Filmmaker and producer Vikas Bahl talks to Divya Kaushik about being a team with friends like Vikramaditya Motwane and Anurag Kashyap, his love for masala movies and his forthcoming film featuring Kangna Ranaut. It is the story of a single woman traveler
Modesty is not one of the most commonly found virtues in Bollywood, but there are a few who prefer living with it. Vikas Bahl comes across as one such guy. The producer and director, known for his National Award-winning film Chillar Party was in the city to promote Vikaramaditya Motwane’s lootera. Vikas is one of the producers of the film and is also Motwane’s great friend. Motwane, Vikas and Anurag Kashyap, who together formed Phantom Films with Madhu Mantena, almost had similar beginnings. “Anurag Kashyap was struggling with Dev D, Vikram was trying to complete Udaan since few years and I was also struggling in my own ways. We have always been great friends, we share the passion for similar kind of cinema and we have grown up together and people took time to appreciate our films but now they are liking the films coming out of our company. We are the biggest critics of each other’s work and take note of what the other points out about the film or the idea,” commented Vikas, a Delhi boy who did not plan to be in Bollywood. He went to Mumbai to be a part of the ad agency and “I was fortunate that I got to work with Piyush Pandey. He is the most insightful person that I ever met. Working with him was a learning experience and a new beginning. I also worked with Sunil lulla, I think I have been fortunate to have worked with some of the best people. After my ad world experience I joined Sony TV. That was the time when SAB was launched then. I was appointed as a business head of SAB TV and the channel saw a huge success in over six months. At the end of the day people only see success and after you are successful they believe that the guy has potential. After SAB, I joined UTV Spotboy as Chief Creative Officer (CCO). I remember that I was sitting in office and I didn’t know whom to call. I didn’t know anyone apart from Tigmanshu Dhuliya. I knew him because we did a TV show together,” shared the filmmaker about his beginning in Bollywood. He mentioned that Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Paan Singh Tomar was one film with which he was closely involved. Other was Rajkumar Gupta’s No One Killed Jessica. “Tigmanshu came with the idea of Paan Singh Tomar with just a four-lines brief. There wasn’t any major information on him. That brief discussion was the beginning and then we went on to do an intense research,” he said and added that he loves being a director and feels “I don’t belong to studio or a production house, I should only be making movies.”
Vikas comes from a non-filmy background, but he has always loved to watch masala films like Amar Akbar Anthony, Ram Balram and Kala Patthar. “The way those films were made was different. We don’t make the masala films the way they were made in Bollywood. We work very hard on our stories but most of them don’t work because of the weak screenplay. A film like Amar Akbar Anthony has many flaws but nobody minds it because it had a very good screenplay. There are directors in the industry who would put the film on floor once they have the story and have managed to sign a superstar, but directors like Anurag Basu would never go on floor until they are sure of their screenplay,” said the director, who has recently completed his film Queen, starring Kangna Ranaut. The film is born out of his love for travelling and it depicts a story of a girl who sets out on her honeymoon before her wedding. It is about the story of her travel, from Delhi to Amsterdam and Paris and the people she meets. “Most of last year I spent shooting in Delhi. It was a good experience to visit old hangout addas in lajpat Nagar and Alaknanda and surprisingly the old eateries are just as they were,” commented Vikas, a travel junkie who often visits Europe to drive long distances. last year he went five times. He has even driven down from Mumbai to Delhi with his dog.