Maximum City is now muse to Paul Schrader, the writer of cult American films Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. He is heading to Bollywood to direct a bilingual thriller
For about a year now, the scriptwriter who gave America an anti-hero it hasn’t forgotten (Robert De Niro in Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver) has been on a Bollywood diet. Sixty-three-year-old film-maker Paul Schrader has watched around 130 Hindi films, ticking off Om Shanti Om and Satya, as well as films from the Seventies and Eighties from his must-watch list. The idea, he says, was to “get to Bollywood from Bollywood”. Yes, Schrader is coming to B-town with a project that could again —after Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire —strike cinematic gold in Mumbai’s dirt and gangster world.

The film is Xtrme City, a bilingual action thriller he will direct. It is set in Mumbai, a city which he says best represents India’s “harmonious extremes—serenity and chaos, beauty and squalor, high ideals and ignoble actions.” It will be produced by David Weisman (of Oscar-nominated Kiss of the Spider Woman fame) and Indian producers Anubhav Sinha and Mushtaq Sheikh, who has also written the script with Schrader.

The plot revolves around a former US ranger, Curtis Hawkley, who returns to Mumbai after his father-in-law’s youngest daughter is kidnapped by an underworld mobster. To save the girl, he takes help from an old friend, Raj Rangan, an ex-Indian Special Forces commando. “It’s a variation of the classic Hollywood “fish-out-of-water” storyline. The interesting point in this case is that the water (India) is more important than the fish. The story could have been set elsewhere although I don’t know if it would have held as much fascination for me,” Schrader said over e-mail.

... contd.