In a desolate corner of an office in one of suburban Mumbai’s many high-rises, a lanky man, dishevelled hair prominent, is brewing tea for himself. The sprawling space overlooks the city skyline and is nearly engulfed by its enormity. “Darjeeling tea?” offers the connoisseur, who gets North Bengal’s best teas exported to him by the estate managers. Strewn around are promotional materials of his last release. And neatly stacked on the desk are biographies of film personalities, books on poetry and a bunch of music CDs. He quickly shoots an email before settling down for a chat. As the sun goes down on a mellow November afternoon, Imtiaz Ali’s insights into life and cinema keep us engaged.
Half a year after Highway, Ali’s much talked about film, he’s onto his next—Tamasha starring Ranbir Kapoor and Deepika Padukone. “I don’t like to sit and wait for the rose to grow in my garden. I’ve always been working all the time,” he says. As it is, the 43-year-old director admits to losing connection with his films very soon, as if they were “old friends who made me happy but don’t mean anything anymore”.
“Soon after the release of a film, I start to feel I have messed up on many counts,” he says. What would he do differently then? “Everything! I would want to do everything differently for every film of mine,” he asserts.
Ask him about Highway, and he concedes that it is his “most technically satisfying” film, the kind he’d like to present in a festival. Push him a little more and he declares, “By the time you start getting returns for a movie, in terms of adulation and so on, you are on to doing something else. And you don’t want to be disturbed. While you are praising me for Highway, I am occupied with a scene in Tamasha.”
This occupation, or preoccupation if you will, has been Ali’s hallmark since his days in Delhi’s Hindu College, where he set up the still-functional theatre group Ibtida and travelled the country with semi-professional plays. “He was a hosteller, immensely involved and hands-on at every step,” says a friend and then group member.
But theatre was just one of his many expressions. Ali was a man of multiple desires. That someone who wished to be (or was) a basketball player, an author, an engineer, a civil servant, an advertising copywriter and a management graduate—sometimes two at a time—has stuck to filmmaking for a decade is an incredulous thing. “Almost everything that I had planned for myself did not come true. I was kind of swept away by some unseen force into film direction,” says Ali. “And now that I have made some films and have the prospect of making some more, I feel my life could not have been more accurate than this.”
He began as a production assistant with Zee TV in the mid-90s. “Basically, I was a glorified errands boy carrying tapes from the editing studio to the office and vice versa. But I was also learning stuff in the studio and started contributing in the promo department,” he says. It was there that he learnt about tapes and how machines assembled stuff and how the editing process could be manipulated—invaluable lessons which would come in handy years later in his directorial debut Socha Na Tha.
This was followed by another brief stint at Crest Communications, a post-production studio where he would write concepts for television. “Most of what I wrote never saw the light of day,” he says. But there was a talk show (Purush Kshetra), which he’d written and conceptualised for El-TV, Zee’s sister channel. “Crest was the producer and I ended up directing it because it was convenient for them,” he says. The show became the talk of the town for the bold subjects it addressed, and Ali had “turned director by accident”.
But continuing high praise for the film amuses Ali. He says, “I still don’t understand why people like Jab We Met so much. I had never anticipated its success. I used to think that it wasn’t a film worth making because there was nothing important happening in it.” The film, though, served as an outlet for Ali’s suppressed self. “I know myself to be a very inhibited and awkward person. While making Jab We Met, I wanted to be Geet [a motormouth]. I wanted that vent.”
(This story appears in the 26 December, 2014 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)
Imtiaz Ali is one of India\'s TOP directors.Looking frwrd to Tamasha. Loved readng the article.
on Jan 3, 2015Very nice article. I lov Imtiaz sir\'s movies. No one do romance like him, he is badshah of love films in bollywood,
on Dec 27, 2014I thought Highway was a pretentious film. Rockstar was senseless. And Jab We Met was childish. But there are many things to admire in Imtiaz Ali\'s craft. He really is a fine storyteller. Good to know that that is how most of the industry sees him. Enjoyed reading this piece. Keep it up!
on Dec 20, 2014