On an unusually warm December evening in a posh Delhi hotel, with cacophony of the wedding season filtering into the space from every nook and cranny, I meet the Mumbai-based Delhi man director Kanu Behl, who enters in a casual attire: sweatshirt and a smile, to talk about all things grim, including the subject of his latest film Despatch. His third feature, the Manoj Bajpayee-starrer released on Zee5 on December 13. Behl, whose both his previous films Titli (2014) and Agra (2023) screened at the Cannes Film Festival, began writing Despatch, as a procedural rather than a thriller, alongside Agra, pre-pandemic. “Irrfan was supposed to do this role [Joy Bag in Despatch], but he fell ill and passed away. After him, I went straight to Manoj, there is nobody else who could have done this role,” quips Behl, between sips of cappuccino. He lets on that it was at a birthday party where Bajpayee walked up to the director who made Titli, expressing his desire to collaborate.
In this interview, Behl talks about the making of Despatch and his films, why indie filmmaking is dead and why he finds patriarchy too banal to talk about. Excerpts from an interview:
Despatch, a Zee5 Original, is your first direct-on-OTT release. Dibakar Banerjee’s film Tees was commissioned and then shelved by Netflix, which did the same with Anurag Kashyap’s Maximum City. What do you think about making films in the time of OTTs and censorship?
I just think, we are all living in the same Big Brother house. That’s all I want to say about that.
You mentioned that journalist-activist Gauri Lankesh’s killing in 2017 bolstered your resolve to go ahead with Despatch. Dibakar told us earlier that Lankesh’s murder triggered him to make the unreleased Tees.
We started working in late 2016. So, our initial period was just about figuring out what we are doing. It happened more or less around the same time. Basically, what I remember is that it’s in that phase when we started working that once that (Lankesh’s assassination) happened, we got very triggered by it. But because the Gauri Lankesh incident became what it became, it seemed like it was breathing a new round of cold air on all our faces that everything else sort of crystallised around it. At the beginning, we were fumbling a lot because we, Ishani (Banerjee, co-writer) and I, didn’t know much about the world (of crime/investigative journalism). She knew a little bit more than me because she’d a mass communication background. She’d done (co-written) Aligarh (2015), in which she mostly did the research. But both of us were fumbling, trying to find the people in the world of crime journalism, we didn’t know who to talk to and how, we met a couple of people whom we didn’t see eye to eye with. We realised they had a different world view, not what we were looking for.
To what extent did you have to dirty your hands to get your story?
Entirely. We were looking for primary information. So, we got in touch with most of the core team (five people) of a renowned investigative journalist (name withheld for legal reasons). A lot of the characters you see in the film are based on those people. We realised they will not talk on record. So, we kept on digging, spoke to everyone off the record, and since we didn’t want the film to be just about any one incident or any one killing because we thought that there is something much bigger at play here, we realised that we need to know the larger world much better, we need a better lay of the land. We met a couple of cops who put us in touch with a couple of notorious lawyers with whom Ishani and I took turns on case hearings. We spoke to some underworld people and tried to form a picture, for ourselves, of what this world is like. From there emerged the idea that it’s a world which is obtuse and foggy. It didn’t matter who did what when, everything is misinformation and you cannot trust anything. So, we decided to do the film as a procedural rather than a thriller because everybody was making a thriller. The overall picture that our research showed us was far more interesting to recreate than what people do in fictional journalistic films. It came down to the individual unit. The system is made up of us, and if we are responsible, then the film should also travel with that person who is equally responsible for what he is chasing. We went on that journey to look at it through his gaze, of this Faustian guy who’s not a do-gooder out to finish crime, he is just a very selfish person who wants to do it (pursue a case/story) for his own self.
Having been a co-writer yourself in the past (with Dibakar Banerjee on Love, Sex aur Dhoka in 2010), why did you need co-writers on your directorial ventures?
