“It’s the horses,” Tigmanshu Dhulia quips as he breaks down his love for the Westerns. The filmmaker, who helmed the acclaimed Paan Singh Tomar (2012), returns to the wide, arid, cinematic landscapes filled with cops and dacoits in Ghamasaan. Set in the Bundelkhand region, the film is a drama-thriller set around a feared daaku, Maharaj (Arshad Warsi) and a determined cop (played by Pratik Gandhi) tasked with catching him. It’s an old-school, good vs evil tale. A confrontation between the law and the lawless.
Beyond the visual freedom, Tigmanshu says he is excited by the rebel streak in Westerns. “These films are set around characters who are criminals, bank robbers, and train looters. They live by their own rules, by their own moral codes, and with a sense of freedom. Some of them have a value system, some do not. In The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, all three are bad,” he says. “They defy authority. Even I dislike authority.”
Must be difficult for a filmmaker to go against authority in the current climate, we slip in. “It always has been,” Tigmanshu answers with a smile.
This is Pratik’s second collaboration with Tigmanshu. The two have worked together previously on the JioHotstar series The Great Indian Murder (2022). “We were in the last schedule of that show when Tigmanshu sir told me he is thinking of a dacoit story set in Bundelkhand,” remembers Pratik. “He told me he has the character of a cop for me, who is heading the Special Task Force (STF) to catch a dacoit and it is based on multiple real-life incidents.” Pratik said that what excited him about the project was that Tigmanshu was helming it. “He has a very clear vision. I knew if he was there, I could visualise the film in my head. That gave me comfort.”
Ghamasaan is presented as a direct, cat-and-mouse chase thriller between a cop and an outlaw, but it was different on paper. Pratik’s character, Aditya, was supposed to be a cop who had failed to catch Maharaj and thus had become an alcoholic. The story revolved around Aditya getting a second chance to bring the dacoit to justice. “It was getting into this classical structure and was becoming too long,” explains Tigmanshu. The character of Aditya’s wife Aparna, played by Ishita Dutta, was also initially supposed to be a forest officer but it was ultimately made into a homemaker. “It might seem a bit offensive but what I wanted was the focus to be on the relationship between Aditya and Aparna. I wanted the wife to be more feminine,” said Tigmanshu.
In the film, the relationship between Pratik’s cop Aditya and Arshad’s dacoit Maharaj is also peculiar. The two never share a frame and only trade barbs over phone calls. The actors too had different schedules and were never present on the set at the same time. “I didn’t even know Arshad’s look,” mentions Pratik. “Maharaj in the film is elusive, somebody who has not been seen in years. Both me as an actor and a character were clueless about him. So, it worked wonderfully.” It was also intriguing that Tigmanshu went with Arshad, an actor otherwise famous for his comic roles, to play the antagonist. “What helped was that I had never seen any of his comedy films, no Golmaal or anything,” he says. “I had written his first film Tere Mere Sapne and had seen him in Sehar. Since then, I have had my eyes on him. The great thing about Arshad is that he is a very free-flowing actor. He can play anyone.”
With the advent of OTT, although the subjects of films and series have become more rooted and realistic, their presentation, often, has the plasticity of a made-up set. Rarely films are shot on real locations. “If you take drones from their hands, they won’t be able to shoot,” jokes Tigmanshu. “It’s true that the subjects on OTT are varied and better, but we are not diversifying in the way we are telling a story. It’s good work but not mazzedaar (fun).” He further explains, “When you watch Sholay it’s fun. Yaadon Ki Baraat is a fun movie. What we are often making, under the garb of great subjects, is a burdensome film.”
“We don’t trust our audiences,” Pratik opines. “We don’t think they are intelligent. We just want them to have our attention, either through constant hook points or loud background music.”
Before wrapping up, we ask Tigmanshu about the status of his much-anticipated biopic of K Asif, the director of Mughal-E-Azam (1960). Hopefully, it won’t take 16 years, the time it took the famed filmmaker to bring his vision to life. “It just might,” Tigmanshu says with a laugh. “I have written about 100 pages with dialogues and I have only reached the start of the shoot of Mughal-E-Azam!”
