Interview: In conversation with Shonali Bose on 'Margarita with a Straw'

Margarita with a Straw, directed by Shonali Bose, is a coming of age story of a teenage girl Laila, played by Kalki Koechlin. Living with cerebral palsy, the film follows Laila's journey as she explores her sexuality and falls in love. It was a comment from her cousin Malini Chib, who has cerebral palsy, that sparked the thought in Bose and led to making the film. The film also stars Revathy as  Laila's mother, with Sayani Gupta playing Khanum, her love interest.

Bose won the Sundance Mahindra Global Filmmaker Award for the film's script in 2012, where it was further developed. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival 2014 where it won the NETPAC award for the Best Asian Film. It was also screened at the BFI London Film Festival and the Busan International Film Festival. 

An acclaimed director, Bose's first feature film Amu (2005) dealt with the anti-Sikh riots of 1984. It premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival and Toronto International Film Festival and won the FIPRESCI Critics Award. The film also won the national award for Best Feature Film in English and best first-time director.

Her last film Chittagong released in 2012 which she co-wrote and produced with Bedabrata Pain.

Bose talks to dna about the process of writing and making Margarita and her excitement for its release in India.

How did you move forward from Malini's comment to making a film on it?
That comment was made some years before the film. To backtrack a little, this was something I was very conscious of as a teenager growing up with her. I was extremely conscious about her yearning to have a boyfriend and therefore I didn't date anybody. And then I forgot about it or rather pressed it down because I couldn't do something about it. So when she said that to me—she was 39 and I was 40—20 years had passed and it hit me with real force and it moved me. After Chittagong, I thought about what the next film should be and again I remembered this. My aunt, Malini's mother, Dr Mithu Alur said, "Why don't you do something about disability?" and I said, "Well I'm not interested in doing it the way you think." But I realised that I do have an angle that I'm interested in. Then I started  exploring how the story would evolve and cracking that.

People with disability are usually portrayed on screen - sexuality never comes into the picture. It is usually shown with the angle of creating sympathy for the character. What was your aim with its portrayal in the film?
I don't think as a writer I went out with the aim that this is what I want to achieve. I just wrote organically expressing it because my own experience with my sister and being brought up with there being no difference between her and me. We never dealt with her with sympathy. There was no difference between the siblings in either how we dealt with each other or how our parents and our aunts and uncles dealt with us. So that grounding automatically just played into how I wrote the character. I didn't really sit down and say that my aim is that the audience will understand you shouldn't treat somebody differently. But that is how it has come through. You actually don't sympathise at all, you empathise. So you understand that person's point of view but you don't pity them or sympathise with them. Different people have different problems in life you can't walk, you are in a wheelchair. Somebody else's problem may be that they are poverty stricken. Everybody has a disabilty in a way is kind of my outlook. 

So there was never an intention of making this film about creating awareness.
Actually, that is what my aunt wanted me to do. I didn't go about it like that. This struck me that somebody who is in a wheelchair is yearning to be loved and I wanted to develop that story. That's what interested me as a narrative filmmaker. It was never about creating awareness because then I'll make a documentary or I'll make it very differently. The film deals with issues like access but in a subtle way. So, once in her college the lift is not working and she has to be carried up the stairs. But I didn't make a point about it but indirectly it will make you think about those things because you may not be exposed to them. We take these things for granted.

Your previous films have been very political in nature and Margarita with a Straw is a much more personal story. Did your process of filmmaking change from film to film?
Not at all. What happened with Amu is that 1984 (riots) impacted me hugely and nobody had made a film on it. So I wanted to deal with that issue in a narrative film. But other than that, the entire process was exactly the same. As a writer I went deep down to look at my own personal life to write an honest, emotional story. There is a lot of me in Amu. For instance the mother-daughter relationship— its a theme that is important to me. Both the films have very important mother-daughter relationships. I lost my mother when I was 21. That has played into both films. The character of Amu comes from America to India. Both Amu and Laila (from Margarita with a Straw) are in Delhi University. I was in Delhi University. So I think I borrowed heavily from my own life for Amu as I did in Margarita. I wrote from a place of my own pain and incidences in life for them and that's how my narrative developed for both films. The process was identical.

