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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Amit Kumar | Target practice
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Amit Kumar | Target practice

The director of 'Monsoon Shootout', which opens at Cannes this month, on playing the waiting game

‘Monsoon Shootout’ is about a police encounterPremium
‘Monsoon Shootout’ is about a police encounter

From development hell to Cannes—it has happened to several film-makers in the past and it is now the turn of Amit Kumar. His debut feature Monsoon Shootout, which was supposed to take off in 2004, was completed only recently and is being premiered at the ongoing Cannes Film Festival, in the Out of Competition section.

Monsoon Shootout is a Rashomon-style thriller set in rain-drenched Mumbai. Kumar draws attention to the artifice of film-making and the relative nature of truth, presenting four perspectives on a police encounter. A rookie policeman, Adi (played by newcomer Vijay Varma), confronts the criminal Shiva over and over again, with each experience teaching him, and us, different lessons about cause and effect, morality and destiny.

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Amit Kumar

“It was a couple of painful years of writing," says the director who trained at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII). “You make one change and everything changes in the structure. Then, I had a kid."

Kumar finally finished his screenplay in 2008. “There were two versions of the incident, which I had originally wanted to make into a short film," he says. “A third and a fourth treatment were added later." Potential financiers advised him to cast a leading actor, but Kumar stubbornly refused. “It’s a different kind of film that didn’t need stars but good actors," he says.

The production delays have actually benefited Kumar. Co-production and distribution deals, as well as film festival exposure for offbeat Indian cinema, have improved vastly in recent years, in large part due to the effort of producers like Guneet Monga. Her Sikhya Entertainment is one of Monsoon Shootout’s producers, and her deal-making dexterity has ensured that renowned independent cinema distributor Fortissimo Films is the movie’s international sales agent.

The Indian release is some months away, Kumar says. The head-scratcher of a plot is likely to be Monsoon Shootout’s strongest selling point when it finally arrives in India, but it has other pleasures—the convincing performances by Varma, Siddiqui as Shiva and Neeraj Kabi as Adi’s hard-nosed boss, Rajeev Ravi’s immediate and intimate cinematography, locations that effectively evoke the city’s underbelly. “With our grounding in FTII, we never thought of making our stories slick and glamorous," Kumar says. “I wanted the movie to be as realistic as possible within the limitations of the concept, which is essentially abstract."

Monsoon Shootout was shot in 2011, but not during the rainy season, as had been originally planned, since the production could not be pushed any further. “All the rainwater is artificial—what a waste," Kumar says.

Kumar’s film-making dreams hatched in Botswana and Zambia in Africa, where his father was posted during the mid-1970s. “We left soon after we had watched Sholay in India, and my brother and I would entertain ourselves by enacting scenes from the film," he says. “I was Jai, naturally, and he was Veeru." He also invented opening credit sequences in his head. The movie mania lasted all the way till the 1990s, when Kumar enrolled in a screenplay-writing contest organized by the National Film Development Corporation.

He had acquired a degree in hotel management in the meantime, and wrote out Ashwathama the Elephant Is Dead, a script about the relativity of truth, at the business centre of the establishment where he was employed. “Nothing came of it, but (film-maker) K.G. George was one of the panel members during the entrance-level interview at FTII, and he remembered my script," says Kumar.

The contest entry, combined with a film-school exercise about a police officer, a killing in a lock-up and a cover-up, point to Monsoon Shootout’s antecedents. In a way, Kumar had been working on the idea even before he joined film school.

Other screenplays under development, however, aren’t police procedurals—there’s a script with a World War II backdrop, and a science fiction comedy. The projects might take their own sweet time to unravel, but he is no hurry, he says. “If it has to happen, it will happen."

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Published: 18 May 2013, 12:09 AM IST
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