"What a crap movie! A piece of shit! I BET I CAN MAKE BETTER MOVIES THAN THESE!! ….." Have lost the count of the no of times I’ve uttered this phrase over the years.
And then sometimes I am watching a movie, the final credits start rolling and I go ‘WOW!!! Awesome! How I wish I could make a movie like this! I would give up everything to direct just one such movie!!'
This urge to make movies was always there. Ever since childhood!! The idea of directing big stars, those exaggerated action scenes(must agree though that i loved them then!), song/dance sequences in foreign locations thrilled me. Years passed by. The urge persisted. But the kind of movies I wished to make got more polished, more refined.
Cut to mid 2005. Was done with my engineering. I had got a job offer from CTS, but was still waiting for my joining date then. One of those days, was just having a casual talk with my friends and then, as it so often happens, we started discussing films. The GOOD, the BAD and the even UGLY ones!!! One of us suggested that we buy a handycam and make a movie as we were anyway free for a couple of months. The idea got registered in my mind. Immediately!! I was convinced. And I had already begun MANUFACTURING the PROs of buying a handycam, hoping to somehow ‘patafy’ dad!! However, the “movie making” plan never featured in the PROs list. :) Dad agreed!!! Instantly! (Still wonder how I managed to convince him though!!). We bought one of those then high end handycams. At one point of time, we were even contemplating going for the cheaper ones and buying two of them, as that would give us an option of different shot angles for a particular scene. (I am glad we bought just one though! Had a tough time managing even that one camera during our first movie! There was no one to operate the camera! So finally the actors had to take up the part time role of a cameraman, and vice versa! :))
Movie seemed too much of an effort so i was planning on a music video on 3 friends. Shishir was thinking of a documentary or something on similar lines. But then we finally decided we would make a movie. Myself, Shishir and Pradyumna started working on a subject. We then had the skeleton of our story ready. Shishir would do the screenplay and dialogues. We didn’t take long to decide on a name for ourselves. We called ourselves ‘Broken Mirror Productions’!! But then suddenly our project looked jinxed!!! Nothing seemed to go right for us. But we managed. And managed well, to complete our first movie, Raahein. (The making of Raahein deserves a separate post for itself!)
By then we had got our joining dates. Its been more than a year and a half since we’ve made Raahein. And “Broken Mirror” had been dormant since then, till recently. We’ve just completed our second movie “Dwandwa” (meaning “Dilemma”) in kannada.
That fire is back again. That fire to make movies. Movies that we want to make. Make it the way we want it. No on to question us. No one to dictate terms. Just make movies. Movies for ourselves!!
- Sumanth
