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My relationship
with Sanjay Dutt began in one of the bleakest phases of his early professional
life. There was, of course, his drug addiction; he also had a series
of unmemorable films to his name, right from Rocky, his launch, whose
release tragically coincided with his mother’s death. I remember
thinking of him at our first meeting as a stunning-looking boy, but
one rather quiet — too quiet, there was something unhealthy about
his silence. It took me a while to fathom that that silence was drug
induced. I had been working for a while on an idea that later became
Naam, and I knew that the two people I wanted for the film were Sanjay
Dutt and Kumar Gaurav. Our relationship began in the frequent visits
these two made to my house, where we would spend hours talking about
the movie and what it could become. Then there were Sanju’s appeals
to his father who was completely against his working with outside banners.
A further objection Dutt saab also had was that the person Sanju wanted
to work with was himself a kind of an oddball. Sanju was still very
much a kid tied to his dad’s apron strings at that time. I remember
visiting Dutt saab to try to get him to change his mind; in a corner,
I could see Sanju anxiously biting his nails, waiting for the verdict.
As a launch, the
only reason Rocky was talked about was because it was the great Nargis
and Sunil Dutt’s child who was making his foray into films. In
the industry, the word around Sanju, the whisper that is a kind of scream,
was that here was this drug addict with blank, dead eyes, a no-good
actor who got sniggered at every time he appeared on screen. There was
his disastrous role in Vidhaata, where the audience roared with laughter
when he did an emotional scene because he was so ineffective. Professionally,
he was born dead; his reputation made him a leper nobody wanted to touch.
But he was desperate
to prove himself. I’d go to his home, and he would disappear into
his room and come out with these strange scars on his face, scars achieved
by make-up that he would bear like medals to show what great characters
he could play. What I saw in him was exactly what I wanted for Naam
— a guy with this appetite to dazzle the world, to outdistance
and outshine the expectations of his parents, but who is without the
means or the tools to do it. I wanted to work with him despite the sceptics
because I was convinced the raw material was there. Mentoring and a
little structural support from the script were all it would take to
get an effective performance out of him.
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I
remember thinking of him at our first meeting as a stunning-looking
boy, but one rather quiet — too quiet, there was something
unhealthy about his silence |
Naam was greatly
delayed: Dutt saab said a clear no, and Sanjay disappeared suddenly
to the United States for his detoxification. When he came back, he was
transformed, he was like a flower that blooms overnight in your backyard.
He came back clean, he had the fragrance of life in him. And that’s
when Kumar Gaurav prevailed upon his father to not hold Sanju back any
more but to let him make Naam. Dutt saab was an overprotective father
who knew his son had more than one problem. He did not want to relinquish
him to alien hands lest he make a complete fool of himself. But, as
they say, bheega hua aadmi barsat se nahin darta. Dutt saab’s
resistance collapsed simply because there were now no takers for Sanjay
Dutt, he had no films on hand, he had no career at all.
So Naam began.
The making of Naam was one of the most pleasant experiences I have ever
had. There was an enormous trust Sanjay, Kumar Gaurav and I shared —
in fact, Kumar Gaurav was the single most important component in the
remaking of Sanjay Dutt. Here was a man who was saner, on a firmer wicket,
and was the producer to boot, who put himself on the line for Sanju
just out of sheer generosity. It’s something you don’t see
in the movie world. As for Sanju, he gave everything to the film —
he was single-minded, as focused as a horse with blinkers, he just did
not see anything beyond the movie. It was deeply satisfying to watch
— perhaps it caters to a certain Pygmalion complex, but nothing
is as invigorating as seeing someone who has been written off come into
full bloom right under your gaze.
Up until now, the
who’s who of the industry were very sceptical of the project. Mahesh
Bhatt had found success with Arth and Saransh but, as they saw it, even
if Mahesh made a good film this time, his delivery boy remained Sanjay
Dutt. Then Naam released and it dazzled everyone. It brought the tragic
dimension of Sanjay Dutt to the fore — a boy who had the best of
intentions, whose niyat was the most important thing and that was what
the audience embraced. Naam was a golden jubilee film; with it, Sanjay
Dutt was reborn. The first time he came to see me later on, I still remember
the smile he walked in with, the sunlight shining through his hair and
the gratitude in his face as he looked at me. I had never experienced
a thank you said so silently and so eloquently.
Sanjay Dutt is not
a man of words. He’s a disaster when he opens his mouth, he has
no control of his tongue, he talks like a low-grade moron. But what
he feels, he feels with an energy that just surges out of him and overwhelms
you. He has never enjoyed hobnobbing with people of any intellectual
pretensions. The lingo he used even then was that of the common man
— foul-mouthed, abusive environments made him very comfortable.
The purer you are, the more distant you are from Sanju. The coarser
you are, the more real you are to him. Anything refined is for him something
suspect.
One of the things
I loved about working with him was the relief of finding an actor who
is not narcissistic. I remember thinking during Naam: This guy doesn’t
give a damn about how he looks on screen, he leaves it to the cameraman
and just goes and does what he’s supposed to. And this in an industry
where men (and macho men, not just the pretty boys) go to huge lengths
to control how they look on screen — lighting, best profile, best
angle — spend hours, like women, in front of their mirrors before
they give a shot. Not Sanju. It was a relief to find a male who was
not in awe of his own physical form. I don’t think I’ve
found an actor who fits that bill in all my life.
It’s a trait
that shows up in him in other ways as well. Sanju never exploited his
physiological assets, nor did he ever claim status because of his background.
He never behaved as if he were part of the Bollywood aristocracy, the
child of two iconic film people who were also among the very few in
the industry to demonstrate real concern for our world through their
social activism. I do not think it is true to say that the albatross
of his parents’ greatness weighed him down, though. That wasn’t
the point. It was just that he was always a people’s guy, someone
most at home with drivers and make-up men and lightboys.
