Movies and television, writing and directing, Mukul Abhyankar has done it all. Yogesh Pawar meets the filmmaker who is ready with his latest offering, Missing
The boyish charm can be misleading. There's little that misses 47-year-old filmmaker Mukul Abhyankar's hawk eye. "You have to keep an eye out. One never knows when an opportunity for your narrative offers itself," says the Mahim resident on the sidelines of a meeting to finalise his production house, Hawk Eye Movies.
With his debut Missing, a thriller starring Tabu, Manoj Bajpayee and Anu Kapoor, having many corporates vying for the film's rights, Abhyankar should be in a comfort zone. Sitting on eight more scripts and three fully made films, he can take it easy. "Only I can't," he laughs, at a loss to explain his restlessness. "The churning of the creative juices is a non-stop process."
He should know all about that. Born to celebrated sitarist Pt Shankar Abhyankar, he's accustomed to the likes of Pt Ravi Shankar and Pt Kumar Gandharva visiting their typical Maharashtrian Mahim home since he was a toddler.
"I was on stage since school days as I had no stage fright. This went on till I turned 19 at St Xavier's." At the SoBo college when a professional actor-director expected Abhyankar to just ape him, Abhyankar decided not to act, but only to direct. Five years as a student of visual communications at Hochschuele fuer Gestaltung, Offenbach Am Main, in Germany, got him interested in editing and sound. He returned to cut his teeth on hour-long films for Zee, Star Plus and Sony and Gubbaare for Zee.
When labelled as a comedy filmmaker, he moved on to Thriller at Ten and a children's serial Shhh, Koi Hai… that lasted nearly five years. "I found myself really comfortable with this suspense-horror-thriller genre and most of my subsequent work is related to that."
Abhyankar says he'd been fine-tuning Missing for quite a while before narrating it to producer-director Neeraj Pandey. Asked about his dream cast, he says, "I was lucky. We first approached Manoj, who'd just wrapped up Saath Uchchake with Neeraj. Considering how many good offers Tabu's flooded with, I'm grateful she chose Missing. When we got Anu Kapoor on board, I was over the moon. I've been a huge fan since his Ek Ruka Hua Faisla where he played a septuagenarian when barely 22-23." Yet, it was no cakewalk. "It was working out to only 24 days from the cast."
For completing the Mauritius shoot in just over 23 days, he credits his stars. "If they had to report at 7am, they were ready with make-up and their lines at five to seven."
Abhyankar's dream of making it big took several years. Though he bagged big banners and even signed on big stars, the films never took off. While his TV work kept the hearth running, his skills with the small screen got him assignments across the border. He was invited by the Pakistan government as a creative consultant for Geo TV entertainment.
"They were used to a languorous pace of making serials and suddenly flooded with Indian saas-bahu content. When the Indian channels were blocked by hardliners, the DVDs of the episodes would reach audiences via Dubai."
It was then that the Musharraf government invited him to train a pool of talent to create their own daily soaps. But Abhyankar returned following the 2006 Mumbai serial train blasts. And as he dreamed of making cinema, he created a bank of scripts that are now coming handy as he readies his production house. "When you work with different set-ups you have to start from scratch every single time. Now we'll have the basics in place and keep using them for all our projects."
Other feathers…
Mukul Abhyankar has worked with Merchant Ivory Productions in 1989 on films like Street musicians of Bombay and Dolls Wedding for BBC Channel 4 as production assistant. He was also briefly a still photographer on The Deceivers, starring Pierce Brosnan.
While in Germany, he assisted state award winner Heidengeld directed by Dagmar Kamlah and other short films like Coming out, Das Café, Klaus und der Hund, The Park, Lover of a Kung Fu Fighter which were showcased at film festivals across Germany.
From March 1999 to 2005, he made about 40 short and long tele-features for various networks, including Shhh Koi Hai, Kahani Jurm Ki, Rishtey, Gubbare, Thriller at 10 and Rooh
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