Vikramaditya Motwane's debut film was originally set in Nashik, in his head. He changed location after director Imtiaz Ali read the script.
Udaan (2010) was screened at Cannes in the prestigious Un Certain Regard section
Vikramaditya Motwane's first script to be made into a film was the near-masterpiece, coming-of-age, Udaan (2010), that went straight to Cannes in the prestigious Un Certain Regard section, where he was competing against, among others, Jean Luc Goddard. "That was really trippy," says the filmmaker during his Sit with Hitlist conversation.
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It's set in Jamshedpur (now in Jharkhand), about a boy who finishes school with ambitions in arts and poetry, but is forced into the mundane, by a disciplinarian father, who brooks no dissent.
It's almost the opposite of Motwane's own life, since he was actually driven into the media world, because his mother needed help with a TV show she was producing for teenagers. He was a teenager then, chilling all day in the Mithibai College canteen.
Also read: Vikramaditya Motwane on Phantom's dissolution post #MeToo: We could've handled it better | Exclusive
What did he even know of a strict boarding-school or small-town life, let alone the Tata Steel township, Jamshedpur, to get it so right with Udaan, we wonder. Motwane says Udaan was originally set in Nashik, in his head, because that's a similarly industrial small town he knew, since his father owns an audio-equipment factory there.
“They live in nice little bungalows. The town is very organised. So, I wrote it as a generic place, in fact. Because I knew that world. I could not write in Nashik. It'd be too close to home. And I didn't want it to be that. So, I wrote it like a Ghaziabad or Faridabad kinda set-up - outskirts of Delhi, where the family lives. The boy sneaks out, comes into Delhi-proper, to party and stuff."
And then he handed the script to director Imtiaz Ali. "Imtiaz read the script and he’s like, 'You know what, just take a train, go stay with my family in Jamshedpur. Have a look. I am reading this, and I can see those streets.' I was going to cast Imtiaz's younger brother, Sajid, in the lead, at that time. This was 2005.
"Sajid and I hopped on to a train, went to Jamshedpur, spent four to five days with his family, saw the place — this was perfect! I moved the film to Jamshedpur. The film finally got made in 2009, which is also great, because by then, the viewership had changed; audiences had changed. In 2005, multiplexes were still not what they were by 2010, when we did the film with UTV, with a 225-screen release, which is a big deal for a small film."
Watch the full interview here.
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