Neeraj Ghaywan shares with Iknoor Kaur his love for Benares and explains how his award-winning screenplay deals with death
When Neeraj Ghaywan first went to Benares as a part of the Gangs of Wasseypur crew, he didn’t know a thing about the place. However, after four and a half months of living there, when he was about to leave, he almost broke down. Overwhelmed by this reaction the writer-director ended up basing both, his first film Shor and his recent Sundance– Mahindra Global Filmmaking Award-winning screenplay Fly Away Solo, on the city of Gods.
“I had a strange connection with that place. There was something that made me feel extremely sad when I left. All I knew about Benares before was what I had heard. I had heard about this community that cremates bodies for their whole life. So I had this concept in mind for a script even before I went to Benares, but had abandoned it. However, during the two years of Wasseypur, I met Varun Grover, who is the co-writer of the film. So Varun and I went around Benaras, did research, dug deep inside and developed the screenplay,” he shared.
According to Neeraj, the script has multiple plots set in Benares. “In one way if you look at it you are looking at the small town India and the crises that people go through. At a thematic level, it’s about how people deal with the loss of someone very close and hence come of age. What binds it together is the connection that the river Ganga has formed between these stories,” he elaborated.
A beginner in the industry, Neeraj felt that Sundance gave him the push that he needed. He said, “The kind of people I met at the awards was great. I had been trying to raise finances for the film since a long time and at Sundance I got an opening.”
However, winning the award was no cakewalk for him. “I had to rewrite the entire script in English because it was a complete American audience. So when I did that, I had to give the cultural context for each and every thing. So there is a lot of Hindi poetry used in the script which I changed into English poetry and gave the reference for each socio-cultural or socio-political context that the script needed,” he explained.
Having worked under the tutelage of Anurag Kashyap, Neeraj owes his victory to him.
“He gave me the opportunity to work on Gangs of Wasseypur which was my principal as far as this script was concerned. I learnt maximum under him. Then I was also the assistant director for Ugly and when you work with Kashyap it is always a huge thing because of the creative freedom he gives you. In fact, even now he is helping me set up the cast and crew for this film,” he summed up.