In an interaction with mid-day, production designer Saini S Johray opens up about his journey from Delhi to Mumbai
Saini S Johray
The sprawling den of Anil Kapoor’s Shelly Rungta in The Night Manager, the underground castles, soaked in red, in vampire love story Toothpari, and the tiny, cramped apartment of Srikant Tiwari in The Family Man, making more room for drama than the people inhabiting it. All of them are settings familiar to the audience, but the man, whose imaginations are the source of these spaces, is probably not. “When I tell a layman I am a production designer, he asks me, ‘So, you do production?’ I tell him I design sets, so he says, ‘But that is done by the art director’,” laughs Saini S Johray, leading production designer in the Hindi film industry.
Enjoying a 13-year-long career that began with Yash Raj Film’s television show, Powder, in 2010, Johray is currently working on at least three projects simultaneously and has a few coming up, including the second part of The Night Manager, Amazon Prime Video period drama Gulkanda Tales, and Abhishek Kapoor’s next feature film. In an interaction with mid-day, the production designer opens up about his journey from Delhi to Mumbai, from designing weddings to building the world of popular series, and from being a fine arts student to now filmmakers’ right hand.
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Excerpts:
Q. First things first, what does your job as a production designer entail? Laymen, as we know, are most accustomed to the term ‘art director’. But I assume that’s not what you do?
Saini: In India, for the longest, there was no such term as production designer. We were art directors. We picked the term from Hollywood. Initially, art directors would take care of designing of the set as well as its execution. But the difference between the two profiles is that an art director crucially takes care of the set construction, while a production designer looks after the visual of the film.
So, my job on a film, especially one that has a period setting or futuristic or a fantasy where everything has to be synced in one visual, is to take care of the hair, make up, costume, special effects, VFX and the art. So a character’s look is also part of my vision. I as a production designer will not go and construct sets. The art director works in my team. He or she basically takes care of the day to day routine of putting up a set, like the labour, the material, and I will supervise as to how the set should look, what it needs, and the art director will implement it.
Q. Do you recall when you realised you wanted to design for films?
Saini: I honestly had no idea about production design growing up. I was studying fine arts in Delhi mid 2000s. At the same time, I was working as a freelance designer in multiple agencies. I was a wedding designer. So, I used to design sets for weddings as well as corporate events in Delhi. In between, I met a guy, who wanted to make a film in the capital and he wanted someone to make sets for him.
Now, events are quite theme and brief specific. But films are about storytelling, not a client’s brief. So, when these people started to talking to me, they would use terms like camera angles, shot divisions and all of it just bounced over my head. I told them I could design the set and they could shoot it. They then said, ‘It didn’t happen like that, You have to understand the camera angle, what portion we are shooting. You don’t have to design an entire room. If we are focusing on just a corner, use that and (design).’ They understood that I had the knowledge of set designing and building, but not of filmmaking. That project couldn’t work out.
Q. Go on…
Saini: I got disheartened, thinking I have been making sets for four years, how could I not do what they asked me to. That made me curious about filmmaking. Then I learned about Film and Television Institute of India (FTII). I went there and met the faculty. That’s how I ended up taking the art direction and production design course.
During that time, one of the faculty members, the late Samir Chanda sir, asked me to work with him on a film because we had a one month break. That film was Kaminey, and he was the production designer on it. That’s how I started.
Following the course, when I began my Mumbai journey, I had no clue how to go about it. Rajkumar Rao was one year senior and a very good friend. So, he told me, ‘You come here. Things will fall into place on their own.’ I came and stayed with him. He even guided me about things here. I landed my first project as an art director, which was YRF’s Powder.
Q. If you have to describe your process, what would you say where does it begin from?
Saini: There’s research that every production designer does. But first, you have to become that character. For example, Srikant Tiwari is an agent, but he shows that he works in a government bank. He is able to provide basic amenities to his family of four. I cannot show his house as a big space of two or three bedroom apartment. Srikant Tiwari’s house will look like that of a middle class guy. He belongs to a section, which faces space crunch. A (small) living room will have a sofa, a TV set, a dining table and they have to manage in that space itself.
Now, exactly opposite of that is Inside Edge, where if we take Vivek Oberoi’s Vikrant Dhawan’s character, he is a guy who deals in crores. I have to design keeping in mind the financial and social status he enjoys, and the darkness that is inherent to him. I can’t put pastel colours in his living space because that won’t go with the character. I have to come up with the colour of his psychology.
Now come to Anil Kapoor’s character in The Night Manager. I created a villa as his living space, He is someone, for whom money is not a big deal. Everything for him has to be specific, selective. I read the script and derive designs out of every character. Then I ask a couple of questions to the director. In The Family Man, 70 percent of the show is shot on sets, whether it’s the police station or the house but you have to be so authentic and detailed that it should look lived-in and people should feel, ‘Oh, even my house is like that.’
So you have to think to the level of why a pickle jar is kept on the dining table even when it’s not used more than twice a day. A set will look like one if you don’t imagine people living it.
Q. You have designed for projects far removed from one other, have varied degrees of density and requirement of world building. What has been the most challenging project so far?
Saini: There are three projects that come to my mind instantly when I think bait work that took a lot out of me.
When I came on board The Night Manager, it was just one week before the shoot. I hadn’t done any prep. I had to straight up go to Sri Lanka, see the locations and come up with the design. I had three challenges. I was fighting against time, then I had to design as well as execute it in five days, and of course the budget was limited. That time there was a financial crisis happening in Sri Lanka. So, everything that cost me Rs 100 was costing me Rs 300. A sofa which I could actually buy in Rs one lakh rupees was now costing me Rs three lakh. That took a lot of energy out of me.
In Netflix’s Toothpari, we created a world of vampires, which is not an Indian concept. Vampires live in castles. So, I had to think about where they will live in India. We don’t have abandoned castles, and especially when the story is set in the heart of Calcutta, where do you get such spaces? We start digging down and placing the characters underground, but how will they live there? We did a lot of research. At the same time, I can’t make the castles so lavish that you are distracted from the character. It has to look plausible and blend with the story. Production design shouldn’t stand outside the story but look like an extension of it.
Third is Gulkanda Tales, created by Raj and DK and directed by Tumbadd helmer Rahi Anil Barve. It stars Pankaj Tripathi, Kunal Kemmu and Patralekha. It’s one of the most production design heavy projects I have done so far. The story is set in a time of which you can’t find space designs so you have to build it from scratch. So, every material, fabric, texture has to look like that time. And I really go into the details, to a point that if a person back in the day is shown to be signing a paper, I would find out which was the first company to make pens in which country, and how it was imported to India and who brought it here, and whether this person can have this pen or not according to his or her social status.
Ideally, it takes four-six months to design but for Gulkanda Tales, I came on board one month before the shoot. So, we did reverse planning according to which schedule was first being shot so that we could design according to schedules.
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