Paul Schrader’s brief flirtation with making a Bollywood movie: “You never stop looking”
Posted On
(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Cinema has always been a global enterprise but established American filmmakers rarely venture outside their wheelhouse to try something completely different. For a while, Paul Schrader sought to become one of the few, but it didn’t end up coming to fruition.
Writers and directors who cut their teeth in Hollywood always try their hands at different genres, styles, tones, and budgetary ballparks, but full-blown international detours are a rare occurrence. Of course, plenty of auteurs who found fame and fortune Stateside have made films with a distinctly British or European flavour, but Bollywood has never been a destination they’ve shown much interest in.
Schrader wanted to make it happen, though, and a large part of it was driven by his dissatisfaction with playing the political games integral to getting ahead in America. In 2008, the Taxi Driver scribe described the local industry as “a barren, barren place,” so he decided to look to the other side of the world for inspiration.
After attending a film festival in India, Schrader was approached with the idea of making a Hindi-language movie, and the pieces quickly started coming together. Bollywood veterans who boarded the project included screenwriter Mushtaq Shiekh, entertainment company Sahara One, and producer Anubhav Sinha.
For a leading man, Schrader opted to set his sights as high as possible in seeking megastar Shah Rukh Khan to take top billing, which proved to be a deal-breaker. When quizzed on his brief flirtation with Bollywood by The Playlist, the Academy Award nominee admitted that as a filmmaker, “you never stop looking” for when and where inspiration will strike. However, it wasn’t to be.
“I was going to do something with Shah Rukh Khan, and Shah Rukh just decided not to leave the comfort zone of Bollywood and make an international film,” he offered. While it would have been an Indian-set picture with a largely Indian cast and plenty of Indian talent involved behind the camera, the star wasn’t too keen on the idea of ceding his usual levels of creative control to march to the beat of someone else’s drum.
Schrader compared his cross-continental venture as being part and parcel of the job, saying that “the independent filmmaker is the scavenger dog of the planet, wandering from country to country for scraps”. It didn’t quite take him as far afield as Bollywood, but he did try, only to discover that the political machinations of cinema have no such things as cultural or language barriers.
It was an ambitious thing for Schrader to even attempt, regardless of his efforts being stymied well before things had even gathered serious momentum, but it did at least outline that making movies is an intensely difficult and precarious business regardless of which country anyone pitches as the perfect backdrop.
[embedded content]
Related Topics
