This Friday, his ninth film Jail is up for release and Bhandarkar is far from nervous, “I had the proverbial butterflies in my tummy during the release of my first film, Trishakti in 99. When it bombed at the box-office, I nearly had a nervous breakdown and I wept! Starting off with a flop film, I have faced humiliation and disaster - now I am quite immune to it. I am happy the way Jail has shaped up,” he says.
Madhur had thought of this subject a couple of years ago but got busy with other projects, but after Fashion, he took out Jail from his idea bank. He then visited various jails in Pune, Thane, Dehradun and Tihar for basic research, “The most striking aspect that I noted in every jail is that each inmate is living in hope that one day he will go out and lead a new life,” he points out.
Jail presents a ringside view of the world of law, criminals and jail inmates. “From Chandni Bar to Jail - my protagonists have been from the middle class because they represent the society. I like to put my protagonists in trouble and let them face trauma and find a solution for themselves. So even in Jail, the trigger point was the idea that if a middle class corporate sector employee having a brush with the law and then what would happen to him in the jail?” he elaborates. This stark film about “relationships, bonding, authorities and legal point of view in a jail” comes in a compact format of just two hours and twenty minutes duration.
Made on a smart budget of Rs 13 crore, Bhandarkar reasons that his subject dictates the budget, “Fashion was priced at Rs 18 crore and I could have even made a Rs 40 crore film after that. But Jail didn’t need that kind of budget. My films are always correctly-priced and therefore they make money,” he asserts.
For a U/A certificate from the censors, he admits that he had to make seven cuts in Jail. He bleeped swear words, deleted lines referring to homosexuality dialogues, blurred the nude shot further and cut out Mugdha Ghodse’s lovemaking scene, “I agreed to the cuts because I want the youth between 14 to 18 to watch it. With so much drunken driving around and kids getting caught in pubs and put in jail, this film will be an eye-opener,” he adds. The film also depicts the sorry state the jails are in, with a barrack with a capacity of 200 inmates being crammed with 400!
As for the strange pairing of Neil Nitin Mukesh and Mugdha, Bhandarkar says, “My films are concept-oriented and character-driven and I always cast a character, not stars. Mugdha makes a good pairing with Neil in a deglam avatar.” He informs that he had cast Neil much before Aa Dekhen Zara and New York, “He surrendered to me completely as we shot in Karjat for 41 days from 7 am to 12 in the night everyday. Even after all the success, he’s very grounded and focussed,” he says approvingly. The director is also full of praise for Manoj Bajpai’s “subtle and underplayed” act and Arya Babbar’s zealous portrayal of hit-man Kabir Mallik.
About wooing Lata Mangeshkar out of her self-imposed sabbatical, he says that when the prayer song came to him, he and his music director Shamir Tandon, both thought of Lata simultaneously. “I approached Lata didi with the master tape and she agreed to sing it but, only after a month owing to her ill-health. But once in the recording studio, she was like a newcomer full of beans. She took just about one-and-a- half hours to record and when she asked us if the take was okay, we just gaped in awe at her. So great yet so humble,” smiles the director.
Bhandarkar had no qualms about releasing his film along with Rajkumar Santoshi’s Ajab Prem Ki Ghazab Kahani, “Both the films have different audience, while APKGK is a big commercial bonanza, Jail is a stark Madhur Bhandarkar film that people are waiting for. Remember, Fashion came with Golmaal Returns last Diwali and both the films worked!”
He denies emphatically that he’s making a film on IPL Head, Lalit Modi, “If I attend an awards function, they think I am making a film on awards and if I visit a hospital, I am making a film on health services. When I visited a school, the parents gathered there suggested that I should make my next on school donations. I am getting typecast as an issue-based filmmaker. I have to take a break to reinvent myself. I am basically a musical person so now I want to make a nice romance,” he muses.
With his inherent sense of humour, Bhandarkar would be better off making a comedy next. He laughs and admits, “Tabu had told me that. She said that I have such a whacky sense of humour that I ought to be making madcap comedies like David Dhawan.”