[The need for a co-writer is] because it’s such a lonely process. It’s also a long process. And there are so many chances of you losing your objectivity. I, personally, feel it’s always beneficial to have another person to jam with in the room, to be able to throw some bad ideas at another human being instead of the wall. It helps me do what I do. Great writing partnerships are really hard to find and build. Having said that, the next one, I’m writing alone now. I finally decided to do one alone.
I treat myself more as a writer first, I don’t think I bring the director into the room. I’m really curious about the textual nature of what we are doing, and then the directorial aspect of it for me also comes much later, because I anyway don’t believe in a very auteur-driven style of filmmaking. A live process gives me great joy to first be only a writer and then once you’ve discovered what you were writing, then you look at how it should be interpreted.
From your time working with Dibakar, what have you learnt which has helped you evolve as a writer?
The biggest thing has to be his rigour, his desire to just keep going on and on and do better than what he is doing. That and his curiosity and his desire to want to peel off the layers of human beings.
And as a director, since you’ve also been an AD/assistant director to him on Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! (2008)?
I think, his calm. I kind of grew up in a film household, so, I had seen a lot of my mom (Navnindra Behl) and dad (Lalit Behl) work in a certain way as filmmakers and, let’s just say, it was a more vocal, sometimes even aggressive, style. Then I did film school (Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, Kolkata) and I was doing my own thing trying to find how I want to do it, but I remember when the shoot began on Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, the first few days I saw the set, and it was not like it was not a stressed-out set, there were things going wrong, there were shit hitting the fan, but I remember him (Dibakar) being really calm and just dealing with everything. I remember just really marvelling at that and saying, okay, things can be done this way, too. That has been my biggest learning to not add more chaos to the set because that doesn’t help, you lose control of more things.
Who’s your favourite writer-director of all time?
(Stanley) Kubrick.
And his best work?
Arre… I think that’s why I like him because it’s very difficult to pick his best work. Is it A Clockwork Orange (1972)? Is it Space Odyssey [2001: A Space Odyssey; 1968]? With PTA (Paul Thomas Anderson), you can say it’s between The Master (2012) and There Will be Blood (2007). But I don’t think, with Kubrick, you can say that with as much confidence. You’re always confused, should I say Dr. Strangelove (1964); 2001: A Space Odyssey; The Shining (1980); or A Clockwork Orange. I’m always at a loss.
Which is Manoj Bajpayee’s best performance for you?
In Satya (1998) and Shool (1999).
Like your previous films, Despatch too enters the grey areas of the male psyche, a space you like revisiting. Desribe what Joy Bag, the character played by Manoj Bajpayee, is to you.
For me, he’s a guy who actually doesn’t listen at all. He has a fixed idea of who he wants to be, what he wants to be. While we were writing, we we had our matrix brief for all the characters, for the workshops. And in that, there was this idea of Joy’s dollhouse. So, Joy used to have a dollhouse with Shweta (Shahana Goswami who plays his wife). He looks at women as objects. If you carefully see, with none of the three women (Goswami, Arrchita Agarwal, Rituparna Sen), he really ever makes any attempt to connect to them. He just wants to shove his own idea of life and how it should be, on them. And, so, probably, at a point when it’s not working with Shweta, he abandons that dollhouse and catches this new, younger girl Prerna (Agarwal) and probably in his head, he’s saying, she doesn’t understand how life is lived. It’s the same with his history with Noori (Sen). Maybe in the past, pre-Shweta, Noori was Prerna, and the truth of the dollhouse was unmasked in front of Noori at some point and she flew away, having realised life’s good enough with just her little daughter. Joy isn’t a guy who listens at all. He has this base impulse that he wants to run on. He’s not a very conscious character, his mistakes, one after the other, keep snowballing.
Has the representation of patriarchy evolved from Titli to Agra to Despatch?
