Prosthetic makeup in Indian films is mainly a white man’s job. Filmmakers fly down artists from Hollywood and show little faith in local talents, let alone hire a woman for the job. But two special effects makeup designers, Preetisheel Singh (34) and Zuby Johal (36), are slowly changing that, one project at a time.
Singh’s most recent claim to fame is her work in Padmaavat — she designed Ranveer Singh’s menacing look as Alauddin Khilji, giving him a ‘deep-set glare’ and adding a prominent scar on his cheek to indicate the character’s ferocity. But that was just half the job. “I designed a chopped head for a sequence, and did the blood work in the war scenes,” says the Mumbai-based artist, whose craft often extends beyond the face, to creating artificial body parts that requires technical expertise. She also won praise for transforming Nawazuddin Siddiqui into a creepy-looking detective in last year’s thriller, Mom. Sporting a bald pate and buck teeth, the actor was virtually unrecognisable in the film that starred the late Sridevi.
On the other hand, Bengaluru-based Johal — who came to the fore with her work in Gangs of Wasseypur — is now taking her craft outside the set. For Anushka Sharma’s Pari, she has just unveiled large-scale silicone installations (of the actress and the ghost) at malls in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru.
More than makeup
Chehre Pe Chehra (1981) was one of the first Bollywood films to use prosthetics. In the thriller (based on RL Stevenson’s Gothic novella, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde), actor Sanjeev Kumar played the dual roles. Makeup artist Shashikant Mhatre is credited with creating his intimidating alter ego, designed with a facial contortion and buck teeth. Then, when budgets got bigger, producers began looking West. Kamal Haasan’s transformation into a corpulent woman in Chachi 420 (1997) was done by American artists Michael Westmore and Barry Koper, while Christien Tinsley (nominated for an Academy Award for The Passion of the Christ) created Amitabh Bachchan’s look as a child affected by progeria in Paa (2009). And while Baahubali bucked the trend with an Indian team, it was still a predominantly male one.
- Charu Khurana, the makeup artist who helped bring women on to film sets, says that while she has experimented with prosthetics, it is not her forte. “In Baahubali 2, I did some wound makeup, with minimal prosthetic touches, but my mainstay is cosmetic makeup,” she says. Currently working with Amy Jackson, the veteran with 15 years experience is also planning to take her court petition into phase two. While she did not face any discrimination because of the Supreme Court verdict, she believes the ₹1 lakh enrolment fees asked by the Association is too steep, especially for newcomers. “I will be taking it up soon, if no one else does anything,” she says.
In fact, women makeup artists on film sets is a recent phenomena. A 60-year informal ban by the Cine Costume, Make-up Artists and Hair Dressers Association had them confined to vanity vans, sharing credit and remuneration with their male counterparts. Things changed in 2012 when makeup specialist Charu Khurana filed a petition and won. In November 2014, the Supreme Court ordered the Association to allow female artists to register and work on sets. However, that has not lessened the challenges for Singh and Johal.
“Unfortunately, in India, prosthetics is still clubbed with makeup, despite it being a different art,” says Singh, who studied at the Cinema Makeup School in Los Angeles. One of her solutions: her company, Da MakeUp Lab, offers everything from prosthetic design to high-fashion makeup and setting up a lab to ensure its indispensability.
Finding their stride
Singh, who specialises in character get-ups and life-like masks, left a job as a software engineer to move to Mumbai eight years ago. She took up several small-time assignments before her big break in 2015 — when her prosthetic designs in Nanak Shah Fakir won the National award for makeup. During this period, she met filmmaker Sanjay Leela Bhansali and signed Bajirao Mastani. Her current list of projects is impressive: Sriram Raghavan’s Shoot The Piano Player, Vikramaditya Motwane’s Bhavesh Joshi, and Thackeray featuring Siddiqui. “I gave him (Siddiqui) a fake nose and chin, and enlarged his ears to make him look as close to the character (Bal Thackeray) he is playing,” she says.
Johal, a graduate in ceramic and glass design from the National Institute of Design, got her first film project by chance. “I was doing some work at the Sadhu Vaswani Museum in Pune, when a friend who was interning with filmmaker Anurag Kashyap asked me to show him my work. I brought along one portrait and he gave me the scripts of Gangs of Wasseypur 1 and 2, and asked me to put in prosthetics wherever I could,” she recalls. Since then, her company, Dirty Hands Studio, with partner Rajiv Subba, has worked on projects like Katti Batti and Dil Dhadakne Do (2015) Trapped, Bose: Dead/Alive, and Raabta (2017). “In the latter, Rajkummar Rao played a 324-year-old oracle,” says Johal, who used high-resolution images and Photoshop to create an image before ageing the actor using prosthetics. She is currently working on a project called House of Stars, but is tight-lipped about details, only sharing that it is on the lines of a museum of celebrities. The installations for Pari fall under the project.
Checks and balances
The design process involves sculpting and moulding life casts of the actors. Silicone is used as the primary raw material as it has a transparent texture that makes it easier to blend with skin. “When I first started using silicone prosthetics almost a decade ago, the movie industry was only using latex. I had to explain to people what it was (and why it was better),” Johal says. Their main competitor is Vikram Gaikwad, a two-time National Film Award for Best Make-up Artist.
Today, working with silicone, fibreglass, marble, glass and metal casting, the two women ensure they keep themselves constantly updated. While Singh spends her free time surfing the net and doing online courses on new techniques and materials, Johal has teamed up with a consultant in Los Angeles to ensure she is on top of trends. But there are still challenges, like budget constraints. Interestingly though, this has also seen projects getting bounced between them. “I had to bow out of Haider over money issues,” says Johal, who teaches prosthetics at the Film and Television Institute of India. Singh, on the other hand, jumped on board when the Vishal Bhardwaj film came to her. “I did Haider for very little money, and more for the experience of working with such a fantastic filmmaker,” she concludes.