Shakun Batra on How He Handled Fawad’s Character in Kapoor & Sons

In a candid interview filmmaker Shakun Batra reveals what went into the making of ‘Kapoor & Sons’

Filmmaker Shakun Batra directs Rishi Kapoor on the sets of Kapoor & Sons

Shakun Batra grew up in Delhi in a family that wasn’t even remotely connected to films. In fact, he tells me that his mom slept through a screening of 3 Idiots, which sort of illustrates that, for his parents, Shakun was a bit of an odd lil boy who strangely seemed excited about moving images on screen while growing up.

The director who is now making waves with his second film Kapoor & Sons recalls that it was a screening of Amores Perros that really blew him away, “It was like nothing I watched before,” Shakun says, “It didn’t feel like a film. The kind of look it had, the texture, the tone.”

It was always the visuals that excited the 33-year-old before he discovered the works of Woody Allen, Billy Wilder and Wes Anderson while at the Vancouver Film School and realised the kind of films he wanted to make.

Shakun’s next stop obviously was Mumbai, where he went door to door looking for a job with filmmakers and luckily met Zoya Akhtar, who was working as an Executive Producer on Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd. Shakun began his journey in Bollywood with that film and went on to assist Farhan Akhtar, Abbas Tyrewala and Abhishek Kapoor among others.

The Idea of Kapoor & Sons

Shakun Batra along with Fawad Khan, Sidharth Malhotra and Ratna Pathak Shah on the sets of Kapoor & Sons

The germ of the idea of Kapoor & Sons came about just as Shakun was dropping a script he had spent 7-8 months on because “it wasn’t going anywhere”. That’s when his co-writer Ayesha DeVitre brought up a story about a brother and sister, but before they started work on it, they learnt that Zoya was making a film on a brother and sister, which was Dil Dhadkne Do and so they decided to make both their characters brothers. “I also had this story idea of a parents’ marriage falling apart, so I thought that it would be interesting to put both these two brothers and have their parents’ marriage fall apart and we can play with these interesting dynamics. It started with those little thoughts and ideas and then all of them came together to make Kapoor & Sons,” explains Shakun.

Writing Kapoor & Sons

I’m curious about how he collaborated with Ayesha on such an emotionally fluid and intense screenplay.

Ayesha is actually a hairstylist, I met her during <i>Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na. </i>I was like – I’ve met a bunch of guys who call themselves writers, I don’t enjoy working with them, you tell funny stories, why don’t we try writing, I can’t pay you, we’ll just have fun, we’ll write. So there is no pressure, no money involved, we just write because we like working together.

<b>Shakun Batra</b>

“We just sit in a room and keep talking, talking, talking. Then I will go and write something and mail it to her and then she’ll reply saying – this is stupid, please don’t do this. Then I’ll make changes and send it to her again… it’s a lot of back and forth. Basically its a lot of talking and bouncing off ideas. If I wrote alone, I would kill myself, and I think Billy Wilder said this - she stops me from jumping out of the window. We fight a lot and we laugh a lot and basically save each other from jumping out of the window,” Shakun adds.

The Original Cast of Kapoor & Sons

On Making Rishi Kapoor a 90-Year-Old

Shakun Batra says he’ll do a better job with prosthetics if he ever uses it in his next film

Shakun is aware that Rishi Kapoor’s laboured prosthetics didn’t go down too well with a section of the audience and critics. “There are a lot of people who have questioned the prosthetics and there are a lot of people who have gone – ‘Wow!’ I do understand that there are places and if your eyes are technically trained, you’ll be able to  catch the prosthetic a little bit here and there. But we’ve worked with the best in the world, Greg Cannom of Benjamin Button did the prosthetics, we didn’t have a budget as big as Benjamin Button and I couldn’t risk taking a non-actor in that role.”

I have worked with a non-actor in my first film (<i>Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu</i>), a 92-year-old played Kareena’s grandmom, it’s kind of tricky to make them do everything, it’s very exhausting for them. I find Rishi Kapoor charming, very enjoyable, very pleasant, a lot of fun to watch. It wasn’t such a bad call, we could have done things a little better with the prosthetics here and there.

<b>Shakun Batra</b>

On the Portrayal of Fawad’s Character

The subtlety with which Fawad’s character – Rahul’s homosexuality is handled was, of course, a deliberate part of the narrative. “We were very very very sure about this from the start that it would be a whisper, it would not be a scream or a shout, it had to be a whisper, even if you missed it, you missed it,” says Shakun.

He’s like you, me, my brother, my friend and then we just say that he has one more side to him as opposed to like – YEH GAY HAI!.

On Choreographing Chaos

As a viewer, what really drew me to the film was the totally raw and unrehearsed feel that the actors gave to their movements, especially during an argument or a spat involving more than 3 or 4 characters on screen. Remember the frenzied atmosphere created as the secrets tumble out of each of the Kapoor’s closet before the family photograph is about to be clicked? For Shakun, the best part of the film was what he calls - ‘choreographing chaos’.

Team Kapoor & Sons filming Rishi Kapoor’s birthday scene

That’s what happens in our daily lives in our house. It’s kind of a chaos… but to put it on film you need to choreograph it so that it looks like chaos. It feels chaotic but there is a design to it, which is hidden which feels real. A lot of it is about camera - actor - choreography, how it’s written, so for me, that was the most exciting part as a director. How do I make it feel like a real house like there are so many things happening at once.

<b>Shakun Batra</b>

I ask Shakun if he was surprised to get a UA certificate for the film and he says, “There is hardly a difference between U and UA, I think because there is smoking… there is… I don’t know… they have their rules and you got to follow them. I’m very happy it’s not an A film, UA I am ready to accept.”

There were dialogue changes and word changes made here and there. There was the birthday party in which Rishi Kapoor shows the middle finger, we were told that we can’t show the middle finger, we had to CG the middle finger out.

As a parting note, I ask Shakun if naming Fawad’s character ‘Rahul’, was a cheeky way of subverting the cliched Bollywood hero’s prototype, but it apparently wasn’t. “I find it very hard to come up with names when I am writing. Even in my last film, the hero’s name was Rahul,” he explains. Ok we’ll buy that.

Also Watch:

Shakun Batra on the Most Annoying Thing About his Cast of Kapoor & Sons

(You can connect with Suresh Mathew on Twitter @Suresh_Mathew_)