Aamir Khan

Aamir Khan has been one of India's most popular movie stars for more than a decade, since rocking onto the screen as a teen idol in his cousin Mansoor Khan's hit romantic musical Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (From Doomsday to Doomsday) in 1988. He has since matured into one of Bollywood's finest (and funniest) actors. His textured performances have helped turn star vehicles like Ram Gopal Varma's backstage musical Rangeela (Colors, '95), Dharmesh Darshan's Taming of the Shrew variant Raja Hindustani ('96), and J.M. Matthan's complex crime thriller Sarfarosh (Sacrifice, '99) into both popular and critical winners. He is known as a hard-working hands-on collaborator and as a shrewd career tactician with the best hit-to-flop ratio in current Hindi cinema.

Aamir Khan starred in two top-ten hits in 2001, Asutosh Gowariker's Oscar-nominated Lagaan (Land Tax, which the actor also produced), and Farhan Akhtar's innovative yuppy buddy movie Dil Chahta Hai (The Heart Desires). At first glance the films are almost diametric opposites: one is a period picture about poor villagers set in the 19th century, the other a contemporary urban drama about globe-trotting "Westernized" professionals. But both films took major technical and aesthetic risks, flouting long-standing Bombay conventions like looped echo-chamber dialog and piece-meal on-again-off-again shooting schedules (a practice that grew up in the 1970s to accommodate greedy stars, who routinely signed up to a dozen projects at once).

The English critic Jessica Hines has ascribed "Napoleonic" ambitions to the detail-oriented 36-year-old star: "[Aamir Khan] wants to change the way that Bollywood works and challenge the perception abroad that it is a low-tech film industry which only produces cheap films. ...Lagaan is more than just a film about 'modernization.' It has begun to apply the process itself to the way that films are made in Bombay." -D.C

Lagaan has been unprecedented success for a Bollywood movie with audiences around the world. Do you have a sense of why this film in particular has been able to reach out beyond the Indian community?

I think because it is a basic human story that has some echoes in every country. It's a story about the underdog achieving the impossible, of David against Goliath. It's kind of like an Asterix comic book: The little Gaulish village standing up against the Roman Empire, but with a lot of humor. There have been lot of films made in India, by Indians and non-Indians, about the British Raj, and it's a very serious and somber topic. But that is not what our film is about. Our little village is not even concerned about independence. They don't know India as a nation at all; it's too large for them. They are just concerned about their village and whether their children get food or not. They have small needs. That's why I think is doing so well with people all over, including people in every part of India.

On the other hand I gather that the other film you made last year, Dil Chahta Hai, was a great success in the big cities and in the overseas NRI market, but not in outlying areas of India. The implication is that there is now a middle class, urban audience in India that is big enough that you can aim a movie simply at that and still do well?

Yes, you can. This is something that has become really noticeable just over the last five or six years.

How did this come about? What changed in that period?

Up until about 1993, the biggest hit film in India, which was Sholay (Flames, Ramesh Sippy, 75), did a business of about 15 crores of rupees [$3.5 million]. But in '94, the biggest hit did 200 crores [$45 million]. That was Sooraj Barjatya's film Hum Aapke Hain Koun. It was a sudden jump. It didn't go from 15 crores to 30, it went straight to 200. So where did this audience suddenly come from? In fact, it had been there all along, but we didn't know about it. Why not? It's kind of an amazing story.

People in India love watching movies. But when video came in the early 1980s it hit the film industry very badly. Suddenly a huge network of pirates emerged. Every film that was released in the theaters, within a few days it was available in your home. And you had these little video theaters mushrooming all across the country. In small towns there would be somebody's house with a little board outside that said the film starts at nine o'clock, and it would cost two rupees [five cents] to see the film on this guy's TV set. This began eating into the theater business across the country. Until it reached a point where people got a little fed up with video. They wanted to come back to the large screen.

