Filmmaker Raj Kumar Gupta won hearts and mind space with his first two films - Aamir (2008) and No One Killed Jessica (2011), his third outing, Ghanchakkar (2013), received a mixed response. Now Gupta is back with a crackling trailer of his upcoming Ajay Devgn-starrer Raid, here’s the director talking about his new project and mulling over the past.
How did you stumble upon the story or idea of Raid? Ajay Devgn, as we know, plays an IT officer whose real name is not being disclosed, but did you meet the man who ran one of the longest IT raids India has seen?
Raj Kumar Gupta: The story was given to me by my producer and I found it very interesting - the content, the time-frame, and at that point it was one of the longest running IT raids. So that intrigued me a lot about the case, about the people involved. We met the officer involved, he told us things related to the case and also how things happen in general. We met other officers because we needed to understand how the department works, how things were in that period of time. Now you get to know everything, if there is a raid in someone’s house - whether it is a big fish or small fish, it will immediately be on Twitter. But at that point in time, if you go on a raid, in a place like UP, it can be very dangerous, you don’t know how many days it will continue, you don’t know whether you will return or not if you get into that kind of space.
So Raid is inspired by a true story, but has fictional elements added to it?
Raj Kumar Gupta: This is a true story, there is enough drama in it, but as filmmakers you try and introduce fictionalised elements to it to make it more dramatic, so me and Ritesh Shah approached it in such a way that we mixed reality with fiction to dramatise certain events, to bring in that balance where it doesn’t become like a documentary and it’s more like a film.
How was it working with Ajay Devgn? He’s quite a recluse when it comes to the media.
Raj Kumar Gupta: Ajay sir is a very economical actor, he knows just how to play his character, and he’s also very, very involved. I remember there was an important scene we were doing with a very important character in the film. While there was a scripted 2 page thing already, the way Ajay Devgn saw the scene was very different from the way in which I saw the scene. When we started discussing, we realised that what Ajay sir was thinking added a lot to the character and the way we have approached the character and that’s when we decided to play it that way. It really really appealed, it really was better than the way I was thinking.
In the trailer of Raid, we see the titles “from the maker of Aamir and No One Killed Jessica...” they seem to have forgotten your last release Ghanchakkar? But, looking back how do you feel about the film, what do you think went wrong, why didn’t it work at the box-office?
Raj Kumar Gupta: (Laughs) No, firstly, you are right they only mention a director’s successful films, I have no idea why but that’s the way it is. As far as Ghanchakkar is concerned, I don’t think anything went wrong, people had extreme reactions to the film as compared to my other two films - Aamir and No One Killed Jessica. People either hated Ghanchakkar or loved it, more people ended up hating it than loving it.
Whether I would have liked to change something in the film or not - of course there would be elements in any film you do that when you look back in retrospect, you would want to change a couple of things. But, would I have wanted to change something which was very hotly debated in terms of the ending of Ghanchakkar? I don’t think so. Simply because that’s what I believed in and that was what my conviction was, and I stand by my conviction.
As far as box-office is concerned, Ghanchakkar was made in a budget of Rs 30 crore and it made it around Rs 33-34 crore, so in no way did the producer lose money. But yeah, it didn’t get as much love and respect from the audience as much as my previous 2 films.
Talking about Aamir, it was the first film under the UTV Spotboy banner and that started a whole culture of studios backing small budget films, but slowly in the last ten years it seems to have died out. What do you think went wrong?
Raj Kumar Gupta: Aamir was a film that was made on a very small budget and it really did well not only for me, but also for the producer and somewhere down the line it helped make a lot more of those small films. What happened to the genre afterwards - I really don’t know, perhaps there were two aspects to it.
One, there are producers or studios who tell me that - if we have to invest the same energy of making a film, we would rather invest it in making a bigger film - which I don’t understand. Secondly, I don’t think we made many good small films. There would be like one good small film doing well followed by 10 to 20 small films that were very bad and so losing money, that brought about a certain negativity.
Also, marketing a film became a monster to deal with...?
Raj Kumar Gupta: Yes, marketing budgets went out of control, to the extent that the budget of making a small film at times would be lesser than the money required to make it visible, which made producers question its viability.
Coming to No One Killed Jessica, your second film, it came out at a time when there weren’t many women-oriented films around, there weren’t many films which had the “based on true events” kind of a tag to it either. Now, it’s become like the most sought after genre - with films like Neerja, Airlift, biopics on Milkha Singh, Mary Kom, Sarabjit - you know PadMan just released. But I am sure in 2010, making a film like No One Killed Jessica, couldn’t have been easy.
Raj Kumar Gupta: Firstly, No One Killed Jessica really opened a lot of doors not just for me, but also for other women-oriented films, especially because the film worked both critically and commercially. It also breathed life into the “court room drama” genre, of which you can still see a resonance in many films that came after Jessica. The “based on a true story” tag caught on because I think the audience immediately relates to something that happened in real, to real people in a real location - that connection gets established with the viewer.
Coming to the second part of your question, I already had UTV as my producer but if I were to go around with a script that just had 2 female actors, I don’t think I would have got any takers. Even if it worked at a script level, they would say that it won’t work at the box-office.
No One Killed Jessica was a film that everyone had written off, but once the trailer was out, there was an interest in the film and for me, I never thought that I was presenting two women, they were my protagonists. I never thought of them as male or female and that’s how I’ve treated the film.
A lot has changed in the last 5 years, some studios have shut down, people’s viewing patterns have changed, OTT platforms have come up in a big way and they have taken away a lot of the audience which were going to theatres. As a filmmaker how do you see this challenge of adapting to newer formats and an audience that’s not easy to please.
Raj Kumar Gupta: The world around is constantly changing and its happening faster than ever before. Good or bad, I don’t know but it is constant and the only way to keep coping or keep adapting yourself to this is by putting your best forward. You need to keep telling good stories and tell them well. The formats change - it could be OTTs today, something else tomorrow but if you a tell a good story in any form, people will come for it.
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