He’s “allergic to plots”, is learning some hard truths about distribution and works on it projects to help fund his films. This low-profile filmmaker seems to thrive on the untried and untested.
When I first see him, Anup Kurian is standing on a large rock near a cliff-edge, eyes red from lack of sleep, waiting for the sun to cast just the right shadow. Possibly he isn’t in the mood for smart-aleck quips, but this is not an opportunity to pass up. “Dr Livingstone, I presume,” I say, holding out my hand — it’s been a long climb up a desolate mountain road near Kurian’s family house in Vagamon, Kerala, and there’s something surreal about stumbling out of foliage at 5:30 in the morning to find a film crew shooting here, of all places.
There are two reasons why The Hunt — the working title for Kurian’s second feature as a writer-director — is being filmed entirely on what is, for him, home ground. The first is that Vagamon is a beautiful, pristine location, perfectly suited to the character-driven script about a middle-aged recluse growing potent marijuana in a forest retreat. The second is that The Hunt is being made on a budget of only around Rs 40 lakh.
That’s still a step up from Kurian’s first feature, Manasarovar, which cost Rs 11 lakh to make in 2004, got good notices at the London Film Festival but then suffered from poor distribution and never really found an audience. “We lost a lot of money while releasing that movie,” says Kurian, “One thing they don’t teach you in film school is distribution — you learn it the hard way!” This time around he has more reason for optimism; with Naseeruddin Shah playing the lead role, The Hunt is assured of basic visibility.
Kurian has been obsessed with movies and cameras for as long as he can remember — he moonlighted as a wedding photographer during his school and college days and later did a production course at the Films and Television Institute of India (FTII) — but he isn’t what you’d call a “full-time” director. After FTII, he spent a few years working in San Francisco as a software programmer, and simultaneously began writing scripts. (“You need logic to do coding, though it’s a bit different from the logic you need to write a screenplay,” he jokes.) His IT projects have helped fund his movie-making.
In one sense, making a low-budget film is easier in the Internet age. Kurian’s unit lives and works in places as far-flung as Kottayam, Mumbai and the US, but this didn’t matter, for most of the early brainstorming was done online, on Skype, Google Talk and email. “Our pre-production communication costs were close to zero,” he says, “There was no need for face-to-face meetings, everyone was working simultaneously on their own projects, and we all got together only when the film actually had to roll. I wouldn’t have been able to make a movie on this scale 15 years ago.”
The actual shooting is trickier. Costs have to be carefully accounted for each day (getting 40 cans of film from Kodak for a marked-down price of Rs 5,000 each was a minor triumph), little compromises are made, tempers tend to fray easily. Artificial lights aren’t available for the last few days, which means keeping fingers crossed that the clouds stay away. Other hitches flow from shooting in a small, homely location where Kurian and his family are well-known and the personal and the professional get confused. A real-life local policeman, who has been requested to bring along his jeep for a short scene, is under the impression that he will get to play a role as well — to act with Naseeruddin Shah! — and when he sees an actor in a policeman’s costume, he gets miffed, turns the jeep around and departs. To put it mildly, this is not the sort of thing that would happen on a Karan Johar production.
It’s a wonder that Kurian retains his broad smile through most of this — and even says humorous things in the tone of a Zen master — but then, as he puts it, “I have to be the cool and composed guy on the set. If I lose it, nothing will get done.” However, there are areas where he doesn’t brook compromises. When the script was being finalised, some of his advisers suggested alterations to make characters’ motivations more strongly defined and to give the story a fixed arc — even a twist near the end. But Kurian stuck to his guns. “I’m allergic to plots,” he says nonchalantly, and you understand what he means when you watch Manasarovar, a film that isn’t concerned so much with the resolution of a narrative as with mood, character development and creating a sense of unknowable connections between different types of people. “The moment someone tells me that the script should follow a tried-and-tested template, I lose interest.”
We’re interrupted by the cameraman shouting “Clear the field!” Gathering his lungi around him, Kurian bends down to remove large pieces of paper and polythene bags from the ground. Then he moves out of the “field” himself, yells “Action!” and the camera rolls.
