Anant Mahadevan On 13 Years Of His Meditation On Mortality Staying Alive

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Looking back at the true story of the writer and the brilliant film Staying Alive with director and lead player Anant Mahadevan.

Screenwriter Sujit Sen, who died unsung in 2005, was the subject of Anant Mahdevan’s Staying Alive. “It was the story of a journalist, played by me, who has had three heart attacks and is back in hospital where he encounters a gangster, played by Sourabh Shukla, in the next bed. These are incidents that actually happened in Sujit’s life. It’s sad that he’s gone before Staying Alive could be released. As a dear friend, I’d have liked to have it released before his death… Sujit Sen was like a father figure, brilliant but broken by the blitzkrieg of callousness in Bollywood.”

Apparently, Sujit, who wrote Mahesh Bhatt’s best films Arth and Saraansh, never quite survived the break with the filmmaker. Anant shrugs off the Bhatt factor in the late screenwriter’s life. “I came close to him after his Bhatt phase. He wrote all my films in the last seven to eight years, including my directorial debut Dil Vil Pyar Vyar and Aksar. He was a chartered accountant in Kolkata and came to Mumbai during the Naxalite movement in West Bengal. He eventually formed a creative coterie of screenwriters with Javed Siddiqui, Aakash Khurana, and Robin Bhatt. Sujit Sen always wrote in English. He’d joke he was a Bengali who wrote in English for Hindi cinema. It was very difficult to adapt his lucid lines. The Hindi translations always appeared weak in comparison. He was very well read and had written several Bengali novels. The way he wrote his screenplays they were almost like a book. He always spoke about the dirty dawn, the way a patient feels when he wakes up in hospital. He had lost hope at one time. He felt when I came into his life he started writing again. I don’t know whether I motivated him. I just believed in him again when he was abandoned by his friends. He often said he wouldn’t work just for money. Hrishikesh Mukherjee once called me out of the blue and invited me to assist him. I ran to his home with Sujit Sen. Hrishida wanted to adapt a short story ‘The Dressing Room’, written by music composer Salil Chowdhary. Suddenly, Hrishida came out of his bedroom and into the living room. Sujit wanted to write a screenplay about a man who was motivated to make that walk all over again. This was the way he thought. He captured real-life feelings on paper.”

“Let me tell you, Sujit wasn’t an easy character to play. I had to take pointers from him, for example, what happens when one gets a heart attack. No one clutches the heart, as shown in films. The feeling is as though someone is trying to strangle you. I brought in such details without making the film dull or pedantic. When Mukesh died, Raj Kapoor said he had lost his voice. With Sujit Sen’s demise, I’ve lost my pen. He was a father figure. His creativity and optimism always served as an antidote to the excesses of Bollywood. We used to meet at least three times a week. Frankly, there’re no writers of his stature. He was arguably the best screenwriter we had. His generation of writers brought so much substance and values to writing. Today, technique has taken over screenwriting. There’s such a drought of writers, I don’t know where to look. Do people even know the kind of writing Sujit Sen did? In Broadway and Hollywood. The death of a writer is front-page news. He changed my life and way of thinking. Hopefully, my film Staying Alive will keep his memory alive. This film is a homage to Sujit Sen,” he added.

Says Mahadevan, “It was a time when I had started off with mainstream films like Dil Maang More, Dil Vil Pyar Vyar , and Aksar . But that wasn’t the path I was aiming at. Being a film society product, I had educated myself on the works of Truffaut, Bergman, Fellini, Wajda, Kurosawa, Tarkovsky, Ray, Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, Adoor, Aravindan and their ilk. I desperately wanted to break the mould for myself. Staying Alive presented that opportunity. It was a true incident that the late writer Sujit Sen experienced, and it was just right for a small budget (30 lakh rupees) experimental film. With Saurabh Shukla playing a local hoodlum and me, Sujit Sen himself, we shot this in a hospital ICCU and two homes. When a viewer saw it, he was astonished that despite having this bent of mind, I had indulged in mainstream cinema. That did it. Shemaroo picked up the film and even gave it a theatrical release, giving me a much-needed leap of faith. I had charted my course in filmmaking. I followed it up with Red Alert, MEE Sindhutai SAPKAL, Doctor Rakhmabai, Gour Hari Dastaan, and the like. One big producer who saw the film in its premiere said, ‘I loved it. I like to see such films. But I don’t think I can produce one like it’. That summed up my long and hard road ahead to convince producers/ funders to back out of the box projects. That I have managed about fourteen of them with The Storyteller and Phule is perhaps a miracle. I will continue to be staying alive despite the harsh realities and challenges.”

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