Bring home the tides of change: Guruprasad

Stop the chase
Big or small, low budget or high budget, hit or flop — there’s no denying that the script is the most important thing of a film. And it’s high time the Kannada film industry sat up to this and stopped chasing only heroes — it just goes to show that the industry is neither bothered about quality nor is it professional. Unfortunately, all that filmmakers want is to make up their money somehow even if that means taking recourse to shortcuts like remakes.

Positively different
I don’t call myself a film-maker, but a frustrated Kannada film audience, watching mediocre films for over 25 years now. At least, that’s what made me leave my job as a scientist at Hindustan Lever and choose to follow my passion. Through my cinema, I want to show what sort of films the audience wants to see. Hence, when writing a script, I keep myself as target — whatever entertains me, makes me happy or sad is how the audience too would react. In fact, my forthcoming film, Director’s Special, is a story that will be a new concept to the Kannada audience and can justifiably be called path-breaking.

Trash the cliche
A good film script involves some key aspects — a new story with an interesting plot, which is entertaining, yet has some values, apart from interesting experimentation in dialogue, screenplay, acting and grammar. And to achieve all this, at least eight to nine levels of scripting is a minimum — a rarity in the industry. What film-makers do is give the most crucial stage — scripting — the least possible time. Writers write with no knowledge of the basic ingredients that go into a neat script — they don’t study people, books or films. According to me, cinema is nothing but the science of commercialising art. That’s more reason why a script should be so strong that on reading it once, the entire film can be visualised with ease. But in the industry here, neither producers nor directors have any control over raw material (read actors, script) or the final product. How on earth can it then be called an industry? Essentially, there are four types of films being made: mafia stories, love stories, the regular brother-sister plot and the mother-daughter/ son drama. Over 78 years of Kannada cinema and 3,000 films later, I can confidently say that only 450 films have been complete entertainers, most of which starred Dr Rajkumar.

Master the art
It’s an unwritten rule that the audience wants novelty in a script — who would want to see a film that comprises stolen scenes? Just the way a new toy excites a child, a new sari excites a lady or a new mobile excites a man, a new script excites the audience. But sadly, films are made in two ways in Kannada — one is a remake, in which the rights are bought officially and the script is rewritten to suit native needs. The other is a freemake, in which a few scenes are lifted, rather stolen, from maybe four films and all this is mixed to make one film. Also, heroes kill the script in this industry. They ask for reading sessions but never take an active interest in getting to do some research into the character or the situation — in fact, directors don’t even expect it from them. All they do is reach the sets, shoot and leave, as long as their image is taken care of. The young lot of scriptwriters are enthusiastic but don’t have adequate scripting knowledge. I don’t blame them entirely — in a country with so many film industries, we lack a scripting school. There are schools to teach enthusiasts and aspirants the technical aspects to film-making but not scriptwriting. This was one of the main reasons why I thought it necessary to start my own film-making and scriptwriting school.

As told to Dipannita Ghosh Biswas