Tarsem Singh: Dear Jassi turned into a Romeo-Juliet story on the editing table

Tarsem Singh Dhandwar has a lot of thoughts and ideas teeming in his head. As he jumps from one to the next, a rare energy transmits through the short, 13-minute conversation on his new film Dear Jassi, his first to have been shot in India. A harrowing, tragic tale of star-crossed lovers, it is inspired by a real-life incident—the murder of Indo-Canadian beautician Jaswinder Kaur Sidhu at the behest of her own family back in 2000 in Punjab. 
The famous director of many “fantastically” imagined and visually striking international commercials (Pepsi, Nike), music videos (R.E.M’s Losing My Religion, Lady Gaga’s 911) and celebrated films like The Cell (Jennifer Lopez), The Fall and Mirror Mirror (Julia Roberts), was in Jeddah at the Red Sea International Film Festival along with his young lead actors—Pavia Sidhu who plays Jassi and Yugam Sood as her beau Mithu—where CE sat him down for an exclusive interview. 

Excerpts:

There is a musicality to the way you have edited Dear Jassi. The way you begin with the Bulle Shah song, “Beshaq mandir masjid todo”, pan the camera to make the viewer literally enter the love story, and then pan it back a full circle to end with a song…
It’s very amazing you say that. I came up with that last second. The writer had written another 40 pages, about what happened to Mithu’s [the protagonist] life after Jassi. And I said no, I remember the story from 23 years ago. [For me] There's a telephone call that finishes this movie. Something so horrendous that a mother told her child on a telephone call. So, I had to reverse-engineer the rest of the film.
It’s funny that you’ve used such a strange word—music. When I spoke to the writers, all the actors, I said there's no music in this film. There is no background music. There is just the film. When I explained to them the film and the style I wanted, one of the actors said, ‘Oh, you're not making a Punjabi movie. You're making a movie in Punjabi.’

Was it the ghastly news itself that made you pick it up as a subject for your film and to then give it a broader Romeo-Juliet context?
I remember this line from 22 years ago, that a mother said to the people [who were holding her daughter captive]—do whatever you want, she means nothing to me. Where in the world could you get this mother? Forget justifying, how do you even begin to understand this? Where in the world can a mother say that? I put my mother in that particular position. When really good people do horrible things in the name of culture, religion, economics, anything—that’s what I was looking for.

So, that phone call is *the* film for you?

For me, it was. The rest of the film came from the phone call. The bookends came when I was ready to shoot. I didn't want to, in the end, do the typical Weinstein kind of film that used to always win Oscars, and cut to [real] photographs in the end. I didn't want it to go there. Everybody knows it's a real story. Then I remembered this mystic that I’d seen one time who, while performing, kind of lost the plot a little bit, and just went into a trance. And I said, let this guy tell this story. I got him, and worked very hard with him. We did one rehearsal and one take.

There’s this phrase in Hindi, “Mitti ki Khushbu” (fragrance of the soil) implying rootedness…

I always say “gobar ki khushbu” (the smell of cow dung). I know the smell of cow dung in both places. I am from Punjab, near the same area [as the film]. I went to Canada. I did a whole bunch of farm work a couple of years earlier in that region.

I meant in terms of realism. Even in a scene at the bus stand, the sights and even more so the sounds that you capture. It’s not just a visual but also an aural recreation…

[The noise]is so loud. After some time that becomes background sound. You literally start to think it's like going to a techno place or a drumming place at 4 or 5 in the morning. It is so loud that after some time it actually has a calming effect. Not that it happens in bus stations in India but for a newcomer it’s like ‘how can you think in this space’, this is not normal.

Stylistically, would you say that realism was a new dimension for you?
Everybody knows my fantastical stuff. But  I've really liked Michael Haneke and Gaspar Noe's works and I adore the Iranian filmmakers. So, I didn’t want to make a film in the neo-realism of the Italians but the mystical films that the Iranians make. But the big difference was, as I told my writer, that this will be a film that was written by Gaspar Noe or Haneke but gets directed by the Iranians. One will take you to a really big event, show it to you, get you into that world, and shock the daylights out of you. On the other hand, the Iranians will take a divorce and make it like the end of the universe. They are that intimate. So, I just decided to take a big story but to tell it simply. There are no close-ups. People have to perform within that. So, it will take you some time to get into that realism. But if you do, you are in for a shock.

The most obvious question…How did you find your two young leads?
I didn't think the Bollywood actors would work. Yugam has never acted before. He’s a kabaddi player. I had 24 hours to find the girl. I just picked up the phone and started calling people in Vancouver and asked if they knew any bhangra groups or acting groups. The only condition was that the person should not have acted before. The fourth bhangra group I called said that they once had a girl there who was interested in acting, but she is a lawyer. I said it didn’t matter; I needed her number in an hour. I was cycling when I got it. I called her. She sent me a picture of hers. In 10 minutes, I told her I will sort everything out, you're gonna get on a plane and come to India, and we will make this film right away.

Your film rests on extremely strong contemporary issues. How much did you want them to come into the story? And how much did you not?
I literally did not think like that. I just thought about how I tell the story in the best way possible. And that's how I went forward with it. None of the other things mattered to me. What happens in the film or the background, is not something that's going to go away. It's been going on for a long time. Dear Jassi turned into a Romeo-Juliet story on the editing table. I edited it in 48 hours and that's how it is. Those were real events. People asked me if drugging the family was Romeo and Juliet. I said, no, they literally drugged the family because they couldn't meet. Anything that you think comes from Romeo and Juliet is actually the real event.