Dunno if this has been posted before. It is a seven-page article by Raja Sen on Byomkesh Bakshi series and the films made on them. Gives a good insight. Sushant really has a difficult task in hand since Byomkesh is an extremely revered character for Bengalis.
Excerpts from the article mentioning Dibakar's Detective Byomkesh Bakshy and Sushant:
Over in Mumbai, having bought the rights to all 32 stories in every language other than Bengali, Dibakar Banerjee has announced his own Byomkesh Bakshi film, with Kai Po Che! star Sushant Singh Rajput in the lead role.
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MEANWHILE IN MUMBAI, Dibakar Banerjee has rolled his sleeves up, joined forces for the first time with the gargantuan Yash Raj Films, and aims to take on his own Sharadindu story in a film with a peculiarly provocative title. "It's not just Detective Byomkesh Bakshy with a Y," said Banerjee, "but it's Bakshy with an exclamation mark at the end. The exclamation stands for youth and action." Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!, then. The director defended his unusual choice of spelling by saying that Sharadindu Banerjee had never spelt Byomkesh's name in English, which made Bakshy as valid as Bakshi. "I know that Byomkesh didn't like to be called a detective, but Sharadindu babu said, through the character of Ajit, that while Byomkesh didn't care for the appellation, he was at heart a private detective. He just hated to be slotted."Banerjee will start shooting the film, which is based on two of the original adventures, and features a Byomkesh just out of college, in January, and wrap up by the end of 2014. It is the director's most ambitious project to date, a massive period film for which he has turned music composer as well. Banerjee's Byomkesh will remain the quintessential Bengali, except that he won't have "any funny Bengali accent" in a Hindi film."My Byomkesh will be a young and sharp guy who will be accepted as a sleuth by a pan-Indian audience. Byomkesh will be in his 20s and be someone who has healthy interests in life, and loves the company of women. We even want to take Byomkesh to the global audience," Banerjee earlier said in an interview to the Indian Express.And Sushant Singh Rajput"fresh from the success of Kai Po Che! and Shuddh Desi Romance"seems well aware of his responsibility as the first Hindi Byomkesh. "I spent some time in Calcutta with various families who seem to have formed their own versions of Byomkesh," Rajput said over a phone conversation. "Byomkesh belongs to them and there is a huge responsibility not to disappoint them. He is, after all, the first real detective in Indian literature." Rajput's been catching up on his predecessors, and feels Uttam Kumar was "slightly stylised but believable" and Rajit Kapur was impressive because of his simplicity, and because "there is no playing to the galleries." Their Byomkesh seems to be aiming for gritty naturalism.
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Banerjee, however, said that he found a truly interesting conflict in the idea of 22- and 23-year-old boys, young men "detecting and coming to know" how life works. "This is pure detection, before the maturity and the cynicism sets in."Rajput appears determined to live the part. He's taken three months off after the September release of Shuddh Desi Romance to immerse himself in the Byomkesh novels and Bengali culture, and Dibakar's prescribed him a mammoth reading list, which includes all the Sharadindu Banerjee novels, Nirad C Chaudhuri's Autobiography Of An Unknown Indian, and books on the history of Calcutta. "I want to start by understanding pre-Independence Bengal," said Rajput. The actor broke down his process: "My understanding of the character is formed by first studying all the similarities and dissimilarities I have with the character. That gives rise to a binary state between yourself and the character, and when the stand-by light is on and the camera begins to roll, you react"in that state"to whatever the director says." Binary state? Byomkesh might well approve.
Edited by bonnefille - 11 years ago
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