Everyone asks me this…I have a counter question. How has patriarchy evolved from 1947 to 2024 in India? What is there (in Indian society), that is in my films, too. That men know of patriarchy’s existence and impact is a fallacy. All of us, as human beings, are in denial. If we were acknowledging what we were struggling with, our lives would be so much better and there would be no Ukraine War, there would be no Iran entering the war [on Gaza] through Syria but directly meeting and talking to (Israeli PM Benjamin) Netanyahu to stop [the war].
I don’t think I have ever tried to take on patriarchy in any of the stuff that I’ve done. It is a part of who we are, so I cannot look away from it, from its presence. That has always been the base pillar for whatever I’ve done, because it is the world that I live in. It is not unconscious. I am conscious of it but it’s not me trying to talk about patriarchy. For me, Titli (2014) was a film about family and circularity and how images pass on from one person to the other person. I could have made the same film on a matriarchal society if I’d grown up in a matriarchal society. I find patriarchy too banal to talk about it. What more can I add to that conversation? In Agra (2023), I was trying to talk about sexuality and space. Titli is not about patriarchy, just like Despatch is not about crime journalism, it’s just a part of the matrix.
The city is a character in your films, whether it’s East Delhi in Titli, the eponymous Agra, or Mumbai in Despatch. Does the city come first or the story chooses the city?
For me, the human condition is of much more interest. The root [of the story] will always be there. I will always start with people: Who they are? What they think they know about themselves? What do they don’t know about themselves? Where is this journey taking them? What are they going to know about themselves by the end? That is my primary concern. That fascinates me. Cinema as an art form is more an exploration of time and space. You are curiously trying to find the sense of time and rhythm of a film…I don’t have a pre-knowledge of what the time and space of a film would be but I know that’s the canvas. The exploring of what and where these people are and what surrounds them will reflect my relationship with space. Space is explored very differently in each of my films. You still see parts of the city in Titli, but you don’t really see the city in Agra, it was so closed in, that’s the feeling of the film, it’s cramped and claustrophobic. Even when you see those shots of Guru (Mohit Agarwal) walking from the call centre, it’s just tight, narrow lanes that goes into a corner.
It’s been a nine-year gap between Titli and Agra. Besides the quest for funds/producers, how many films have you written and scrapped in the mean time?
Many.
It feels like nine years, but all this time, I have been constantly working. After Titli was over, I was working on Agra in 2016, and while Agra was getting financed in 2018 (shot in 2019, edited in 2020), I’d already started working on Despatch (shot in 2021, shooting got delayed by COVID and happened in 2022), parallelly I did [short film] Binnu Ka Sapna (2018, wrote in a week). The gap feels long but in my head, I have constantly been on to something. It just so happens that because Agra is such a difficult film and the space here is not ready for it yet. And I do have a certain pace. I’m comfortable with about three years to do one thing right. Right now, I’m working on four different things together, so I’m always developing. I feel the nature of how this thing is for a filmmaker like me, you have to have two-three balls up in the air and see which one gets stuck first and then you run with that. I don’t think once a project is greenlit and is alive that I can multitask.
Writers often face a writer’s block. Are you, at times, saddled by self-doubt?
No, I don’t have self-doubts.
Actually wait, I very proudly said I don’t have self-doubt. But in reality, now I have started having self-doubts.
Why so?
Because we are undergoing a huge change, and independent cinema is dead in India. It’s not like even on its last legs. It’s gone. I feel I am going through a crisis.
So is the film industry...
The industry is going through another kind of crisis, of where earlier they could make, say, Rs 500 crore from films, now they have to think from where they will make the next Rs 500 crore? While indie filmmakers are dealing with the crisis of, ‘oh, my God, I used to get Rs 5 crore for an indie film 10 years back, now I’ve to make the same film in Rs 2 crore? Are you saying I should stop eating? How do I function?’ Indie filmmakers won’t survive any longer. This crisis, personally, gives me the sense that it’s over [for independent cinema]. I’m not pushing myself. Somehow, I have always had that sort of fidelity towards cinema that if I genuinely have something to say and it is exciting then I will make it. If not, then I’ll do something else. I don’t want to be a career filmmaker.
