Ad Mad & Fun To Know
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SANJUKTA SHARMA meets the Britain-based ad filmmaker who has won clients and influenced audiences through his sheer audacity and compelling creativity

He doesn't accept scripts. Story board? Forget it! Give Tarsem Dhandwar Singh either of the two and he’ll hijack it and toss it around into exactly what the client doesn’t want. But then, the clients keep going back to him. And we know why. From what appeared in six of this UK-based Indian ad filmmaker’s films screened in Mumbai recently, it’s that all-important Wow factor.

The smart assemblage of music and visuals that tells the story so persuasively, yet subtly. Even the 30-seconder doesn’t rush to tell you ‘buy it!’. Most of them have that sense of taking its own sweet time, stretching out, like a cat waking up from a nap. Or they just numb you with their powerful visuals so that you are forced to take the idea and the visuals with you. Or you just feel cool watching them.

Already a rage in Britain with a host of award-winning ad films for brands like Levi’s, Reebok and Coca Cola and a few music videos (including R.E.M’s Losing My Religion) to his credit, Dhandwar was in Mumbai for a day, during which he took time off his shooting schedule for an interactive session with Mumbai’s ad world. And the Ludhiana-born seemed less interested in talking about his latest claim to fame — his first Hollywood film, the Jennifer Lopez-starrer The Cell — than about his art, inspiration and why the West is ‘home away from home’ for him.

Dhandwar knows how to sport his art. He’s glib and witty, and flaunts an audacity that’s grounded in common sense. Even when he doesn’t need to promote himself, because he seems to be more than content with one ad film made for an Indian client. Remember the Coca Cola film, where boys played cricket against the backdrop of a red wall and red chillies to the tune of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan?
‘‘I don’t get scripts anymore,’’ he proclaims, ‘‘just a two-line brief. If they want hip-hop just because they think it works, I somehow manage to replace it with Bach or Jazz.’’ For which, he says, they pay him a whopping amount. If you’re wondering where that arrogance stems from, it’s a part of being in the ad industry and Dhandwar slips into it effortlessly.

He learnt the art of self-promotion after he left film school in LA. Or perhaps even earlier, when he sold cars in America after dropping out of an MBA programme at Harvard. ‘‘I learnt that first you have got to ask your client what he is willing to shell out and then persuade him to give you what you want out of him.’’ And unlike his idol, J. Carton, the American ad filmmaker (‘‘I traced the ebb and flow of his career religiously’’), who had ‘‘the unfortunate gift of just pure creativity’’, Dhandwar can be quite the wheeler-dealer.

‘‘Initially, I had to mislead my clients quite often,’’ he smirks. For a Levi’s spot, the agency wanted a man clad in jeans jumping from one swimming pool to another, with all kinds of women lusting after him, and all this in the backdrop of a fast soundtrack. Dhandwar presented it to the client that way, got their rough approval and then changed the track to a slow 1960s song. ‘‘The film changed, but it was too good for them to turn it down,’’ he quips, in his indeterminate Yankee twang-turned-British accent, which occasionally slips into the raspy Punjabi stress. And yes, he did try to speak broken melodramatic sentences in his mother tongue.

Born in Ludhiana, Dhandwar travelled through the Himalayas when he was very young, but had to come back to Delhi to do B Com and which he ‘‘HHH-A-T-E-D. I didn’t know what I was looking for — whether doing the Geometry well was the right thing to do or mugging up the History chapter. I didn’t see films as points of reference. I was lazy and completely wasted,’’ says the 39-year-old.

America opened up Dhandwar’s destiny. All the ‘‘jazz’’ that he does today, he owes to film school. The rest was a combination of being with the right people (including an ‘‘artsy ex-girlfriend’’), hanging around the professors he liked (one of them is now his cameraman), taking down furtive notes in and out of class, a lot of hard work and then of course, getting the right breaks at the right time. Which partially explains why he is blatantly condescending towards Bollywood, particularly the rich producers — ‘‘I mean you gotta be serious if you show a dog having a flashback with that kind of money!’’

But look a little beyond the glib talk and smart business sense and you see the artiste. Not a gifted one, he admits nonchalantly. ‘‘You can’t imagine how many paintings, literary imagery and photographs I have borrowed from. Almost every film has a classical reference. Just the treatment is mine.’’

There is no clear-cut definition of creativity in his dictionary. ‘‘It’s the sum of all your experiences — of what you’ve read, seen, heard and internalised. My clients pay me for all that, not just one film.’’ Dhandwar’s mantra is: no matter how much you mess up in your shoot, no matter how Murphy plays tricks on you that day, your shots have to look the way you want it to look. The director’s sensibility has to come through.

An odd tip or two there, for the huge turn-out of Indian filmmakers in the seminar and then it was time to let his work speak for him — the award-winning pastiche video for R.E.M, Losing My Religion and Deep Forest’s Sweet Lullaby, filmed in several continents within a month’s time. But despite his huge success in the field, Dhandwar is not committed to the art of music video. On the contrary, he is unhappy that the concept even exists — ‘‘it’s like forcing upon a music lover, a particular way of ‘seeing’ a song.’’ Not that that’s reason enough for him to let a sweet indulgence slip by. ‘‘I enjoy directing music videos because they give me a larger canvas to visualise on and I have no regrets about making people looking at one of my favourite bands through my eyes. But I’m sure many R.E.M fans have different associations with the song,’’ Dhandwar justifies the contradiction.

But anyway, perhaps not many have other associations to the R.E.M song. How else does one see the band’s lead singer Michael Stipe singing that song, standing about in a weathered room looking all moony, an injured angel falling from heaven and pretty young boys posing as martyrs. Like all his other works, all the imageries in this video are straight out of the director’s cultivated resources — ‘‘I have put together imageries from Italian painter Cravaggio, Soviet Social Realist style posters, Hindu mythology and the Marquez short story A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings.’’ The reference point is somewhat narrower in Sweet Lullaby, where a small girl, trying to go to sleep on her sister’s lap, takes a trip around the world on her tricycle, to see how people sleep in different countries, but actually circles around her sister.

If you still can’t guess where that came from, Dhandwar spells it out: ‘‘It’s the story of Kartik and Ganesha. Ganesha, the lazy and smart one defied his brother Kartik to go around the world faster than himself and he won because he went around his mother and his mother is his world.

If it’s mythology, Dhandwar doesn’t mind borrowing from India too, although he denies any Indian influence, ‘‘except, perhaps the bold colours.’’ And he sure doesn’t want to suffer comparison from Shekhar Kapoor and Manoj Knight Shyamalan after his film is released, just because they share the same roots. ‘‘I don’t see any common ground. Our backgrounds are different, our visions are poles apart.’’ And that’s about all Dhandwar lets us in on his film, except another predictable hint: ‘‘The soul of my film are its visuals.’’

With Hollywood knocking on his door, Dhandwar isn’t exactly looking forward to any offers from India. He just sympathises with the Indian ad man. ‘‘You’ve got to be kidding if you’re planning to tell my mother this detergent doesn’t make your clothes look whiter than the other. She’ll tell you you’re no better than her son!’’
(Tarsem Dhandwar Singh’s debut film The Cell hit the American box-office on August 18)

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