Monday,11,2019

Ranjan Ghosh is a Bengali film-maker.
His interview was conducted by  Rudrani Gangopadhyay and Rupayan Mukherjee.

What has been your personal relationship with Shakespeare? When did you first encounter his texts?
As a child I lived in Durgapur. My sister studied at Carmel Convent School while I was at St. Xavier’s. My relationship with Shakespeare was an aural one. I’d hear my sister being taught The Merchant of Venice by my mother in the next room.

Did you read Shakespeare on your own or because it was prescribed? Do you still read him?
When we were in our ninth or tenth standard, Julius Caesar was taught to us. That was when I read him for the first time. I never came across any translations, but I was part of a performance of Julius Caesar, where I played the soothsayer who warns Caesar about the Ides of March. Post-Julius Caeser, I had gone on to read other plays by Shakespeare. I read The Merchant of Venice right after reading Caeser in school. After that, I did not read any Shakespeare for a while. It was after I completed my Bachelor’s degree and joined the Merchant Navy that I began to re-read Shakespeare. On the ship, we had a lot of time at our disposal after our duty-hours, so I read all of Shakespeare. And I read one of those annotated editions.

Did you watch any Shakespeare plays in performance as a child?
I had seen Bhranti Bilaash as a child, which was inspired by The Comedy of Errors. Recently, I saw Rajat Kapoor’s production of Hamlet, the Crown Prince, where Atul Kumar played the title role. I also saw Atul in Nothing Like Lear, which was an adaptation of King Lear. Both of these plays I saw at Prithvi Theatre, Mumbai.

Have you watched any of the recent Shakespeare productions on the Bangla stage? What did you think of them?
In Kolkata, I saw Kaushik Sen’s Macbeth. And had immensely liked it. I had also seen Gautam Halder play Othello, about which I have a few reservations. Of course, I had loved watching Soumitra Chattopadhyay play Lear in Raja Lear. I have recently seen Manish Maitra’s controversial Othello production, which I disliked absolutely .

Was your film Hrid Majharey made keeping Shakespeare’s 450th anniversary in mind?
No, it was not made keeping the anniversary in mind. I was at Whistling Woods Film School, majoring in Screenwriting. We had to write two screenplays for our final assessment, one of which was original, and the other - Aparna Sen's Iti Mrinalini - was assigned. While writing the original one, I realized that it was a love story with elements from Othello in it. That was not by design, came in rather organically. This was in 2008-2009. But once I recognized it, I nurtured this similarity. I had initially wanted to make this film in Hindi, in Mumbai. I had gotten Siddharth Narayan and Raima Sen, but the producers wanted me to change the ending. They said, Shakespeare wouldn’t sell, ending was too tragic, and so on. I finally got funding in Calcutta for a Bengali film in 2012. But by this time, I knew 2014 was coming up, so I pitched it as such.

Was Shakespeare’s name mentioned in the credits or posters? Did the Shakespearean connection help to get funding for the film? Was the connection highlighted in the promotion of the film?
The PR team picked this up, and they highlighted this in the promotions as well. But I never wanted the Shakespeare thing to be oversold. It was only on the poster and in the opening credits of the film that we acknowledged Shakespeare’s influence on the film. I did not want to alienate a section of the audience that was not familiar with Shakespeare.

Were the actors aware of the Shakespearean connection? Did it make any difference to their approach and style?
No, I did not tell them about the Shakespeare connection. This was a directorial decision. The moment you tell your actors this is Shakespeare, they might think of a certain style. I shared this information with my cinematographer, my editor and my music director because I wanted a certain kind of classical visuals, edit-pattern and music. It was much later, at a promotional event, that my lead actor Abir Chatterjee found out that Abhijit is Othello and Debjani is Desdemona. I thought the Shakespeare tag would intimidate them unnecessarily and sit on them heavily.

How marked is the use of Shakespeare in the film?
It was fairly marked. I was directing them in the Shakespearean space. You can see that in the images, in the space they were thrown in, in the sound design, in the treatment of the scenes, in the way characters interact – you can see that we had intentionally kept it casual, but they still bear all the hallmarks of a Shakespearean tragedy.

Was the connection to Othello important for the audience? Did it make any difference?
Because we had mentioned Othello on the posters, the audience went in expecting Othello. They could see Macbeth, they could see Hamlet’s dichotomy, they could see the soothsayer from Julius Caeser, and they could see Othello too. Perhaps this confused them. Looking back, I feel we should not have mentioned Othello during the promotions, and definitely not on the poster. It was actually an experiment with certain iconic Shakespearean texts and should have been presented as such. Somehow, when the audience watches an adaptation, they end up expecting it to be wholly faithful to the original text, but that is not always the case. Kurosawa, for example, has always used Shakespeare as a jumping point. Our audience, unfortunately, does not see things this way. This was a downside when it came to the business the film did.

