Frame of mind: What makes Hansal Mehta's filmmaking click
Nonika Singh
SUCCESS is a catalyst but story-telling is my oxygen,” avers National Award-winning filmmaker Hansal Mehta. Riding high on the overwhelming response to yet another of his directorial ventures, Netflix series Scoop, Mehta isn’t your average filmmaker. Refusing to eye box-office numbers, he still has a finger on the pulse of audiences. “Why do we see thought-provoking content that engages with your intellect as not appealing to masses?” he wonders aloud.
If he abhors putting people or ideas in a box, there is no way you can pigeonhole him. Questions on his work do not beget standard responses. To be authentic, sensitive, realistic and engaging at the same time, and above all to ensure that stereotypes go flying down the Bollywood alley, you can’t generalise what Mehta says or does. Even praise is taken with a pinch of salt: “I try my best.”
Shahid, Aligarh, Scam 1992, Faraaz and now Scoop, he is drawn to true stories. His production house not surprisingly is called True Stories. But ultimately, real or fictional, a story has to excite him, whether it’s a book or a newspaper article. “I have to see a journey in it,” he says. Rajkummar Rao, his favourite actor who’s ‘like a family member’, has a dialogue in the much acclaimed Aligarh that sums up Mehta’s filmography: “It’s a human story.” Inspired by real people, real world. Even when it explores the dark zone as in Shahid, based on the life of lawyer and human rights activist Shahid Azmi, the filmmaker never loses sight of a humane approach. Shahid was a milestone for Mehta as it introduced him to Rao, who became his muse of sorts. It fetched him a National Award and put him on the path he is currently walking.
Interestingly, the filmmaker does not think it’s any more challenging to bring true stories to life on screen than any other work of fiction. He observes, “There is no comparative challenge. Life is a challenge, so is filmmaking, be it any genre, from docuseries to biopics to fiction.”
His cinema does stand for the underdog, but for Mehta, this summation of his work is too reductionist. He likes to dig out extraordinary stories among ordinary people. In Scoop, he wanted to bring out characters in the newsroom who are ordinary people, living in small homes, with typical aspirations. “If we don’t pay attention to the marginalised, we are likely to lose our humanity,” he says.
A lot of his work is based on books be it the super-hit Scam 1992, the forthcoming Scam 2003 or the OTT rage, Scoop. But he is not automatically drawn to the written word. “Stories find me and not the other way round. But if a story resonates with me and is also somewhere a cautionary tale of times to come, I get obsessed with the idea.” Harshad Mehta’s rise and fall is a story he always wanted to tell. When Sameer Nair of Applause Entertainment bought the rights of Sucheta Dalal and Debashis Basu’s book, ‘The Scam: Who Won, Who Lost, Who Got Away’, there was no getting away for him. “Harshad was the big bull, an icon in the heady days of the stock market when I was just out of college,” he shares.
Trigger points for Mehta always lie in character arcs, be it the fallen hero in Harshad or a woman incarcerated in Jigna Vora’s tale. Only, in Jigna’s memoir, he found more than a jail story. Thus, for Scoop, he went beyond what she had written and decided to tell it more as a character study, a visual encapsulation of the journalistic world and as “an alliance between journalists, police, politicians and underworld rather than a regular crime saga”.
Weaving human stories around crime is not a recent preoccupation. If his upcoming Scam 2003: The Telgi Story is about the stamp-paper scam, back in time, Citylights, an official remake of BAFTA-nominated Metro Manila, too, was a crime thriller of sorts, rooted in realism. If at one level it shook you by depicting the predicament of an impoverished family, on the other it kept you on tenterhooks. Whatever be his characters, heroic or victimised, he humanises them with a deft touch. Remember Manoj Bajpayee as Prof Shrinivas Ramchandra Siras in Aligarh? Mehta lent such dignity to the character that even in moments when you should have been laughing at him (like when he dozes off during the court proceedings), you empathise. In Scoop, you feel for the ambitious crime reporter Jagruti Pathak with all your heart. The acclaimed filmmaker, who refuses to judge people or characters, views them with heartfelt empathy; not merely his protagonists but even antagonists. In Scoop, viewers are still in awe of the morally ambiguous police officer Harshvardhan Shroff, etched remarkably well by Harman Baweja. Time and again, Mehta rediscovers actors. Rajkummar Rao, Pratik Gandhi and now Karishma Tanna, there are no golden rules for his casting choices. Resemblance to the real person is incidental. “Physical likeness narrows down your choices,” he says. Stars or actors, he doesn’t care to delineate between them either.
