CHENNAI: For a filmmaker who’s as brash, curt and outspoken as his film Gandu, Kaushik Mukherjee certainly surprised City Express when he said that he found that Rajinikanth movies made more sense than mainstream Bollywood fare. He argued, “The thing about a Rajinikanth movie, and for that matter, most movies that I have seen in the south, is that they are honest enough to acknowledge the level of imagination that a movie-goer is willing to accept. Now obviously, he watches it and enjoys it — What else is cinema if not the maker’s imagination? Unfortunately Bollywood has some trouble recognising this.” Apparently, it has become a practice for him to watch a movie every time he stops over in Chennai, when he’s shuttling between Sri Lanka and Kolkata. This was a refreshing tack, which most people would not have expected from the actor-director, whose films have been starkly realistic, “reflecting the sex and status of the India that we live in”, as he puts it.Mukherjee, who is more comfortable with the moniker ‘Q’, was in the city recently to present his critically-acclaimed docu-drama, Love in India, at IIT-Madras’ Saarang. Considering the bold tone that his films have taken, it is surprising that he hasn’t run into trouble with fundamentalist groups. He laughs it off, “If you actually think about it, most groups motivated by religion stay away from people like me from a Communist bastion like Bengal!” But that didn’t really stop the Central Board of Film Certification from going after his film Gandu just so that it could be screened at a Film Festival. “I had some great support from directors such as Anurag Kashyap and Shyam Benegal, but this is one of the reasons I don’t really care if my films release here (in India) or not,” he says and adds, “All my films have been pre-bought by European corporations and so I have no worries on that front.” So does he never want to see a ‘Film by Q’ in an Indian theatre? “Not in the same multiplex that plays something like Rockstar,” he says candidly.Shifting tack to people that he admired in the entertainment industry, he outlines a few clear favourites, “I got a phone call past midnight from some random number, after Gandu was done. When I picked up, I was stunned — it was Naseeruddin Shah!” He continues excitedly, “He really enjoyed my movie and said that we should work together some time. It will happen soon, I’m certain,” the respect is obvious. He has also heard that Kamal Haasan has seen his film and apparently liked it. “Sex will always be a part of my films,” he declares. Always? “Always. It’s part of my journey of expressing the things I want to talk about. I’m not a professional filmmaker. My films are not Blackberry phones. They’re like these Korean phones — dodgy, bad spellings, cheap plastic, but they still work the same,” says Q, who gave up a career in ad films. The controversial man has his hands full with Taashar Desh, a Bengali musical adaptation of a Tagore poem (co-produced by Anurag Kashyap) and “10 other films in the same genre as Gandu produced under the banner Black Bangla.” And all of them in Bengali, because, he admits, he is and always will be, Bengali.
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