How did the film do at the box office? Did it only run in city theatres and multiplexes or also in the districts?
The film ran mostly in city theatres, and some pockets in Durgapur, Siliguri etc, you know - the District Headquarters, for four weeks. It did reasonably well for a film of its genre. I don’t think such a film would have worked rurally.

Do you feel Shakespeare is restricted to the urban audience? Can the rural audience not be made to connect with his adaptations?
Of course it can be done. It has been done. There have been stage plays of Shakespeare in Gujrati, Malayali, Assamese theatre which have at least a semi-urban connect if not a rural connect. Bharadwaj’s Omkara also has a rural connect. I just did not want to do it in this film. There is no point telling a rural audience this is Shakespeare when they do not have an exposure to the original texts. Maybe one would make such an attempt in the future...

Speaking of Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara, what do you think of it?
I had immensely liked Maqbool. Omkara, too, I liked a fair bit. Problem is, with a play like Othello, I already had an image in my head. And the film did not match it, unfortunately.

How many of the other Shakespeare films have you seen? And which ones do you suppose have influenced you?
I was greatly influenced by My Own Private Idaho. This probably came out in the early 1990s and had elements of many of Shakespeare’s historical plays. The kind of worldview represented in this film influences me greatly. Of course, there were Kurosawa’s films like Ran and Throne of Blood. And then there were films like Maqbool, Romeo+Juliet, West Side Story etc.

Othello is the most performed play in India—why do you think that is the case? What is its appeal to the Indian culture?
I think both Othello and The Merchant of Venice are very popular in India. The thing with Shakespeare is that his plays are very universal. The jealousy in his plays, the love, the prophecies, the human relationships, the worldview – these are all that would connect to any culture, be it in Africa or Asia or Europe or America. Especially the supernatural concepts would appeal to an Indian audience. Besides, the Indian audience is very much vulnerable to the emotional turbulence we find in his plays.

Is Shakespeare a colonial icon? How is he relevant even today?
This is a difficult question. Yes, he is a colonial icon. But while we have rejected the British colonizers, we have embraced Shakespeare. I would think his relevance lies in his themes, which are timeless and universal concepts. They appeal to everyone in today’s time as well. His works lend themselves very easily to adaptations, and he does not mind. You know how they say there are seven basic plots. Shakespeare manages to capture the full range of human emotions and the essence of life very easily in his plays.

In what way, if at all, is Hridmajharey an adaptation of Othello? No lines from the text are used—the only Shakespearean lines are from Hamlet. The plot seems to be more influenced by Macbeth than by Othello – would you agree on that?
To a certain extent, yes. The witch-like figure makes the prophecy at the beginning and the rest seems to be worked out from there. Also there is the interest in Causality, Natural and Supernatural. so, it’s not only about Othello. The three witches of Macbeth have been combined into the one face-reader who foresees something and that becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. There is Desdemona’s blind love, which is from Othello. It has elements of Julius Caesar’s soothsayer in the beggar who sits by the road and keeps asking Abhijit to go back home. The protagonist displays Hamlet's dichotomy throughout the second half. As i said, we should have probably broadened the horizon and said it is inspired by Shakespeare’s body of work, and not just Othello.

Can you have an Othello without a Iago? Who is the Iago here?
Today when I am looking at a character like Othello, in my mind, it seems very stupid to have a character like Iago to influence his judgment, if you see the context and background of the protagonist - Abhijit's character. They say that in order for someone’s true character to come out, you need to put them through trying times. When Abhijit goes through the trying times, his inner Iago comes out. So I am convinced by the fact that in today’s time, the Iago does not necessarily have to be outside of Othello. It is within him.

The use of Andamans is very interesting—but why does the home and exile theme feature so prominently?
I don’t know why it was so crucial to my plot. It just happened. I wrote it like that. In hindsight, maybe I can think of reasons for it, but it wasn’t put in consciously. I organically felt that Abhijit had to be taken out of Calcutta and be turned into an outsider for his inner Iago to come out.

In Shakespeare’s Othello, the titular character is a marginalized one. In your film, Abhijit is this high caste, charming professor. Would you suppose you achieve his marginalization by sending him away from home?
Probably. I did not think bringing in a racial or a caste-based difference as that would not be very appropriate in today’s context, especially in the film's setting (in Calcutta and Bengal). So I subverted that in a way. Abhijit becomes Othello truly only in the Andamans. But he also becomes Iago there.

