"It’s Crying to Be Made into a Film"

By Saibal Chatterjee - Newindpress on Sunday - India
Saturday, August 25, 2007

His long, eventful career has been built on a steady flow of films. Shyam Benegal isn’t, ergo, accustomed to protracted inaction.

His last release, Bose: The Forgotten Hero, was completed all of two years ago. “I am getting extremely restless,” the veteran director says. “I have never had such a long fallow period in my career.”

It isn’t, however, just the forced hiatus that has had him a tad on the edge of late; the lackadaisical manner in which the distributors treated the Netaji biopic, a pure labour of love, still rankles.

“That film would have had a fair chance hadn’t it been so poorly exploited,” he laments. “Imagine running a three-and-a-half-hour film at 11 at night or at 10.30 in the morning. It had to sink.”

But that setback is now behind him, and the septuagenarian filmmaker is moving on, with not one, not two, but three ventures looming on the horizon. First up is the tentatively titled Mahadev, which is scheduled to roll in September.

“The idea has been with me for a long time,” he says of the comedic film that will star Shreyas Talpade and Amrita Rao. “It is about a young villager who is the only literate man in his community and aspires to be a writer. He ends up becoming a letter writer to the unlettered.”

Mahadev will see Benegal return to the rural Indian terrain that has yielded some of his best films. From his very first directorial outings, the epochal Ankur (1974) and Nishant (1975), to the more recent Samar (1998), his cinema has frequently explored the hinterland of a complex, constantly evolving nation grappling with debilitating divides at various levels of existence — caste, gender, history, modernity versus tradition…

Also on the Benegal anvil is what promises to be by far his most ambitious film to date — an international spy drama about the real-life Noor Inayat Khan, a direct descendant of Tipu Sultan.

Her courage is still commemorated in the UK and France, but she isn’t even a footnote in Indian history. “I hope that will change once the film gets made,” says Benegal.

Noor’s story is indeed the stuff that riveting cinema is made of: during World War II, she laid down her life working as a British agent in Nazi-occupied France. The upcoming film is being scripted by economist Lord Meghnad Desai and his wife, Kishwar, who have bought the film rights to journalist Shrabani Basu’s critically acclaimed book, Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan.

“It’s an outstanding story,” says Benegal. “It has everything: human drama, heroism, intrigue, war…The book is the first authoritative biography of Noor Inayat Khan, very well researched and reconstructed. It’s crying to be made into a film.”

The scriptwriters, the director reveals, are currently on the third draft of the screenplay. “They are now in India for a month-and-a-half. By the time they return to London, the draft will have been wrapped up. It’s flowing quite nicely,” says Benegal.

Noor, who was betrayed by double agents and shot by the Nazis in Dachau in 1944 (she was only in her 20s), was a “strikingly pretty” woman endowed with multiple creative skills. She was a singer, broadcaster and writer of children’s stories.

Says the director: “She was as unlikely a war martyr as you can ever get. She was very quiet, gentle and vulnerable, a woman who believed in the tenets of the Sufi order set up in Paris by her father, sitar player and dhrupad vocalist Inayat Khan (in 1909, he was the first Indian classical musician to settle in the West). Subterfuge and violence were anathema to Noor. But she was required to resort to both once she volunteered to be an underground radio operator in France during the war.”

The screen adaptation of Noor’s tale of bravery and sacrifice, to be shot entirely in Europe sometime next year, will be an English-French-German film with a smattering of Urdu.

“The cast and the funding will obviously be international, but the film will have a strong Indian involvement in both respects,” says Benegal. Has he homed in on an actress for the character of Noor? “We will get to that only after the script is ready,” he says. “The character can be played by anybody from the younger lot of Mumbai actresses, but I am open to an European, somebody like Monica Bellucci, for the part.”

Closer home, Benegal is still nurturing an idea that is all set to roll but for the problems he has had with prospective producers — Chamki Chameli, a musical adaptation of Georges Bizet’s famed opera, Carmen. He plans to shoot the film on the Indo-Pak border in Rajasthan.

“I haven’t abandoned that project. A. R. Rahman has already done a lot of music for Chamki Chameli,” he reveals. “It needs a producer who is willing to be patient and involved. It’s not the sort of film for which you can go the location and start shooting.”

Talking of Rahman, wouldn’t he be the right man to score the music for Spy Princess given his strong Sufi moorings? Benegal acquiesces: “Indeed, it has to be somebody who has an instinctive feel for Sufi thought as well as a developed sense of world music.”