A scene in Despatch, of black kite hovering in the sky, over the city, awaiting a prey, reminded me of the first scene of Ram Gopal Varma’s Company (2002).
To be really honest, that kite is an accident and not my idea. That kite is B-roll shoot by (cinematographer Siddharth) Diwan. Kites are there in [Vishal Bhardwaj’s] Maqbool (2003), too, when he (Irrfan) dies and the camera falls, you see the bird. I think the feeling that that kite visual in Despatch evokes in you is very different from that in Maqbool and Company.
Bengali actor Rii (Rituparna Sen), known for her roles in the edgy indie films by Q (Qaushiq Mukherjee), is an interesting casting choice in Despatch.
Rii (who plays journalist Noori Rai) was already written. I knew I would cast her for the part. She has that kind of energy. Noori had a journey where she sincerely dreamt of having a pure relationship, which led to a marriage, but she got scalded so badly again and again that she eventually gave up and decided she doesn’t want a man anymore in her life, but she knows she has an effect on men. She knows how to use herself but is strangely detached also. These two opposite impulses in a woman, I think I found somewhere in Rii in some of what I had seen in her body of work and I felt she has some sort of energy which we can tap into and bring to this part.
In an interview, Manoj has said that he’s a very shy person and has found it awkward to do intimate scenes previously. Did you have to persuade him?
I didn’t need to. Manoj and I met at [screenwriter] Apurva Asrani’s birthday coincidentally, I was standing at the window and Manoj walked up to me and said, ‘What are you doing these days? I have seen your film Titli, and I want to work with you.’ I didn’t pay much attention at the time since a lot of people say these things to filmmakers. The next day he called me and said that he was serious about what he’d said the previous day to me. Then I sat down and thought about whether I have something that I could do with him? Then I remember even going to him with Agra for the father’s part, but he didn’t want to do it because, at that point, he didn’t want to be part of an ensemble. Then I took Despatch to him. He read the script overnight and came on board the next day.
In the post MeToo world, when even talking about or showing male sexuality is seen as politically incorrect, do you now self-censor when writing sexuality in the script and what was your brief to Manoj for those scenes?
We had workshops but, you know, you can’t hold back. If you want to hold back then don’t be a filmmaker. And, honestly, this baffles me a little bit but I don’t think I write any of the sexuality for the sex of it. For me, those scenes are not sex scenes. If you look at Manoj and Shahana in the act, it’s not a sex scene, it’s about a woman who’s desperate to get her man back and halfway through, she devices to somehow bring the warmth back, and probably in the middle of it, she gets the idea that if she can conceive maybe he won’t abandon her. And how he gets even more eek-ed out at how manipulative this woman is, that in the middle of it, she’s brought up the idea of a child and he throws her off like a rag doll. So, for me, all of the sexuality in the film is never to titillate but even as a setting for the scenes, it is trying to bare [the human soul]…for example, the bathroom sex scene between Prerna and Joy, they are not facing each other, on the face of it, they have just made up after a fight cut to them not even looking at each other but having sex. So, for me, if you look closely enough, it tells you what just happened. So, if these are not sex scenes for me, thoughts of MeToo, etc., doesn’t even arise in my mind, because I’m covered, my lens on it is a human lens not an exploitative, titillating, or sexual exploration for the heck of it, so, this thought never really enters my head. I might be right today, wrong tomorrow. For me, I ask myself whether am I doing this with the most honest and sincerest, deepest, most consciously unconscious exploration of myself that I can do? It’s a process for me. I’m just 44. I don’t claim to know everything.
What next?
There are a couple of things that I’m developing right now. I’m not sure which one is going to be the next. There’s a sci-fi stoner comedy, and then there’s a very Lynchian sort of bizarre horror piece, which has a doppelganger.
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