I wrote the film for Prabhu Deva: Remo D'Souza

The movie’s trailers have aroused enough curiosity and with about a month to go, Remo D’Souza, director of ABCD is quite antsy just as he is eager. “The movie is releasing on February 8. It’s about a month away; it seems a little far and a little close,” is how he quaintly describes the waiting period.

Expectations for sure are high this time around, for one it’s the 1st 3D film on dance made in India and two, it has Prabhudeva playing the lead, doing what he does best—dance. After delivering a hit in FALTU, was making ABCD a more confident effort?

“You can say that,” concedes Remo adding, “When your first movie is successful, it gives you the confidence when you are working on the next film and because this film is around     some    thing I     love — dance,     I knew what I was doing.”

Quiz him whose idea it was to shoot the film in 3D and he self-assuredly states, “Making the film in 3D was purely my idea.” “Even before I decided to make the film, there were two things I was sure about, one that the film would be shot in 3D and two, I would have the best talent in the industry acting in it.” 

Moving on, we have this niggling doubt if the film is autobiographical. While he doesn’t wholly agree to it, “It’s not autobiographical. It is an underdog’s story,” he pauses before finally conceding, “There are three incidents from my life that are there in the film. Before I began my career (in Bollywood) I was a street kid, so in a way, you can say the film is autobiographical, after all.”

As dance movies come, the essential plot in them almost always is about an underdog emerging a winner in the end. What’s new then is the choreography and dance one gets to see. Ask him what he’s experimented with in the film and pat comes the response, “I have experimented a huge way in making ABCD an emotional film. I’ve focussed on the struggles the dancers face, how they overcome it... the film is about friendship, love, fights. It has every emotion that every person is familiar with and has experienced.”
Besides it all, there is the all-important question about how he got Prabhudeva to agree to act in the film. Recalling it all, Remo enthuses, “I only wrote the script keeping Prabhudeva in my mind. So, when he agreed to do it, I jumped around with happiness. The only issue he had was with the language and I told him that I would take care of it.” Quiz him if Prabhudeva, as an ace director himself, got involved in the film-making too and Remo responds, “He actually listened to me. Before we started shooting, he in fact told me, ‘I am here as an actor, so treat me like one’. He stood by his words and the only suggestions he’d made were very simple ones.”

Finally, the question that needs to be asked is about Remo’s life itself — about how he, a kid from the streets, has managed to get where he has, to which he rather simply states, “I just worked hard a lot. Destiny has played its bit too. I’d say, 80% of what I’ve achieved today is destiny but the 20% of hard work I did... I gave it my all. My aim always was to make it big and I’m glad I stuck to my
desire.”