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| Unknown quantity |
| Abhilasha Ojha / New Delhi Aug 02, 2009, 00:04 IST |
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 Ram Gopal Varma desperately needs a hit after RGV Ki Aag, and is banking on his forthcoming adventure thriller Agyaat.
Towards the end of our conversation director Ram Gopal Varma remarks drearily, “Nothing disturbs me after RGV Ki Aag.” I’m stumped. “I said, nothing disturbs me after RGV Ki Aag,” he repeats, sighing.
 The interview, brief by the standards of many industry wallahs who don’t mind talking non-stop to ensure publicity for their films, revolves around RGV and his failures and debacles that have come in quick succession.
To be fair, Varma must be feeling the fatigue, what with the same questions being hurled at him time and again by the media. He is, after all, talking to us because his new film’s release is just around the corner. I sense the same exhaustion in his tone with this interview, too, and frankly, one can’t really blame him. He would like to forget RGV Ki Aag and his previous flops and, in that sense, he’s someone who is trying hard, very hard, to move on. His new film, Agyaat (due on August 7), is, in his own words, “an adventure thriller with a scary element firmly in place”.
Another horror film? “No, this is not a horror film,” groans Varma, adding, “Horror films, by definition, deal with black magic and stuff, but in Agyaat there is a killer who could be anything, anyone.” The background score, the sounds, the camera movements, not surprisingly, will ensure that the audience uses its imagination. “That’s why,” he adds, “it is called Agyaat, meaning ‘the unknown’.”
The story of his new film, says Varma, came to him while he was shooting Jungle, a hostage drama starring Fardeen Khan and Urmila Matondkar. The film was well received by audiences and critics alike, especially since it came at a time when (now slain) sandalwood smuggler Veerapan was on the run. “Just walking into the jungles, you see, was scary. Why? Because you realise that you’re shifting away from the structured atmosphere that exists in the cities and metros to something wild, into the unknown,” he explains thoughtfully.
That’s how Agyaat was born. Every time Varma went on long walks in the jungle of Bandipur Forest Reserve in Karnataka — where Jungle was shot — he imagined it as the setting of Agyaat. “I realised then that if I wanted to create a scary film, all the elements for the film were in this setting. Every branch, every leaf had a life of its own, and it could be scary to just imagine that something unknown was watching you all the time,” he says.
Only time will tell whether Agyaat, shot in the breathtaking forests of Sri Lanka, will manage to live up to the expectations. Varma, frankly, does need a fresh lease of life, and when I suggest that he might just need to take baby steps all over again, he says, philosophically, “Your life is as good as the next decision you make. You cannot ponder too much on what others say.”
For as long as he continues to speak to the media, one question that will haunt him is RGV Ki Aag. One senses that he’s prepared. But why are things going so wrong for Varma in the industry? Why aren’t his films working? Why didn’t Aag work? Varma believes that we, “as a society, as a race, as people, love being negative. We live in a world of negativity. People love to see people bashed up and ripped apart and it happens all the time.” How did he deal with the failure of RGV Ki Aag, his most ambitious project that was reduced to a pathetic joke and declared the biggest dud in Bollywood? “Within a week of the film’s release I had started shooting for Phoonk, so it wasn’t a big deal. I’ve been around for too long in the industry to feel bad about flops. Besides, I feel that audiences looked at the effect of RGV Ki Aag,” he comments.
It has, undoubtedly, been a long two decades for him in the industry. He’s the man who gave us the glorious Satya and unravelled our primal fear in Raat and Bhoot. He can be partly credited with giving us the “new-age heroine” in commercial cinema (Urmila Matondkar in Rangeela). Varma has recently been in the news for the wrong reasons: for accompanying Vilas Rao Deshmukh with his son Riteish to the Taj in Mumbai after the terror attacks and, a few months later, being reprimanded for distorting the national anthem in his new film. Will his savior be Agyaat? For now, the answer, much like the film’s title, is unknown.
| Rapid rebound
How do you view the debacle of RGV Ki Aag today?
Sanjay Leela Bhansali, after getting criticised for Saawariya, won’t be back with his next film before the end of 2011. I’m always back within three or four months with new films so it’s easier for the media to rebuke me. There have been times when I haven’t liked someone else’s films and criticised them similarly.
Is there any fear before the release of Agyaat?
I’ve been around in the industry for too long a time to feel any “fear” before a film’s release. My job is to make films to the best of my ability. That’s it.
What gives you your unshakable faith in new talent, including actors and directors whom others in the industry haven’t given a second chance?
That’s a very narrow way of looking at cinema. For Satya, a well-known face wouldn’t have worked. Similarly, for Sarkaar, no one but Amitabh Bachchan could’ve worked. I do my casting based on my script requirements.
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