 15. “I have not been privileged enough to see the final cut,” says Asrani, hoping that it would be true to his script. “Right now Simran is so lost in star image-building and politics. I am just hoping that people become aware of the real content when the film is out.”