Ram Gopal Varma‘s iconic film ‘Satya’ has now re-released in cinemas. On this occasion, the film-maker made a rare appearance in the city from Hyderabad. While he’s been away from the limelight and making movies for a while, in a recent interview with ETimes, the film-maker spoke at legnth about ‘Satya’, and how he never thought it would become what it did. He also discussed why he makes movies with the backdrop of the underworld and lots more. Ask him if he liked his own film ‘Satya’ as he watches it again now and he says, “I don’t think the guy who is making it can appreciate it.”
RGV shed light on what made him make a gangster story in the late 1990s, at a time when other film-makers were making these big love stories – like Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. Reacting to it, he said, “I always wanted to make what I wanted to see. Obviously, I’m influenced by many Bollywood films like Ardh Satya, Arjun by Rahul Rawail. I came to Mumbai first time during Rangeela. I was fascinated with the city – the Dharavi, the trains, and there is such diversity in the city. During that time, I was listening about underworld here and there. The root happened of Satya when I sitting with Jhamu Sugandh who was the producer of Rangeela and suddenly he got the news of Gulshan Kumar being shot.”
He further added, “Jhamu Sugandh was telling me how he spoke to Gulshan Kumar just at 7am. It suddenly striked to me that if Gulshan Kumar woke up at 7, then what time did the killer wake up? Did he tell his mother to wake him up because he had to shoot Gulshan Kumar. Did he do his breakfast before killing him or after killing him. Then I realised that we know about a killer when he kills someone. But what does he do in between? I wanted to make a film on that,” he said.
Further emphasising on how Varma wanted to humanise a gangster, he added, “Then one police officer told me, when we were tracking, zeroing on a gangster, out of the tension, he gets fever. He runs a high temperature. I thought that was incredible. A gangster getting a fever was not something I thought of. See, all these keep adding in my movies. One female reporter was one of the only ones who met Dawood Ibrahim. She met him once and he had a high cold. Another guy told me, you are scared of Dawood because he’s on phone, he’s an unknown man. But if you knew he stays in Bandra, you wouldn’t be scared of him He might be having the same power but you would think like, ‘aree idhar hi rehta hai’,” laughed the director.
The ‘Sarkar’ director also revealed that he was not scared of the underworld. “A lot of people warned me that don’t make this. I’m not saying someone is bad. I’m just making a film. So, they were happy. I showed the human side of it. Infact, I was the only one at that time, who did not get a call for extortion because of Satya. They were like, ‘usko chhodo’. I was given a free cut.”
He further added, thus displaying his quirky sense of humour, “The underworld is a business organisation, they are into money, not violence. They use violence once in a while just to close the deal. In 1998, there was Dawood Ibrahim and Chhota Rajan split and some small gangs came in to fill the vacuum. So, there was this competition about who is big. So, they killed people like Gulshan Kumar, Om Prakash Kukreja all these guys were killed in the internal war of the underworld to make their gang big. Mera picture hit hai, that’s what they wanted to prove.”
When further asked if he anticipated that Satya would become a cult, he said he was surprised and that his films like ‘Company’ which came much later were more structured and planned. “Relatively I was more controlled during ‘Company’, I was more controlled. I had the understanding of where I’m standing and where I’m going. It was more structured and designed. Satya was a very random film. Even my camera work, it is eye level. There are no fancy camera angles which you see in my movies, most of the angles are eye level. I was respecting my characters more than me trying to put in my two bits of unique vision. When I saw the film two days back, I was surprised with the kind of respect each character has got in the film.”
