Controversies may follow Avadhoot Gupte but he is here to tell stories

He might have shot to fame with his popular fusion tracks like 'Aika Dajiba' and 'Meri Madhubala' to his credit, but it was in the summer of 2005 when he rehashed 'Jay Jay Mharashtra Majha' to the tune of Bryan Adam’s 'Summer of ’69' to comment on the ‘Mumbaikar’ issue that the Shiv Sena was heralding back then that Avadhoot Gupte had a tryst with controversy.

Gupte, who is a self-confessed explorer of media for expression has since moved towards filmmaking.

“I am an artiste. Music, cinema -- I have chosen them as media of expression,” says the composer-director who is on his way back from Kolhapur where he was promoting his latest film Moraya.

“Even back then, the song was my way of expressing what I felt about a relevant issue. Same goes for Jhenda. I meant what I meant, I wanted to make a statement,” says the director who has taken on the task of commenting on Sarvajanik Ganeshotsav with Moraya which is running quite successfully in theaters.

The director goes back to 2010 and his film Jhenda.

“Jhenda was not about leaders. It was about the karyakartas (volunteers) in these parties. It was a film that made party workers question their ideology. I have no idea why it was made out to be about the leaders. Especially Nitesh Rane who said that one of the characters was his father,” says Gupte.

The director went ahead and edited the film and postponed the release date. “It cost me a lot of money. I went into a loss because of that. If I had to trouble someone, would I have accommodated Mr Rane’s request for changing a name in the film?” he asks. “I never wanted to hurt anybody.”

However, Gupte is happy with the result, “I got so many calls from party workers who said that the film made them introspect, which makes me happy,” he confesses.

The idea for his second film Moraya came during the shooting of Jhenda. “We were shooting during Ganeshotsav and I was dabbling with a new medium and was in search of different points of view. I felt like Ganeshotsav was something worth focusing on. The public celebration of Ganeshotsav stood as a platform to exchange ideas, present art and bring out good in the society back 1893 when it was started. I always wonder if those values hold true today,” says the director who thinks that the society needs to give time and introspect why we celebrate the festival and how.

Althought Gupte has taken care to fictionalise most incidents in the film, the director feels that it is only natural that reality filters in.

“We always have that disclaimer saying all the incidents are fictional but references to real life are bound to come in. Every character is of course inspired by something,” say Gupte who reminisces about Jhenda again.

“To make it easier for me, I constructed the story around what was happening around me then -- which is the Raj vs Uddhav incident. Looking back, had I thought of something else, it would have saved me so much trouble, money and time!”

The director has wisened up. In the climax of Moraya, he has recreated something that happened in another city but fictionalised it by showing that it happened in Mumbai.

But controversies seem to love him. The body that handles Ganeshotsav in Mumbai took offense to the film and demanded a ban. The director is unfazed.

“My film is a story that brings out the fact that there always two sides to the situation. If there are donation collectors’ bodies, are there bodies for donors? If the Ganeshotsav Samiti monitors loudspeakers pandals and smooth functioning, where is a body that makes the side of those who suffer because of these things heard?” he asks passionately.

“I am a Ganeshotsav volunteer myself. I have collected donations, managed the pandals, but I have explored different sides of the festival with this film. It is not against the festival or any committee!”

The film is a fictional story of two rival Ganeshotsav mandals. It brings out the rift through showcasing various media and marketing tactics that are used by Mandals today. When we watched the film, on a Friday evening, the theater was running packed with people queuing up for tickets for the next show. Has the controversy favoured the film?

“Thanks to controversies, Jhenda came in the spectrum of national media. However, though it gained an audience, I lost more than I gained,” says the director whose first film despite receiving a wide response ran into losses. “As much as I enjoyed the controversies, they were not worth it,” he says with dismay.

Gupte is making films when Marathi cinema is seeing wide acceptance. We pick his brains about the progress of the industry.

“Marathi audience, I believe has always been intellectual,” says Gupte, who is being approached by non-Marathi and foreign production houses.

“Films like Sinhasan and Jait Re Jait can be only made and appreciated in Marathi. Also actors like Nana Patekar and Smita Patil were groomed within Marathi cinema. There is a joy to work in this industry, that joy I feel is in the intellectually developed audience who is ready to accept new films about new concepts. If ever there was a FQ, like film quotient, I would say Marathi industry would have it the most. So many Hindi or South films are remade from Marathi but this industry does very little remixing.”

Having said that, Gupte is open to newer big-budget projects but he feels that the people in the industry should be in touch with reality and budget for a film on the basis of expected result.

“Just because there is a foreign investor who will put in the big bucks, doesn’t mean that you go ahead and splurge. The reality is that the collection figures of a super hit Marathi film are average as compared to the Hindi market,” he explains.

At a time when multiple big ticket production houses want to enter the Marathi industry, Gupte feels that to preserve its reputation, the industry has to be judicious with setting result expectations.

“You might provoke them to spend big money and make a big budget film that does phenomenally well, but if the film doesn’t make its money according to expectations, the credibility of the industry is at stake.”