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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Did you select the music yourself?
Yes, it was all personally compiled. Some music that played in the film, like the dance sequences well, two of the three -- was pre-planned. The big number in which the girl dances [Ayesha, played by Neha Dubey], that was something we purchased the rights to before we started shooting. That song was a very hot number at the time. I just asked my niece, who was in college, "What are you dancing to?" I heard a number of these and I picked that song because I wanted a song that could be reinterpreted in a pretty modern way and be a crossover popular song.
All the other Indian pop songs in the film are personal choices, mainly '70s Bollywood pop songs that I love for one reason or another. For example, this great love song that the lovers hear on the radio, while they are making out in the rain -- that's a song my husband would sing to me in our courtship. So it's very personal, the whole thing. And each song is laden with double meanings, to comment on the situation that's happening on-screen. Like the song playing when Alice [the maid] bumps into P.K. Dube [the contractor] and the glasses fall is a '70s song that says, "Today the weather is playing tricks on me. Is something happening or nothing happening?" These lyrics directly relate to the magic of Alice and Dube and the monsoon that is to come.
You've commented elsewhere that Indian kids today have realized that it's hip to be Indian. Why do you think the younger generation of Indian youth, including nonresident Indian youth, embrace these songs? Is it ironic?
In my generation, we embraced the music as nostalgic but lovely. Kids today look at the '70s music anew because oftentimes the music comes back to them remixed, so it's being embraced as contemporary music. Like the song in the film that I bought is a classic song which has been remixed and redone by a band in Delhi called the Midival Punditz. [The song is "Fabric," a remix of a classic tune called "Ras Se Behare Tore Nain."] It's wonderful! These are kids you'd never imagine would know such a semi-classical song, but they've done it and they've remixed it and made it into something modern.
Who did you make this film for? What kind of audience were you envisioning?
I made the film just for myself. Really, truly, I'm telling you, I put myself through this river of 30 days, and the madness and all the fun of it too, because I wanted to lower the stakes. So that I had to just please myself, be truthful to myself and not pander to anybody's demands on me. How will they understand three languages spoken in one sentence? How will they understand all these different types of music? How will they understand five plotlines at the same time? There are so many ways you can just undercut yourself. But by leaving it so low-key and so "everything through the backdoor" as I always say, I just had to be true to myself.
I applied this sensibility to this film more than any other film I've done. With "Salaam Bombay!" nobody knew me, but this one, after I'd done the big things -- the epics and the big budgets and the Hollywood productions -- I just wanted to make a film as the purest act of making it. It was a utopian idea and it worked.
Surely Western audiences won't get all the jokes, all the layered references.
I hear them laugh in the film. The film is so local and authentic to itself, but it's actually universal in different ways you don't imagine or don't know. I've heard, especially with this film, people from Iceland to Hungary to Southern California asking me how I knew about their family. How did I do that? It's a very Delhi family, in a real way, but they can relate to it. As long as people can identify with the stories and the characters, they can always discover the deeper meanings and the jokes later. The great thing about a film with five stories is that a lot of people can return to see it again!
