Filmwallas are a common sight in the lobby of the JW Marriott in Juhu—an office for producers and actors by day; a haunt for TV and movie stars by night.
The afternoon I wait for director Shekhar Kapur to arrive for our second interview in two weeks, fashion photographer Atul Kasbekar’s camera is clicking furiously, trying to capture a young man’s best profile by the hotel’s pool (an aspiring star for sure; my Bollywood meter is usually bang on). Old, familiar faces from television serials talk shop with producers over endless cigarettes. Actor Kajol, accompanied by her daughter and with a sling bag full of swimming gear, walks straight into the private pool area.
Kapur had insisted we meet at the Marriott. His real office was “just about functional” and “there was too much happening at his Juhu home”, his executive secretary informed me.
After a half-hour delay (which the executive secretary warns me of well in advance), Kapur arrives. He is in a slightly faded, black cotton shirt with vegetable dye prints on it (Fabindia, he later confirms), cotton trousers, a black cotton jacket slung over his shoulders, and a pair of ageing floaters.
Sixty-two-year-old Kapur is an old resident of Juhu, and an old, celebrated member of the Mumbai film industry, so he isn’t an outsider at this quintessentially filmi hotel. But he isn’t at home either.
As he soon tells me, putting a spoonful of cappuccino froth in his mouth, Juhu isn’t the same anymore. The one he belonged to, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, was different: “There was no filth, we could go into the beach. The industry was smaller, people hung out together in their beach bungalows, there was a sense of camaraderie.” About Juhu of the 1980s, Kapur writes in his blog: “…Of Kabir and Protima Bedi’s house. Little babies called Pooja and Siddharth. Running around in diapers. Mahesh Bhatt preaching Godhead and nirvana. Parvin Babi sitting in a corner smiling benignly, smoking whatever anyone smoked those days…And who else? Occasionally Smita Patil.”
As our conversation progresses—slowly at first, because his words are measured, to the point, spoken in a voice barely loud enough for my digital dictaphone to capture—nostalgia about Mumbai and Juhu, where his creative journey began, gives way to his hectic present. This is a slightly confusing stage of his life, often difficult for Hindi film insiders and journalists to understand.
For the past 10 years, Kapur has made London his home. In 1994, the director surprised everyone by making Bandit Queen, a film based on a book by Mala Sen on dacoit-turned-politician Phoolan Devi. It got him instant laurels. Hollywood beckoned, and he left.
I meet a man partly seasoned in the structured, disciplined ways of Hollywood, and looking beyond it.