The new adaptation

Benullo isn’t the only Hollywood scriptwriter being roped in to co-write or edit scripts of Bollywood films. Indian film-makers now are hiring foreign scriptwriters for lending desi films a global appeal. David S. Ward,who won an Oscar for the Best Original Screenplay for The Sting (1974) and was nominated for the same award for Sleepless in Seattle (1993),is writing the screenplay of director Ashutosh Gowariker’s Buddha. The film is being marketed by Spice Studios,the producers,as a “global film with a largely international crew”.

Hollywood screenwriting guru Syd Field is a “script consultant” to UTV’s 5 Kaurav,whose screenplay he has “re-written”. The film’s director,Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra,believes 5 Kaurav is an “extremely global film that will be dubbed in various languages”. “If we want the world to watch Indian movies,we have to start speaking their screenplay language. They don’t want to see Hollywood films made in India,but Indian films told in their idiom,their flair,” he says. Field was also script consultant to My Name is Khan,which was co-produced by Fox and had a “global” subject like 9/11. In 2007,Matthew Robbins,who has co-written many of Steven Spielberg’s films,had written the story of Blood Brothers,a 13-minute film by Vishal Bhardwaj.

While overseas business is the primary motive of hiring Hollywood writers,knowledge is what decides which writer to pick. Field,for instance,has “thorough insight of Krishna”,Mehra says. The director had met Field four years ago in Hollywood,where he had attended his screenwriting sessions. “When I saw Gayatri mantra and an agarbatti at his studio,I guessed he was a student of Hindu culture. He then told me that for the last 20 years,he was visiting an ashram in Nashik on his trips to India. When we got discussing Hindu philosophy,I realised that he knows a lot more about Krishna consciousness than I or Hindu philosophers did. So,it was not the colour of his skin or his visiting card which made me decide to get him to polish the final draft of 5 Kaurav,” he says.
Benullo,who wrote Around The World in 80 Days (2004),was roped in because he “knew a lot about superheroes”. “It is all about research,passion and the right collaboration. If these elements come together,you’ve got a good story,” says Sinha.

The director has also got Italian writer Enrico Vecchi “to write a film that deals with an ethnic crisis in an interior region of India.” “Trust me,he knows more about it in the last five months than a lot of us and he has not even started writing. The script is almost complete and I may begin working on it after I am done with Ra.One,” Sinha says. Indian writers,he adds,must learn to “get out of laziness,go out and research on the subject of the film”. Ra.One ’s script,he says,took three years “because of the preparation required”.

Would a Hollywood scriptwriter be able to engage an Indian audience? Benullo had never watched a Bollywood film before. But for Ra.One he was given a stack of DVDs and would watch them at night,after meetings. “So by now,I’ve seen Anubhav’s work and much of SRK’s work,and as part of my research I watched Krrish,” he says. While writing the script,he was in constant contact with Sinha. “I would send chunks of pages,which he would read and respond,sending me specific thoughts about the way a scene needed to play for a Bollywood audience,” he says.

It worked the other way round for Field. MNIK’s scriptwriter Shibani Bathija says that since the film was largely set in the US,“Field was a good person to comment on its reception to an American audience and to modify any aspects that wouldn’t fly.” She and Field would sit down with the script every day for two weeks in the US,and Field “would change the dialogue,restructure the script and try to strengthen the interval.” “We are also called script doctors; we get inside the script,find symptoms of any defect and treat it,” Field tells us over the phone from Los Angeles.
Field says audience’s sensibilities is “a major thing”. “When a clock is ticking on the wall or a car is pulling up on the street,the American audience knows what that means in terms of the story. In Hollywood,we tell the story primarily through pictures. In India,the emphasis is on words and emotions,” he says.

If MNIK were to be made in Hollywood style,he “would have taken out the interval and would have shortened the journey of SRK that begins after it”. Field tells us that screenplays in India are always written around intervals. “The building of characters and relationships happens before the interval,and after the interval,those characters and relations are paid off. In American screenplays,the story grows organically,” he says.
Does screenplay collaboration not interfere with the writers’ creativity? Mehra,whose script for 5 Kaurav was re-written by Field,says,“Screenplays are never written just once,they are always re-written. Mughal-e-Azam had four writers,5 Kaurav,similarly,was first written by Rensil D’Silva,then by me and finally by Field. Screenplay writing,like film-making itself,is a collaborative art. In any case,a screenplay is always re-interpreted. The director directs it in his own way,the actor acts out the characters in his own style and the cinematographers influences the backdrop of a story,” says Mehra.