As he is working with Kareena Kapoor in a forthcoming film, he shares how his job is to make them deliver their best and interpret characters in the best possible way. Yes, the devil lies in details. If Scoop seems authentic, for which he gives the credit to his writers (Mrunmayee Lagoo, Waikul Mirat Trivedi and Karan Vyas) and research team, nothing is in your face. While painting a candid picture of the journalistic world, he neither sensationalises nor trashes the media. “I try my best to make the world I portray as believable as possible. I am hurt to see certain professions, certain sections of society like say Gujaratis being stereotyped.”
Being a Gujarati himself, is he more at home while depicting their milieu as in Scam and now, Scoop? “With Gujarati characters, there is a lived-in experience.” But even when he recreates a world from observation as in Aligarh, “I am as much a part of it as my characters. Whether I am comfortable here or there, in fact, I don’t like to be smug and snug. If I am comfortable, what’s the point of creating anything?” Is the idea also to disconcert viewers? “No, only to provoke them to see reality as it exists.”
In his vast and brilliant filmography, films like Simran and Chhalaang might not sit as well in terms of critical acclaim, but he owns them “part of my learning curve” and puts them in the same line, if not league, as his big successes. “If victories are mine, so are my flaws.” His latest film, Faraaz, a hostage drama based on a terrorist attack in Dhaka, had a limited theatrical opening in India and was banned in Bangladesh as the mother of one of the 22 victims had filed a petition saying that the film portrayed the victims in poor light.
In times when tempers are easily frayed, how does he look at the rise of OTT where he has found resounding success? Once again, Hansal Mehta won’t pass any verdict. If you associate the term franchise with mainstream blockbusters and are surprised how Scam is now a franchise and Scoop might be too, he questions, “Why do we dumb down entertainment and viewers?”
Living in times where filmmakers are challenged and excited at the same time, he feels they have the liberty of telling stories the way they want to and have the satisfaction of their voice reaching out. To aspiring filmmakers, including his son Jai Mehta, who was his co-director in Scam 1992, his advice is simple, “Fight your own battles. Find your own voice, your own path.”
If Scam 1992 became the highest rated Indian series among IMDb’s top 250 shows, rave reviews of Scoop continue to filter in. However, the restless soul in him is back to where he is the calmest: work. Next in line is a series on Gandhi, with the actor he revealed to the world, Pratik Gandhi, playing the Father of the Nation. Rest assured, it will be a Gandhi we have not seen before.
As for the Hansal Mehta that exists beneath thought-provoking films and pertinent social media posts, he laughs, “Ask my wife.” Incidentally, he began his journey with cookery show Khana Khazana and can whip up delectable dishes. During outdoor locations, his apartment (he doesn’t book hotel rooms) is an open house for his cast and crew, much like his films are an open forum for deliberation.
To paraphrase writer Thomas Merton in Mehta’s context, one is (awe)struck by the ability “to respond to reality, to see the value and the beauty in ordinary things and to come alive to the splendour that is all around us.” In the process, he not only captures our imagination, but illumines it too.
Stories find me, and I get obsessed
Stories find me and not the other way round. But if a story resonates with me and is also somewhere a cautionary tale of times to come, I get obsessed with the idea. Hansal Mehta, filmmaker
Actors’ director
Talented actor Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, the Imran of Scoop who has been a part of several Hansal Mehta films like Shahid and Chhalaang, sums him up “as the best director an actor can possibly wish for. He directs and not instructs, he gives you enough space to explore and while developing the character you feel as if it’s your baby”. Karishma Tanna, the lead actor of Scoop, agrees. Prior to meeting Mehta, she might have been a bundle of nerves as it was her first outing with him. However, she recalls how he put her at ease and gave her the liberty to take the character of Jagruti Pathak in whichever direction she wanted to. If he allows a leap of faith to his actors, his own ‘chhalaang’ over the years has been transformative too. Zeeshan shares, “He does not get into too many technicalities and over the years, I have seen him evolve and reinvent himself. During the making of Shahid, there was greater improvisation. For Scoop, he had a bound script. But then, he has found a perfect balance. While he relies a lot on preproduction research, he is flexible on the sets.”