What is the function of the mad old man in the Andamans?
I had decided that he would go to the Andamans to create a kind of Kala Paani [exile across the black waters] kind of a situation. Now, for me, the history of the area where the story is set, becomes very important. Andaman has two histories: the history of the Cellular Jail and the history of refugee-dumping under the guise of 'rehabilitation' from the Indian mainland to the far-off islands to start their lives anew - post the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971. So the mad old man, a character who is constantly yearning to go back home in Bengal, becomes important for me to remind Abhijit that he has also lost his home. That character becomes Abhijit’s conscience telling him that he has to go home, that he too is exiled.

Why does he die when Desdemona is killed?
He is a physical manifestation of Abhijit’s conscience, and so he dies when Abhijit commits the murder.

Shakespeare’s Othello is an action hero—here he is shown as an intellectual—more of a Hamlet figure? Any reason for this change?
This was deliberate. You can see the dichotomy in Abhijit which defines Hamlet. It is very un-Othello.

Why is the prophecy that the old lady makes at the beginning of the film, in Hindi?
I did not want it to be in English or Bengali, but rather in some other language which Abhijit is not very comfortable with. That scene reveals that Abhijit does not speak Hindi very well. It is kind of like the odd language the witches speak in. The old lady is supposed to be Chinese, so it would have been perfect if she speaks Chinese.

Why is Desdemona/Raima an orphan?
I wanted to have a character who cannot be traced to anywhere. I do not need to know where she comes from. I have a fascination for characters (a woman, in this case) who come in from nowhere and greatly affect (destroy, in this case) our lives. In the main text Desdemona’s father’s opposition to the marriage triggers the action of the play—here everybody except the hero seems to bless the match. Abhijit does not need anyone to ruin his life and love. He does not need anyone else to do it for him. His Iago, his villain, is within him.

Why does Desdemona/Raima have to be pregnant?
Since Abhijit is out to destroy himself, it becomes complete only when he destroys his own child. Like his father, he too abandons his child when he kills her unknowingly.

The reference to Saptapadi is interesting. Was your first introduction to Othello through Saptapadi? What are your views on the use of Othello in this film?
No, that was not my first introduction to Othello, but when I saw the film I fell in love with Suchitra Sen playing Rina Brown playing Desdemona. I had to use it somewhere, and it lent itself beautifully to the film. However, Saptapadi was certainly not my window into Othello.

What was the purpose of the sexual harassment episode in the film? What are your views on Sexual harassment charges and the way in which enquiries are conducted? Do you think that many of the charges are motivated and false? Do you think we need laws to regulate Sexual harassment in colleges and schools? Or do these laws victimise men?
That incident acts as a trigger, it is the starting point of his downward spiral. The other purpose for the scene is to show the jealousy his student feels, which in a way foretells his own jealousy later in the film. I do think that false accusations happen, and that the enquiries are often biased. It is easier to victimize men in such cases. I think there needs to be proper regulations in place, which are fixed by the authorities in order to unearth the truth.

Tell us something about the choice of music in the film.
I wanted to play with classical music and electronica. Again, keeping in mind the classicism expected with Shakespeare and yet contemporize it through the use of electronica that i personally like a lot.

Tell us something about the cinematographic style of the film.
My brief to the cinematographer was very plain. I said that my film was revisiting Shakespeare, and I wanted a classical look to the visuals. I wanted dark visuals, which should not be very well-lit. Also, I wanted the colour red to be used extensively which has been done in the film. I also wanted Raima to look very beautiful. We used a lot of her close-ups.

How have critics reacted to the film? Have they commented on the Shakespearean connection?
The critics have by far been very kind. Indian Express, Times of India, Aaj Kal, Sangbad Pratidin, Anandabazar Patrika, Hindustan Times have all lauded my experimentation with Shakespeare. It was the audience that had expected Othello and were disappointed when they did not entirely find it. But I do think that over time, be it through the internet or the DVD, people will warm up to it more.

Anything else you would like to say about the experience of directing or writing the film.
When I was studying Physics at Jadavpur University, I found out that Sir Issac Newton was a great believer in astrology. He used to study it a lot. In fact, he used to spend more time on Alchemy than on Physics! I found this very odd, that someone (expected to be) so logical would believe in astrology or alchemy! I had always wanted to explore and create a character like that. Abhijit is influenced by the soothsayer even though he is a very logical man. He is very much a rational person, yet he gets caught up in this absurd web of jealousy. These two aspects coming together to create a personal tragedy within a larger social context was very interesting to me.