I was in my senior inter when a friend of mine gave me a book called The Godfather telling me to enjoy the explicit sex scene on page 26. I ran back home and after devouring the vivid description of Sonny having sex with his girlfriend in the privacy of my room, I idly turned to the back cover and the blurb said something about the Mafia, a word I had never come across before. Having nothing better to do, I started reading the book. The narrative, the characters and the drama had me so utterly riveted that I think I read the book three to four times, almost back-to-back. Every time I finished reading it I started rereading and every time I read it, I discovered fresh nuances and minute details. Its effect on me was so profound that it got me hooked to reading fiction, and I would say my interest in wanting to be a storyteller through films started primarily from there. And so The Godfather and my interest in novels came about only because of my adolescent urgings.
Long after that when I became a director, I often used The Godfather as reference—the scenes, the dialogue delivery or some moment from here and there. For example, in Satya there is the voiceover describing the aftermath of Amodh Shukla’s murder. That was directly lifted from Mario Puzo’s description of the aftermath of Solozzio’s killing. Shiva too had its Godfather moments. But the idea of fully adapting the novel took shape only in 2002, and I immediately approached Amitabh Bachchan with it. In spite of many people not having heard of the Mafia as it is an Italian/American phenomenon, The Godfather has such resonance across the world because people who can influence others with the strength of their personalities and their tremendous power exist everywhere in the form of ganglords, political leaders, dictators or kings.
In the Indian context, I thought the closest anybody came to the Don was Balasaheb Thackeray—a man without any official position or political seat who could, just out of his sheer personal charisma, affect people so profoundly that they were willing to die and kill for him. So I used him as reference point in Sarkar, my loose adaptation of The Godfather.
There is a line in the book, ‘From 1935 to 1937 the name of Santino Corleone sent shock waves through the underworld.’ James Caan playing the role of Santino Corleone did not bring this line alive for me, but KayKay Menon who plays Vishnu Nagre does. That is what I mean by taking reference from the tone of the book. Likewise, in the beginning when Amerigo Bonasera talks to the Don to help him bring the people who hurt his daughter to justice, I found the conversation a bit unreal—‘How much do you want? Why did you do this to me? Why didn’t you come to me first, instead of going to the police?’ I felt it was unreal because these big people who have reached a certain status, go out of their way to help people in trouble, who come to them, in order to make them feel emotionally obligated. That is how they get to be so powerful, to have people willing to die for them. That thought also I took from the novel. In the opening scene of Sarkar when a guy gets out of a rickshaw and enters the gate of Sarkar’s bungalow, you can see the defeat in his walk and hear it in his voice when he is talking to Sarkar about the injustice he’s suffered. There you get sucked into Sarkar’s state of mind and you feel the anger as much as him, whereas in The Godfather you look at the scene objectively.
My intention was also to make the audience feel intimidated by the characters. So all of them were introduced with a full piece orchestra background score. For example, the way Rashid enters the house, the gate opening, the background score and the way he gets down from the car and goes up the staircase is almost like a Mahabharata character. So by the time he reaches Sarkar, the background score and the shots are commanding the audience to take him very seriously. This is accentuated by his sitting in front of Sarkar, taking his own time and not seemingly concerned or bothered or intimidated by Sarkar’s stature. At a subconscious level, the audience also feels the impact of a new actor sitting in front of Amitabh Bachchan and not feeling intimidated.
My tendency is to have a very dramatic and in-your-face background score. I have two reasons for this; one is that I find background score drives the emotion of the audience in a specified intended direction. At times people complain that it is so loud that one cannot hear the dialogue properly. Sometimes the reason for this is that by the time I reach the mixing stage, I am so bored of the dialogues myself, having heard them so many times before, that I feel like drowning them out in music. I know it sounds stupid but it can happen. So I think sometimes, if the body language of the characters and the build-up are able to convey the sense of the scene, it might be more effective to have the dialogues in the background and the music loud and foregrounded.
Looking back, I felt Sarkar was a very simplistic story. The sequel, I thought no longer had the freshness of the first to cash in on. But I couldn’t change the style because that was the tradition of Sarkar. What I could do was to put in a story which was very original and make it on a scale and on issues which were bigger. What I felt when I saw The Godfather Part II was that the characters were taken for granted. There was no intention on the part of the director to make them look larger than life, the way it was done in the first part. So I was somehow disappointed to see Michael Corleone running here and there. No doubt it is a great film and I have seen it many times, but I didn’t want the intensity and larger-than-life quality of Sarkar to be diluted in Sarkar Raj.
To sum up, on page 26 of The Godfather when Sonny’s girlfriend said ‘she felt something burning between her thighs’, it amounted to ‘something burning between my ears’, and it kicked off my journey to becoming a filmmaker; though admittedly not on first reading, when it evoked very different feelings.
Excerpted and reprinted with permission from Rupa Publications India Pvt. Ltd.