Why did you decide to make the protagonist in Margarita a young girl?
There's something I find very moving about  a coming of age story. It's at that time where any teenager they are thinking about romance and sex. I find that really interesting. It's a universal thing that makes you identify with that person. If I had done it with a 39 year old, then it would be a different thing. Then that person has faced years of rejection. If a person is saying at the age of 39, "I'm dying to have sex" then I'm dealing with a completely different film. That's very interesting and fantastic but that's different. And what I wanted to go back to the memory of us as 19 year olds where we are both same and we both want the same thing and then I let the person have it. She goes forward and gets to have it. So I wanted it to be something that anybody can identify with and understand. It's an age where your attitude towards love and sexuality start forming. And that was interesting to me from a more mature, cynical, disappointed, different point of view of someone in their late 30s or 40s.

How did you direct Kalki Koechlin? What brief did you give her?
First I worked with her for three months and that was the condition before her casting her. She was totally on board with that she needed to immerse herself in the character and immerse herself in the work for three months without doing anything else. So, part of the work was just going back to the basics of acting, where you learn to be honest in your performance and you don't perform from a superficial space. It was really important to me that she has to give a deep, honest performance. She came to my house in Delhi and lived with me. That had nothing to do with disability but going back to doing Bollywood films you tend to act from a superficial place. That was the first six weeks.

After that I introduced her to Malini. She spent a huge amount of time with Malini. She took her out drinking, she went out with her to movies, she hung out with her in the house, she ran the marathon  with her pushing her in the wheelchair, really got an insight into Malini's life. So there were two levels to that. She's closely observing Malini physically but she is also imbibing Malini's joie de vivre. How she interacts with the world, how she interacts with her family, how she is herself. For somebody who has never had disabled person in the family, you tend to pity the person and you don't understand that for that person it is normal. When they pick up a cup, you may feel "Yeh utha nahi paa rahi hai bechari" (Poor thing, she cant pick it up). But for them they are not bechari. You understand that when you spend time with them. So it was important for me to bring her to that place. Then working with physiotherapists and speech therapists. How you run out of breath when you say a sentence or how your tongue cant say certain syllables. All this was part of the training. I worked for three weeks on actual rehearsals on the scenes of the film with all the actors. So by the time we went on set she gave me perfect single takes.

What was the scripting process like, because I read that it went through over 40 revisions?
I spent two years writing this with Nilesh Maniyar, my co-writer. I wrote the first draft by myself. The story is my own and then it evolved with him and story also changed. I think this change happened after we went to Sundance. So the first year it was at a certain place and it won the Sundance Global Filmmaking award. When we to the lab I went much deeper. The comment from there was that I was looking at it from the outside."You're not in the skin of the character". It was from Malini's point of view. I was not owning the character and that's when it through a change.

You identify as a bisexual woman. Was the personal connect a reason for putting in the experience for the character as well?
I didn't do it consciously in fact. Before the Sundance Lab, there is character Khanum and she is gay and Laila sleeps with her. But Laila is like, "Yeah it was great but I'm not gay so I can't have this relationship". So that's how it was. Nobody at Sundance said anything about that. She doesn't have sex with any of the men in the film and they said, "Why do you think she doesn't have sex?" I was still writing from Malini's point of view when I wrote it like that. But I realised that's true. I had written such an amazing Khanum. She is so striking, just such a fantastic character. And there was this really boring, British boy who lived in America. When I owned the character, writing from being Laila myself, Laila was like "Are you kidding me!? This is the more interesting person. Why would I fall in love  with him?" It literally was like that. 

I teach writing and filmmaking, and I tell my students, "Be so in the skin of the character that the character tells you what to do." Now, one can analyse that and say from the deep subconscious that it's me, Shonali, because I'm comfortable with dealing with any gender. But I didn't do it consciously thinking, "Oh nobody deals with bisexuality in cinema". When I was re-writing, Laila just fell in love with Khanum and it happened organically, not from me wanting to deal with this issue.

Do you consider this film political? 
I'm very political person. So I think all my films will always be political. I think even if I do a straightforward love story with Shahrukh (Khan) and Deepika (Padukone), it'll be political. 

Are you looking forward to releasing the film in India?
It's most exciting. I've kind of been there done that with world film festivals. Amu got huge acclaim and awards at Berlin and Toronto. So I'm not having a different experience. I've done that. So, for me to have a big Indian theatrical release is just the most exciting. I think Indian audiences want such films but have never been given that opportunity. Neither did Amu or Chittagong get that opportunity. I'm dying... I can't wait for Indian audiences to see the film.

Are you worried about cuts from the Censor Board?
I thought there would be and Viacom 18 said we'll get an A certificate and we don't expect cuts. I'm very excited where we have reached in the country in that sense. How things have evolved even with the Censor Board. Things have really progressed a lot since I made Amu and that's great.