Posted:
Tracing Aanand L Rai's journey through cinematic adventures
By Roshmila Bhattacharya, Mumbai Mirror | Updated: Aug 13, 2018, 04:00 IST
Tanu Weds Manu
hat's Aanand L Rai's mantraand the reason why the producerdirector, in his decade-long trek through wonderland, has fearlessly broken with convention, experimented with taboo subjects and made the kind of fi lms he believes in rather than what he believes will work. Tracing his journey through his adventures...
APPY PHIRR BHAG JAYEGI (2018)
Mudassar spent a lot of time on Happy Bhag Jayegi but somewhere along the way, I felt that he had not relished the fi lm as much as he should have. So, I urged him to enter the Happy' space again and fl ush it out of his system completely since he already had a plot to take forward. I'd like to believe that this time it was a truly happy experience for him. Last time, since he was returning from a seven-year sabbatical, Mudassar had perhaps been on the back foot, this time he played on the front foot.
HAPPY BHAG JAYEGI (2016)
Mudassar Aziz came to me with this Happy' fi lm when I had just started prepping up for Tanu Weds Manu Returns. I'm a director fi rst and told him that while I would have loved to involve myself with his baby, for the moment, my fi rst love was myself and my fi lm. I o ered to speak to studios and line up a good producer for him. But Mudassar was adamant he wanted to make the fi lm with me and insisted on waiting. It was his trust in me that led to my producing Happy Bhag Jayegi for him. The fi lm brought about the realisation that I can become a good support for my directors.
SHUBH MANGAL SAAVDHAN (2017)
Coming from the middle-class world myself, I knew we had grown and it was time to shed the tag of conservative'. The idea behind taking an adult' subject and turning it into a family entertainer was to bring what had, for all these years, only been spoken in whispers behind the close doors of the bedroom, into the living room. Being the father of a teenage daughter, I also wanted to bridge this generation gap. Shubh Mangal Saavdhan brought together two generations in a way that they could talk to each other as friends.
MANMARZIYAAN (2018)
During Mukkabaaz I met a director who was raw and yet so neat. The Anurag Kashyap you will meet in Manmarziyaan is more polished, milder but bolder. This two-fi lm journey was all about getting associated with one of the most brilliant directors of the country. Mujhe apne andar kuch change lana tha, maybe he felt the same way. Working with him has made me a more gutsy fi lmmaker, while I think he's more controlled today, perhaps a little happier too.
ZERO (2018)
We have fi nished shooting the fi lm but I have yet to meet Shah Rukh Khan, the biggest actor in the country. Khan saab has met me like a friend and a brother, a philosopher and a guide, a senior colleague and a student, but ab tak unhone uss superstar se milne ka mauka nahin diya. I look forward to meeting him some day.
NIL BATTEY SANNATA (2016)
was 40, high on the success of Tanu Weds Manu and its sequel and didn't want to play safe. I wanted to do something outof-the-box, something daringly different, and through its overwhelming acceptance make the Hindi fi lm industry believe that our audience is far more evolved than we give it credit. The fi lm was about a maid who wants her daughter to become an IAS officer. Her argument was that if a doctor's son becomes a doctor and an engineer's son an engineer, toh bai ki beti kya karegi? I'm grateful that a teacher's son got this opportunity to make fi lms and told myself if that can happen to me, then why can't a maid's dream come true? Nil Battey Sannata remains one of our most important fi lms and if it inspires even one maid to educate her child, I would say it was the most successful fi lm of the decade. More recently, my associate Rahul Shanklya came to me with an idea and I told him to just go ahead and make it on a minimal budget. Meri Nimmo (left) was the purest cinema, a small fi lm with a big heart.
NEWTON (2017)
For me, it was an important step to be associated with a fi lm like Newton because while being an issue-based story, it was, to my mind, also a commercial fi lm. As an audience, I believe the divide between the two cinemas is decreasing and viewers are looking for an intelligent fi lm that's also engaging. Newton, for me, was that fi lm.
RAANJHANAA (2013)
After the box-office success of Tanu Weds Manu, everyone expected me to quickly come up with a sequel, but I didn't wish to get typecast as a maker of romcoms. I wanted to challenge myself as a director with a tragedy and Raanjhanaa happened. It was a gamble making a fi lm set in Varanasi with a South superstar, but I was confi dent that Dhanush was the right casting choice and that this was the best way to play my innings. Just before Tanu Weds Manu, I had lost my Dad and that transformed me as a person. I wanted my fi lms to refl ect this change that was happening within me. Raanjhanaa helped me grow not only as a director but as a person too. The fearlessness I carried forward from Tanu Weds Manu was now tempered with a new-found maturity.
TANU WEDS MANU (2011)
I had made two films before this, Strangers (2007) and Thodi Life Thoda Magic (2008), and they had not worked because I had been trying hard to prove that I was a director who knew his job. I realized later that you don't have to impress people, you just have to tell a story. And that's what I set out to do with Tanu Weds Manu. It was the best time for me because I was scraping the bottom of the barrel and had nothing to lose. I could behave like the biggest director because no one was looking at me. It took me three years to finish the fi lm but I was sure from here I could only go up. It paid off.
TANU WEDS MANU RETURNS (2015)
In the four years that it took me to return to the franchise, I had grown as a director. But the best part was that I was not focussed on only my own growth but that of my actors as well. Queen had happened to Kangana (Ranaut) in the interim while Maddy (R Madhavan), after some wrong choices in Bollywood, had found the right path in Tamil cinema. Even my writer, Himanshu Sharma, had had his share of ups and downs and grown, as had my audience who were ready for a new cinema. They understood that Datto was not a gimmick but was for real and accepted her as warmly as they had embraced Tanu. Even the story took off exactly four years after the first film had ended with Tanu wedding Manu.