And that phenomenon happened in 1988, fortunately with my film Qaymat Se Qayamat Tak. That was the film that brought audiences back into the theaters, along with Sooraj Barjatya's first film, Maine Pyar Kiya (I Love Someone, 89), which was a huge hit.

Because these were youth-oriented romantic films, what we would call date movies, and kids wanted to get out of the house to see them?

I think so. The other change that happened was that video, which seemed to be such a threat at first, actually had the effect of expanding the audience for Indian films.

In the early Eighties the audience for Indian cinema was maybe 20 percent of the population, people who would see films in theaters. With video a lot of people who had been too busy to watch films, doctors and engineers, would watch films on video, which they would never have done if they had to go to a theater. So the number of people watching Indian films in India grew dramatically. It grew to - I don't know exact numbers but say to 40 percent or 50 percent of the population.

One thing you must realize is that by the early Nineties, producers who were fighting a losing battle against piracy decided they might as well sell the video rights and get some money out of it. The video had to come two weeks after the release of the film in theaters because otherwise the pirates would step in. And with that the infrastructure of piracy began to break down. And then in 1994 the Barjatya family released Hum Aapke Hain Koun.

When HAHK was released, Rajkumar Barjatya did not sell his video rights. But he did two other things: he spread the word that they had sold the rights, to a company that was run by a friend of theirs. And the video company said, "Yeah, yeah, we are releasing it on this date," and everyone thought, "OK, it's coming." Also he released only a few prints, and at the beginning there was an armed guard watching over every print. So the pirate videos never arrived, and he gradually increased the number of prints, up to 500, and the movie played in theaters for something like five years. That was when the Indian film industry realized the depth of the business. Since then the biggest hit of the year has always grossed around 100 crores: Raja Hindustani, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, Rangeela, Karun Arjun.

From the late '70s into the '80s, that was the worst period for Indian movies, by and large. Up to about 1978 you still found some films that were enjoyable and made sense, and after that it was the disco age. The worst scripts, the worst performances, horrible music. Maybe the filmmakers got lazy, I don't know. A lot of young people who grew up in film families in that period hated the kind of films that were coming out. And some of us ended up making films. There is Aditya Chopra, who is (director) Yash Chopra's son. Karan Johar, who is (producer) Yash Johar's son. Sooraj Barjatya, whose father and grandfather were producers and distributors. We had been close to some great filmmaking growing up, so when we started doing it ourselves, it was kind of a revolt, but a positive revolt. It's almost like an entire generation that wants to correct things.

And in the last few years there have been a lot of filmmakers, small filmmakers, who made a big difference. Hyderabad Blues, Bombay Boys: low-budget films that found an audience. There is now a definite change in the young filmmakers coming in, with their own styles and their own taste of telling a story, and audiences are accepting that to certain degrees. And with the release of Lagaan a lot has changed. You have no idea how much has changed in India with that one film, because it defied certain rules of thumb and yet people accepted it. The industry in India is normally very closed. It takes them a long time to accept any change. When something new happens, and it works, no one knows why it works, so they don't want to accept it - they want to call it a fluke. I've read a lot of books about Hollywood, like William Goldman's books, and I've realized that exactly the same thing happens over there. The businessmen are just the same.

The characters in Dil Chahta Hai seem very Westernized and spend much of their time living outside of India. Was this film made partly with Western audiences in mind?

No, not at all. I don't think that, as yet, mainstream Indian cinema has attempted to address an international audience. Now maybe there might be a shift in that direction, slightly, with the global success of a film like Lagaan. That kind of opened our eyes. But again, it was not made with that in mind.

What you're seeing in Dil Chahta Hai is the work of a young first-time director, Farhan Akhtar, who has grown up in a city like Bombay, which has a strong Western influence. Somebody like myself. When Farhan writes a script these are the characters that flow out of him naturally. This is how we are in Bombay, the way we interact, the way we dress. Dil Chahta Hai is very much addressing the Indian audience and, at the most, an Asian audience outside of India, Pakistanis or Indians living in North America or Europe.

