In my search for answers there were red herrings all over… very Hitchcockian… misleading… distracting… not letting me get to the bottom of it… but that’s where the fun was. The unending stream of red herrings would make my discovery sweeter and worth every penny.
Year 2014. November. My first year at the IFFI (International Film Festival of India), Goa. Teenkahon (Three Obsessions) our debut feature was part of the Indian Panorama. We were excited, nervous and completely over the moon.
And that’s when I met him. Mohsen Makhmalbaf. That year’s special guest to the festival and his film The President was the inaugural film. And as luck would have it we were put up at the same hotel. Next day at the breakfast I met him. And we spoke albeit briefly. In the initial years Makhmalbaf had made longer films. Gradually as he grew older the length of his films generally came down to anything between 70 to 75 minutes. I had asked him the reason. His answer was simple. Give the story the time it needs.
And in one stroke, The Violin Player the feature film was born.
The story was initially thought to be fit for a short film. That’s how I had envisioned it initially. But I was not too convinced. It was turning out to be neither a short nor a full length feature. And since a length midways was not really an option in this country, I was in two minds. Do I look at TVP as a short film or a featurette? I had gone to Goa with a bag full of questions. We were supposed to come back from IFFI and start pre production of TVP as a short.
That’s when I met him…
And things changed overnight.
I still remember breaking the news to Mona and she wore this stunned silence for hours. But by then the idea of The Violin Player the feature film was already born.
In India we do not believe in films which are 70 minutes long. “You won’t be able to release the film,” I was categorically told by people from the fraternity. I had decided to ignore them. The Violin Player would arrive at its own length, I had told myself.
Let’s go ahead and make the film and not worry about the length, the release and the business.
Art and artists have intrigued me from the moment I learnt to differentiate between the two. But are the two really different? Is it really possible to take art out of an artist? Won’t a true artist find ways to express himself? And the more the world tries to beat the art out of him, won’t he find ways to give birth to it? Won’t he look for some squalid corner that is least expected to nurture beauty and then bring his art to life?I wanted to find answers to these.
And The Violin Player was soon becoming my means to arrive at the answers I was looking for.In my search for answers there were red herrings all over… very Hitchcockian… misleading… distracting… not letting me get to the bottom of it… but that’s where the fun was. The unending stream of red herrings would make my discovery sweeter and worth every penny.
There’s another thing that I was trying to do. I was trying to involve the viewers in an experience which for them would not be a passive one. Nope this is not an ‘interactive’ film but I consciously wanted the viewers to be aware of what’s happening around them and not be engrossed in the film and only the film. I wanted them to experience the film while experiencing their own self. Only time will tell whether this experiment of mine was of any worth or not!
Bauddhayan Mukherji, September 2015
P.S : TVP would possibly remain the most planned shoot I have ever seen, heard or been party to. Knocking off a complex feature in just 10 days means one has to raise a toast for the Little Lamb team – Mona, Kedhhar, Harish, Siddharth, Abhinandan, Sambhav, Laxman, Rajesh, Geeta, Sushant, Ish, Mishraji – take a bow! Avik da, Arghyada, Tenny, Payel, Prasenjit, Anup, Sanjay, Sachin, Upendra – I really don’t have words to express my gratitude for making TVP possible. All of you are rockstars!
