Director Amole Gupte employs a unique way to deal with children on the sets of his new movie, Sniff, says Angela Paljor
Director, screenwriter and actor Amole Gupte, who rose to fame with his masterpiece Taare Zameen Par, is all set to release Sniff starring Darsheel Safary and dealing with the layered world of young adults. The film features India’s youngest spy hero, Khushmeet Gill, who acquires super-power to smell everything from afar.
Gupte rejects the concept of inspiration, particularly in Sniff, as imagination, to him, is “not something as difficult as climbing the Mount Everest.”
Gupte is known to be sensitive with the portrayal of children in his movies and to their needs outside them. Keeping this in mind, the film has been entirely shot during vacations without jeopardising his actors’ academic studies.“If one is willing to work with children, then why are we so brutal and do not pay attention to what is required from them during the whole planning processIJ We plan for our A-list stars, book limousines and even get them the longest vanity but when it comes to children we label them as vain. However, this ideology is wrong and as humans they are very sensitive, honest and new to the manipulative world,” he says.
Adds he, “The film moves in the kingdom of children. They can’t come out for a few months and re-adjust their routine lives. This is one aspect which is always neglected as there are no counsellors for them.”
Gupte’s films are unique as they often do not have a bound script for the actors to read out their lines from. “This is not theatre, it’s cinema,” he says. Talking about his working style, he shares, “When we decide to shoot a particular scene, the cameraman and everybody else would have a script breakdown. But the actors – not just the children — but also the older ones never had a paper to read from.”
There is a reason that Gupte prefers to work in this fashion. “For me, dialogues should have been delivered in a real life situation rather than a make-believe one. These are the two paradigms of cinema. In theatre, one has to rehearse for three months and then you have a live audience. Out here we have a dead camera which doesn’t need a rehearsal.”
Adding to his carefree nature while working with children, Ajit Thakur, chief executive officer of Eros International’s motion pictures production division, Trinity Pictures, says, “Working with Amole sir is like a picnic. Whenever I visited the set, it never felt like they were filing a movie. Children would be playing on the swings and gambol around. Also he never auditioned. Rather he kept on doing workshops and no kid got rejected.”
Photo: Pankaj Kumar