dil dosti etc

Synopsis

On surface, Dil Dosti Etc is about lives of students in Delhi University. Sanjay Mishra (Shreyas Talpade) is an ambitious and focused Bihari student-politician in Delhi. Apurv (Imaad Shah), on the other hand, is a rich kid who searches for meaning in life through amorous escapades with various girls. However, in positing Apurv, a rich cosmopolitan guy and Sanjay, an old-fashioned Bihari guy, opposite each other, the film juxtaposes the world of old, conservative India against the new, rich and free-of-past India. The three female leads that of a prostitute, a school girl and a rich model, provide a myriad of social and emotional backdrops to the film. Filmed extensively in Delhi, Dil Dosti Etc has used a rich ensemble of characters, stories and themes to explore the very nature of friendship, male bonding, voyeurism, sexual perversion, love and betrayal. Dil Dosti Etc is a bold look at how young men of today think and choose to live their lives.

During my graduate studies abroad I’d tried balancing my academic and professional life with film-making – I produced and directed two documentary films (Lo Manthang and Ramnagar) and several short films that were shown around in film festivals. I was working in Rome for the United Nations when I decided to switch full-time into film making. I took a long sabbatical and came to Delhi to develop a story idea into film script (with Pawan Sony) which you see today as Dil Dosti Etc.

On finishing the screenplay, I took the idealistic route – I came to Bombay with a 'bound script', looking for a financier. I met a few producers here, but it did not work out, and I returned to my job at Food and Agriculture Organization at the UN for a brief period. During my second run in Bombay, I met Prakash Jha who liked the idea and the setting of the film. He asked for the script, and subsequently asked me to shoot a few scenes digitally to see how I envisage the film. Eventually, he commissioned the project.

Now, we had written a screenplay without me having any idea on who would play the roles. When I came to Bombay, looking to raise finance, I was also looking to find the right cast for this realist film set in Delhi. The priority was to cast the two men protagonists first – Apurv, an 18-year cosmopolitan guy new to college life and Sanjay Mishra, an ‘old-world’ guy from Bihar. This is when my co-writer Pawan Sony pointed out to a TV ad where a wiry-haired young boy plays a shepherd whistling to his herd of sheep! I thought it was very cool of the model to pull that off. The shepherd turned out to be Imaad Shah and I approached him to play Apurv in Dil Dosti Etc. Shreyas Talpade (Sanjay) was suggested to me by a casting director friend, Nandini Shrikent. I had seen Iqbal, but it took a meeting with Shreyas to get convinced that he can indeed play a bold Bihari student politician. I had gotten to know Smriti Mishra (plays Vaishali, a sex worker in Delhi) through the writer & filmmaker friend, Vijay Singh (maker of Jaya Ganga and One Dollar Curry). Nikita Anand, a former Miss India and Ishitta Sharma who plays a school girl in Dil Dosti Etc came through auditions.

As we went into pre-production, I remember spending countless hours at Prakash Jha’s office either on auditions (hundreds of actors were interviewed for this ensemble film) or working on the music. Our finished script had carried references to songs and music themes. However, once the project was commissioned by Prakash, I got down and started expanding on these song ideas and music. We realized that there are two types of music themes that we needed to go for – one that carried an energetic and foot-tapping feel to it (to cover the students' 'masti' on campus as well as the Punjabi party-scenes in Delhi), and the other had to be of more soulful kind (including a thumri that speaks for the prostitute character). Now, we met several music directors in town, and finally zeroed down to two sets of new composers – one was the music director-duo, Siddhartth and Suhas, and the other, the Pune-based group, Agnee. I must also add that we worked with two new lyricists, Raam Goutam and Prashant Pandey. Despite my skepticism for songs in a film, I think we have been able to get music that is interwoven quite well with the narrative and has greatly complemented the film. Also, in retrospect, I realize that I have had several advantages in working with a team (both actors and musicians) that is new and untested, for they persevered longer in gaining a thorough understanding of the film and were keen to give their best.

We prepared on several fronts before we left for the shoot in Delhi – be it laying out a detailed shooting script, or discussing the look of the film (with the Cinematographer and Costume Designer), or having the songs ready or scouting and fixing the shooting locations in Delhi. As far as preparing the actors are concerned – I tried to make sure that there were long sessions between ourselves to figure out the character they were playing and to share an understanding on how the story unfolds. Importantly, we held a work-shop for our key actors with an expert from National School of Drama, Anamika Haksar. Here, there was not much in way of 'teaching' that came from us (all the actors are good at their jobs and were fittingly cast). What the process essentially involved was working on their individual characters, and narrowing them to the context of the film and its plots.

It was absolutely necessary that the film be shot in Delhi. The city plays an important role in the film. The emotional landscape of the film is quite literally spread through the city of Delhi. For example (though this is somewhat generalizing), Delhi has a gradient that gets posher as you go from north to south and we’ve placed our women protagonists geographically and in that order: the sex worker who stands at the bottom end of the class system is located in GB road in northern old Delhi. The school girl comes from middle class Punjabi background, and lives in Kamla Nagar an area that contains all elements of that particular class and culture, while the model represents the higher echelons of society and lives in Mehrauli in South Delhi…I was open to shooting in any college in Delhi University. But the Principal and staff members of Hindu College (the college I went to) were the most welcoming. They literally had the campus doors wide open for us and let us shoot in any part of the college and hostel as we wished. This truly helped.

It’s a common saying that any film once shot is then 'rewritten' on the editing table. Dil Dosti Etc is no exception. During the entire post production phase, my foremost effort has been to keep several of the ensemble elements of this film in harmony. I have also tried to get not only the plots right but have the originally conceived subtext of the film in place – that insights are not lost in telling of a story.

The making of Dil Dosti Etc has taken a lot of sweat and passion. I am confident that the film will bring to notice several talented people involved in various capacities in this film. It’s also a fact that throughout the film’s production, I have respected the money that has gone into its making, the fact that someone was ready to indulge my desire for making this film, and one hopes to do justice to that trust. Naturally, we are all looking forward to the release of the film.

Manish Tiwary holds a PhD from Cambridge University, UK, and was a post-doctoral fellow at Yale University (New Haven, USA) and United Nations University (Tokyo, Japan). He has worked for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Rome, Nepal and India and has also published articles concerning political ecology in the Economic and Political Weekly of India. Manish’s primary interest, however, lies in cinema. Dil Dosti Etc is Manish Tiwary’s first feature-length film based on an original story by him. To know more about the film visit www.dildostietc.com.