What you have to understand is that for someone like me, or Farhan, or anyone from my generation, while our mother tongue is Hindi (or for me it's Urdu, which is very close to Hindi), English is the language that we have grown up with. We study in English, the language we think in is English. We have our own Indian culture, and our roots are firmly in that, but we have influences from all over the place. And as a result the way we think might be different from the filmmakers of the '70s and before.

From what you've said, shouldn't the characters in Dil Chahta Hai be speaking English rather than Hindi?

That's true. In fact the first draft of Farhan's script was entirely in English. But in India any English-language film will only have a limited audience. So in the end the English dialog was translated into Hindi. It was quite a task to retain the flavor, with some bits in English here and there, but Farhan managed it.

A lot has been made of the innovations you insisted on as the producer of Lagaan: a single schedule, a complete script, synch sound-

The reason for that is not just because I want to be different but because that is the way I feel a film should be made. A film should have a complete script before even starting pre-production. People should be working only on one film at a time. Up to now as an actor I have been working in a system that is not used to doing those things, so for me it's been a struggle, swimming against the stream. Finally I had to produce Lagaan myself to make it the way I had been talking about.

I did not do these things just to be different or to be modern, but because I really think this is the way movies should be made. As an actor it is so important when you are shooting a scene to work yourself up to a pitch. You are there mentally, you are hitting the right key, and the sound of your voice, like your face and your eyes, has a certain quality. When you try to recreate this in a sanitized dubbing theater, it is very difficult. I work hard when I dub a film and I try to get it right, but there are times when I don't get it right, when I know that I can never re-create what happened on the set.

I think that Lagaan and Dil Chahta Hai together could make a huge difference. They are definitely starting points for something. Lagaan is actually a movie that has broken a lot of rules and did very well. Javed Ahktar, who is Farhan's father, he was telling us that if we had made a list of all the "don'ts" in Indian cinema, we broke all of them in Lagaan. To begin with it is a period film. It is a film which has a rural background, which hasn't worked for like twenty years. The stars are wearing dhotis, whereas today all the stars wear DKNY and Polo Sport. The women in the film are all fully clothed. A sports film has never worked in India. There is no arbitrary love song shot in Switzerland. You have British actors speaking English in portions of the film. The main romantic song, half of it is in English. And then you have Amitabh Bachchan's narration. Whenever he has given his voice as a narrator to any film, that film has bombed. And Bachchan himself told me that! He said, "I don't mind doing it for you, but I just want you to know..."

Some people might say, though, that while these things may seem subtle and technical, they could actually change Hindi cinema quite a bit if they catch on in the industry. Just to take one example, the sound of dubbed dialog is a distinctive feature of Bollywood cinema. It contributes to the overall sense of-

-of something larger than life, that's true. But I think that quality is there in Lagaan, as well. To whatever extent we wanted it to be. It goes deeper than just the technical aspect. Indian cinema is larger than life. It's got a sweep to it, it's got a romance to it. The audience is transported into another world. Most Hollywood films are like this also, it's just that the world they create is a little different. What is different is almost like a level of logic, and the limits of logic. William Goldman puts it well when he says that you define your level of logic in the first ten minutes of a film. So if you're watching Superman you don't say, "What nonsense. People can't fly. Let's go home, bhai." Whatever the film is that you are making, define what your parameters are, and then stick to them, and you will be fine.

Assuming that things do continue to change, where is Bollywood cinema heading, do you think? What is the immediate future going to look like?

I hope it will continue to improve, that we will consolidate our gains. But again, we are not looking to the West for inspiration. We have our own tradition of great filmmaking. When I think of what I want to do as a moviemaker I think of Indian films of the '50s and '60s, of directors like Mehboob Khan, who made Mother India, of K. Asif, who made Mughul-e-Asam, of Bimal Roy and Guru Dutt, and as an actor of Dilip Kumar. Those are the artists who I find inspiring.

Thanks to Vipul Gupta, Lisa Tsering, and Mohomed Morani.

© 2002 by David Chute