Why Nitish didn't become a Steven Spielberg

Ranjan Das, a writer and director of documentary films writes about the funny ways of a wannabe filmmaker who wants to make a film but realises that he does not have it in him to be a filmmaker. I chanced upon this write-up from the desk of Kapilash Bhuyan, a friend who despite his broken leg, is planning to visit a fledgling film festival in Puri. It's surely funny..

THE MATURING OF NITISH

Nitish is a filmmaker, that rare breed who calls itself filmmakers without having made a single film. Perhaps being a filmmaker is the only profession where you don’t have to practice the craft in order to call yourself one; it takes care of everything, unlike say, a singer or an actor who has the advantage of singing or acting in front of a motley crowd at least, in order to lay claim to that profession. Nitish frequently had to face this question from people:

What do you do?
I am a filmmaker.

Oh, that’s good, but what do you do?
I am a filmmaker!

Na-na, that’s ok, but what do you do for a living?

And the conversation would gradually take a different turn and Nitish would make himself scarce… So Nitish decided that the next time anybody asked him what did he do, he would say that he was a writer - a scriptwriter. But his problems persisted.

What was that?
Well, it is writing for a film. There is a story and I am required to write the screenplay from that story; sometimes I write the story myself…

Oh, the screenplay, meaning you write dialogues?
Ok, ya…

What films have you written?
Nothing yet… actually I am working on a couple of scripts…

Oh, so you have not written anything as yet…
It’s not like that you see…

No-no, I mean you have not written anything that has been made into a feature film?

So back to square one. Nitish did not have a palpable profession that fetched him a livelihood… He was not a technician, an editor or cameraman or a sound recordist where he could rattle off names of projects… Worse still was when anybody asked which film stars he knew… How could he tell them that he has never stepped into a studio floor? Nobody would believe him…

He was in a state of limbo…

So he decided to go to Bring Your Own Film Festival at Puri in 2004 and met a lot of people who belonged to that breed who called themselves filmmakers without having made a single film. But he also met a whole lot of other people who had made films which were being screened at the festival. Nitish gathered courage and decided that next time he would come to Puri with a film of his own, made on DV, a format that has become so popular in the last couple of years.

So after the festival was over, he went back to his home town (wherever it is, but I have a lurking feeling that it is somewhere in the eastern of the country) and embarked on a project of working out a feasible script that could be shot in two to three days with friends as actors and technicians in minimum locations. The length would be something around 10 to 15 minutes and the budget should not exceed… Damn it man, one has to work up the budget… But that can wait.

So he spent the next couple of weeks thinking up ideas and threw them inside the waste paper basket. Damn it, it’s so difficult to work up a feasible script. He thought of all the films that he had seen in the festival and tried to draw inspiration. He summoned up all the European and Latin American masters that he has seen in the last 15 years… The inspiration was there, but the ideas were lacking. But being one never to give up, Nitish continued to struggle with himself and still he could not come up with an idea that appealed to him.

And suddenly it occurred to him, does he have it in him to make a film at all? Or is it just inspiration, a burning desire without the accompanying competence? All his years of film viewing, dissecting masters, abusing contemporary directors (without having seen any of their films), studying semiotics and structuralism and fighting with friends over film related issues… he was now 35 and Rimli, his girlfriend from college, had left him to marry an investment consultant in the US six years ago after waiting in vain for him to make a film for years on end…

Nitish started questioning his ability and hit the bottle. Not that he never drank before, but this time he immersed himself in the liquid… and lo and behold, he suddenly hit upon an idea! There it was, floating in front of him all this time and he was not aware of it. And in a state of trance he wrote out a treatment… Next morning when he read it he discovered that it was not so bad after all. So that evening he drank again and started working out the details. And slowly a script started shaping up…

The next few days he drank without respite and wrote till he was through with the script and drank more… He had it in him after all… He was not incompetent…The next step was to consult a cameraman friend and work out the feasibility of the project in terms of production and budget. Well… even if he didn’t pay anybody and got the camera free and edited the film at night on the sly at some studio with the help of an editor friend, the budget still came to 50 grand. But there was no stopping him now. He borrowed from friends and relatives (his friends had immense faith in him always as a filmmaker); sold his mother’s jewelry, stole (yes!)… He was like a man possessed. And then he shot his film and edited it.

And he was a changed man when he saw the final version: It was a pile of shit. Nitish never went to the BYOFF at Puri in the second year. Today he works as an accounts assistant in a private firm and draws a salary of Rs 3,000.

Moral of the story: Just as the digital ‘revolution’ has democratized and demystified the process of filmmaking, it has also opened the floodgates of garbage that is being churned out by a whole lot of people who call themselves ‘independent filmmakers’. At least, Nitish realized that he was a pile of shit; most don’t.

An Anecdote: One friend from London writes to another in Calcutta (this was long before the days of e-mails and computers when people still wrote in longhand): “…and how are our friends in Calcutta?” The friend from Calcutta wrote back: “Oh, they are all fine and working. And those who are not working are making documentary films.”