On the eve of her departure for the Berlinale, where her new film, Gully Boy, will have its gala screening today, Zoya Akhtar still has to get the fittings done for her wardrobe. She has had no time; till the night before our interaction, she’d been busy with the film’s sound mix.
While the international scene isn’t new to her — Bombay Talkies, the anthology film in which she directed the Sheila Ki Jawaani short, screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013 — Gully Boy is her first première at a major international film festival. “Looking forward to it?” I start off our conversation. “I am nervous; in the sense that you are nervous before every film,” she says. However, seated confidently in the Salcette hall at Taj Landsend in Bandra, on a day packed with press interactions, Zoya, 46, looks far from anxious. “I am a fake,” she laughs. Then adds her two-bit about knots-in-the-stomach: “There’s nobody who doesn’t feel something. They are lying to you [if they say they are not].”
Expanding worldview
Everyone has been talking about how Gully Boy, loosely based on the life of Mumbai street rappers Naezy and Divine, marks a change in direction for her from her previous full length feature films — Luck By Chance, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara and Dil Dhadakne Do. But the move from her own world was evident in Sheila Ki Jawaani and the recent Lust Stories short as well. Zoya herself doesn’t see it as a major shift. “Even though Luck By Chance is set in the film industry, the lead characters are people you know and see, but they are not your friends. Bombay Talkies was also not my world. On a huge level nor was Dil Dhadakne Do. The space is to an extent the same, but the kind of family and gender politics is not my world,” she says.
She admits getting drawn to stories that have something familiar, but at the same time are interesting enough to be different. Gully Boy is one such. “It is set in my city,” she says assertively. “It’s [about] the urban youth of my city. It’s the genre of music I’ve listened to all my life,” says Zoya. Like Lust Stories, it is rooted in the class system. But she doesn’t think that it has taken her out of her comfort zone. What would? Perhaps a “Japanese story, about Japanese people, set in Tokyo”. But even then it would be about people. “And they work with the same emotions as I do,” she smiles. “I want to make a period film, I want to make a film set in another country. I want to make a foreign film. I want to make everything eventually. I am a storyteller. I have many stories to tell,” she says. A reason why Zoya has escaped the straitjacket of a “woman filmmaker” dealing with only “female characters” and “female subjects”.
Gully Boy marks a shift for her in another way. Some of her old associates and long-time collaborators — like cinematographer Carlos Catalan, editor Anand Subaya, and music composer Shankar Ehsaan Loy (SEL) — are not sharing the credits in this outing. How were the new negotiations? “Carlos, my biggest collaborator, was on another job and couldn’t do it, so I worked with Jay Oza and it was incredible. Anand was cutting Gold, so Nitin Baid came on and it was also an incredible collaboration. These are people I will work with again,” she says. She told SEL that because she was making a film about gully rap, she wanted to use rappers to make the music and they understood her totally. “But I can’t wait to go back and work with them again,” she says.
Sets and sounds
Does the issue of class system in Gully Boy align her, in a way, with her father, poet-writer-lyricist Javed Akhtar’s Left leanings? “It’s there in your consciousness, in your awareness. You can’t be living in this country and not see it [class system]. It’s everywhere; you can’t ignore it,” she says.
Shooting on location, in Dharavi, for 40-odd days, is what Zoya looks back as her easiest shooting experience in India. There is an assumption that it will be a problem, a security issue, but “people have so much respect, they are respectful of the fact that you are working. They are so used to the foreign shoots. They leave you alone, they are too busy to be star struck”.
In keeping with the subject, Zoya has used a lot more music in the film. “It’s got various kinds of music. It fits into the fabric of the world. It’s all independent musicians. The most mainstream would be a Jasleen or my dad’s (he has written a couple songs),” she says. All the songs are not used in full — some are there for a minute or 30 seconds, some just come in and out. “Some are part of my montages... So we have more artistes on the platform, got the mood we really wanted, to keep the world palpable,” she says.
Gully Boy premièring on a big, global forum is of value to her. “It is nice to be out there, amongst contemporaries on a global scale. You meet different people, see different things, meet different producers, eventually grow to collaborate in different ways. The world is getting smaller. It’s nice not to be insular,” she concludes.
Gully Boy releases on February 14.