Mudassar spent a lot of time on Happy Bhag Jayegi but somewhere along the way, I felt that he had not relished the fi lm as much as he should have. So, I urged him to enter the Happy' space again and fl ush it out of his system completely since he already had a plot to take forward. I'd like to believe that this time it was a truly happy experience for him. Last time, since he was returning from a seven-year sabbatical, Mudassar had perhaps been on the back foot, this time he played on the front foot.
HAPPY BHAG JAYEGI (2016)
Mudassar Aziz came to me with this Happy' fi lm when I had just started prepping up for Tanu Weds Manu Returns. I'm a director fi rst and told him that while I would have loved to involve myself with his baby, for the moment, my fi rst love was myself and my fi lm. I o ered to speak to studios and line up a good producer for him. But Mudassar was adamant he wanted to make the fi lm with me and insisted on waiting. It was his trust in me that led to my producing Happy Bhag Jayegi for him. The fi lm brought about the realisation that I can become a good support for my directors.
SHUBH MANGAL SAAVDHAN (2017)
Coming from the middle-class world myself, I knew we had grown and it was time to shed the tag of conservative'. The idea behind taking an adult' subject and turning it into a family entertainer was to bring what had, for all these years, only been spoken in whispers behind the close doors of the bedroom, into the living room. Being the father of a teenage daughter, I also wanted to bridge this generation gap. Shubh Mangal Saavdhan brought together two generations in a way that they could talk to each other as friends.
MANMARZIYAAN (2018)
During Mukkabaaz I met a director who was raw and yet so neat. The Anurag Kashyap you will meet in Manmarziyaan is more polished, milder but bolder. This two-fi lm journey was all about getting associated with one of the most brilliant directors of the country. Mujhe apne andar kuch change lana tha, maybe he felt the same way. Working with him has made me a more gutsy fi lmmaker, while I think he's more controlled today, perhaps a little happier too.
ZERO (2018)
We have fi nished shooting the fi lm but I have yet to meet Shah Rukh Khan, the biggest actor in the country. Khan saab has met me like a friend and a brother, a philosopher and a guide, a senior colleague and a student, but ab tak unhone uss superstar se milne ka mauka nahin diya. I look forward to meeting him some day.
NIL BATTEY SANNATA (2016)
was 40, high on the success of Tanu Weds Manu and its sequel and didn't want to play safe. I wanted to do something outof-the-box, something daringly different, and through its overwhelming acceptance make the Hindi fi lm industry believe that our audience is far more evolved than we give it credit. The fi lm was about a maid who wants her daughter to become an IAS officer. Her argument was that if a doctor's son becomes a doctor and an engineer's son an engineer, toh bai ki beti kya karegi? I'm grateful that a teacher's son got this opportunity to make fi lms and told myself if that can happen to me, then why can't a maid's dream come true? Nil Battey Sannata remains one of our most important fi lms and if it inspires even one maid to educate her child, I would say it was the most successful fi lm of the decade. More recently, my associate Rahul Shanklya came to me with an idea and I told him to just go ahead and make it on a minimal budget. Meri Nimmo (left) was the purest cinema, a small fi lm with a big heart.
NEWTON (2017)
For me, it was an important step to be associated with a fi lm like Newton because while being an issue-based story, it was, to my mind, also a commercial fi lm. As an audience, I believe the divide between the two cinemas is decreasing and viewers are looking for an intelligent fi lm that's also engaging. Newton, for me, was that fi lm.
RAANJHANAA (2013)
After the box-office success of Tanu Weds Manu, everyone expected me to quickly come up with a sequel, but I didn't wish to get typecast as a maker of romcoms. I wanted to challenge myself as a director with a tragedy and Raanjhanaa happened. It was a gamble making a fi lm set in Varanasi with a South superstar, but I was confi dent that Dhanush was the right casting choice and that this was the best way to play my innings. Just before Tanu Weds Manu, I had lost my Dad and that transformed me as a person. I wanted my fi lms to refl ect this change that was happening within me. Raanjhanaa helped me grow not only as a director but as a person too. The fearlessness I carried forward from Tanu Weds Manu was now tempered with a new-found maturity.
TANU WEDS MANU (2011)
I had made two films before this, Strangers (2007) and Thodi Life Thoda Magic (2008), and they had not worked because I had been trying hard to prove that I was a director who knew his job. I realized later that you don't have to impress people, you just have to tell a story. And that's what I set out to do with Tanu Weds Manu. It was the best time for me because I was scraping the bottom of the barrel and had nothing to lose. I could behave like the biggest director because no one was looking at me. It took me three years to finish the fi lm but I was sure from here I could only go up. It paid off.
TANU WEDS MANU RETURNS (2015)
In the four years that it took me to return to the franchise, I had grown as a director. But the best part was that I was not focussed on only my own growth but that of my actors as well. Queen had happened to Kangana (Ranaut) in the interim while Maddy (R Madhavan), after some wrong choices in Bollywood, had found the right path in Tamil cinema. Even my writer, Himanshu Sharma, had had his share of ups and downs and grown, as had my audience who were ready for a new cinema. They understood that Datto was not a gimmick but was for real and accepted her as warmly as they had embraced Tanu. Even the story took off exactly four years after the first film had ended with Tanu wedding Manu.
Indian Mythology
Sampoorna
CID
Current Affairs
0