Good writing does not come easy

No One Killed Jessica is the movie many people are talking about now and director Raj Kumar Gupta, who gave us the successful Aamir a few years ago, is the man basking in the limelight.

We know what NOKJ is about; what we don't know is how the movie came to be.

Now, thanks to an enlightening article by Rahul Bhatia in the latest Open (January 17), in which we first learn about the long discussions between the director and Sabrina Lall, Jessica's sister, we know what a struggle it was for Raj Kumar Gupta (pictured above) to put his script together:

After a month away from the story [after the meetings with Sabrina], Gupta sat down to write in his modest Versova [a Mumbai suburb] apartment. Looking at the material he had, he was frightened by its scope and scale. His last movie focused primarily on one character, while this one had several. “Then I thought, ‘If I do a bad job, no one will know about it because it won’t get made.’ But if I did a good job, this could be my best script. And if I could write this, I could write anything.” Before he began to write, he pulled down a poster of Aamir, and put it out of sight. (“You don’t want to think about what you did earlier.”)

After four starts, he found his pacing, tone and rhythm with his fifth attempt at the first scene. This is important, he says, because it gives him momentum when he launches himself into the foggy blank pages of a potential script. “I still didn’t have a story in mind.”

Still, he wrote. Words amounted to paragraphs. Paragraphs became pages. After writing ten pages, he decided he was going to make this movie. Propelled by the force of a steady beginning, he gradually had a story. And then it became a script.

But that's not the end. The shoot cannot start yet because Gupta is a perfectionist who believes everything begins with the script. So, over seven months, he writes 15 drafts. For all those who think good writing comes easy, the next paragraph is instructive: 

“Writing is a very painful process,” he says. “Very tiresome. Very lonely. I have no one to guide me. So it takes me time to figure things out.” To move on with an incomplete script, or even one that’s less than perfect, is unthinkable.

It isn’t just about the story in itself. The story is what will wake him up in excitement for months during gruelling schedules. The story is what will keep him strong when it’s  cloudy on an outdoor shoot. The story, essentially, is where hope lives.

“I think what’s important is that the script is the inspiration,” says Gupta. “Whatever I make, the story should be inspiring enough for me to keep going. And as a director, you know, there are 200 people working towards one person’s vision. Out of them, 70 per cent will be doing a job. There’s no art to it. But the other 30 per cent are creatively adding to the product, whether it’s the director of photography, or assistant directors who are highly neglected and underestimated. But everything begins with the script.”

If you're interested in film-making or scriptwriting, or if you simply want to understand the creative process, read "His Own Way" for a fascinating insight into the mind of an unassuming-looking young man of whom we're sure to hear a lot in the future.

• Photo courtesy: Open

Still on scriptwriting, the same issue of Open coincidentally features film critic Anupama Chopra's fervent plea to Bollywood to put an end to plagiarism and generate some original scripts. She writes:

In the last decade, the Hindi film industry has gone from strength to strength. Profits have boomed; viewers have  multiplied; Brand Bollywood has amplified. Hindi cinema is everywhere — from the Sundance film festival to theatres in Poland and Germany.  However, despite the success, the rising global profile and the  increasing chances of getting caught, Bollywood filmmakers continue to  happily plagiarise. So Aakrosh is Mississippi Burning, Knock Out is Phone Booth, Guzaarish has shades of The Sea Inside and Tees Maar Khan is After the Fox, which is written by Neil Simon.

Read the column in its entirety here: "Original Scripts, Please?"

PS: One of the sub-headings in this piece reads "Less stars, more script". It should read "Few (or "Fewer") stars, less script". Know why?

• Back to NOKJ. If you've watched the movie, you will know that Tehelka is only acknowledged in the end-credits as an afterthought. Well, the country's No. 1 (only?) public interest magazine had a big role to play in getting the case heard again, as Nisha Susan explains in the January 22 issue: "The film attributes the Tehelka investigation that convicted Manu Sharma to an imaginary television journalist," writes Susan. "Cinema, of course, has its own imperatives but before history is entirely rewritten Tehelka would like to take a moment to remember its three-month long undercover investigation without which Jessica Lall’s murderer may still be free." Read the article in its entirety here: "The investigation we did. And the movie they made".