History’s sweethearts showbiz

By the time you read this, Jodhaa Akbar, a UTV production of Ashutosh Gowarikar’s film, will be out in a nearby theatre. It is a significant event, not just for the production house which is vying for the top spot in today’s fiercely competitive Hindi film industry, and for the director whose Lagaan still remains a benchmark, but for a genre which has had a rocky innings so far.

A phone conversation ahead of the movie’s release with Siddharth Roy Kapur, Director of UTV Motion Pictures, starts with precisely the last thorny point: were there major apprehensions that Jodhaa Akbar was a historical, given that movies of that nature have neither a popular mass base, nor a critical niche in India? The answer is clear, and revelatory. Yes, there was an initial pause, but only briefly. UTV exhaled, because the director was very clear that though the backdrop was historical, the movie’s focus would be the love story between Jalaluddin Akbar, (the most popular Mughal emperor of India, according to most historians), and Jodhabai, a Rajput princess.

Romance central

So, the intrigue and the internecine warfare between the local satraps and the marauding Mughals, and the bloody struggle for ascension to the throne, all become the setting against which Akbar and Jodha’s relationship flowers. They are a prince and princess, sure, but in the movie they are also newly-affianced and, a little later, newlyweds, trying to find a way to each other. Which is why the release date: February 15, just after Valentine’s Day, by when the roses should still be in bloom, and sweethearts still in the mood.

It’s not as if the film was always intended for today, though. It’s been long in the making, and a tentative release last year got postponed because of the work that remained; there was an order of magnitude about the post-production, the music tracks, the computer-generated images (CGI) that no one had anticipated. The one suitable date was set to clash with the two winter biggies Taare Zameen Par and Welcome. In retrospect, pushing the date further, to this Friday, has turned out to be a wise move: both TZP, distributed by UTV, and Welcome were huge draws from day one, and would have split the audience.

And given the fact that, traditionally, historicals haven’t been widely embraced by our audiences, the Rs 40 crore Jodhaa Akbar will need all eyes on board. The only record-breaker in the genre has been the evergreen Mughal-e-Azam, where the chemistry between Dilip Kumar and Madhubala is what everyone remembers, as well as the songs and dances, in the face of Prithviraj Kapoor’s thunderous grandstanding.

Hrithik and Aishwarya

Will Hrithik and Aishwarya be able to match up? They sizzled in Dhoom 2, but that was a modern-day caper, where both the hero and heroine could dress up or down, mostly the latter; Aish in a barely-there sky blue bikini and skirt, and Hrithik in a red shirt, flying open, buffed chest all bare. To be a 16th century king and queen, clad in heavy costumes and jewellery, and using a very different body language and dialogue delivery, is altogether different.

Kapur is upbeat. “We are very happy it turned out the way it did, because we couldn’t have asked for a better product.” Talk veers towards editorial control, an issue which can potentially have extremely contentious results: between the producers and the director, who decides what the final take will be? He agrees that there is much back and forth when the film is in the planning stages. “But once we know we are on the same page on the script, schedule, other creative aspects, and the budget, and we know we share the same point of view, we let the director do his thing.” Ultimately, he affirms, a film is the director’s vision.

UTV: content is king

Stepping back from the specifics of Jodhaa Akbar, we switch to UTV’s current trajectory. Begun back in the 1980s as a content creation company for TV, it included movies in its ambit in the mid-1990s. “Distribution was a first step, because we wanted to test the waters, but we always knew that making movies is where we wanted to be,” says Kapur. Refusing to get drawn into comparisons with other production houses (Yashraj is the biggest rival), he says their biggest strength is “content creation.” So it is for most production houses.

What makes UTV stand out from the clutter is the choice of content, most of which is decidedly different from what the other players put out, especially in terms of range. So it’s been a decade and more of expanding their wings, distributing such movies as Parineeta, Bluffmaster, Taxi No 9211, and Don (these are some of the more recent ones), as well as their own such big-ticket productions as Rang De Basanti, Metro, Lakshya, and Swades, the latter being Ashutosh Gowarikar’s last outing with them.

Swades, in fact, is a case in point. Not too many other producers would have risked such a subject — NASA scientist coming back home to spread the light back in his village in India. It made a difference, of course, that Shah Rukh was willing to play the lead, and that it turned out to be one of his best performances. But to greenlight an offbeat project like that one requires the courage of a producer’s conviction. And cash.

This is just the beginning of the year for UTV Motion Pix, which seems to have put behind the less-than-great showing of Dhan Dhana Dhan, Goal, a combo of football and feisty Asians in London, which didn’t find too many takers. It’s going full steam ahead with its studio model (a bunch of directors is on board to make movies with complete backup: Shyam Benegal is busy wrapping up Mahadev, about a letter writer in a village, and Anurag Kashyap is doing Dev D — a contemporary take on Devdas, among others). A music division has been launched with the A. R. Rehman-helmed music of Jodhaa Akbar, to be able to exploit their movies on all platforms.

Next up, in mid-March: Abbas Mustan’s slick thriller Race, which UTV is distributing worldwide.