A few years back it was a battle of Ladies v/s Ricky Behl with Ranveer Singh as the center of attraction. Circa 2014 and there are three ladies who are coming together to support Amit Sahni in his endeavor. The film in question is Amit Sahni Ki List which features Vir Das as the central protagonist. Meanwhile the ladies who are coming together are Tina Nagpaul, Kavita Kulkarni and Sujata Vemuri.
Interestingly, none of them carry any filmy background and were actually in New York together as professionals working in different banks. Fate brought them together and they created and performed shows for charity. While that was 10 years ago, it turned out that the friendship between this trio was pretty much for the keeps. Being film buffs helped and together, they decided to take a step forward and make a film of their own.
Tina was the one who actually went a step ahead and embarked on a filmmaking course. “Yes, I quit banking, did a course and then moved back to India. I started working on films too and was associated with Peepli [Live], Amu and My Brother Nikhil. If you look at it, each of these films has been in a slightly different space. Hence when Sujata, Kavita and I decided to do a film together, the main thought process was to make something truly different. We were inspired by films like Khosla Ka Ghosla, Dor and Chak De! India. We thought that there is lot of space for good content driven cinema.”
This is what led to the genesis of Amit Sahni Ki List. However, the surprising part is that while each of the three producers is a woman, they decided to tell the story of a male protagonist instead. Didn’t they feel like taking a feminine route for their very first film?
“Well, that would have been extremely predictable and we didn’t want that to happen,” laughs Sujata, “Hence a male protagonist came in. As women, we have spent a lot of time pondering about the list in our lives. So now we wanted to see what goes through on the other side. (Smiles) Since we have brothers who are very picky siblings themselves, there was a lot of contribution that came from them. They shared a lot of do’s and don’ts when it came to their choice of an ideal girl. While people talk about what a girl wants, we were amazed to know that men too think so much on these lines.”
While the basic core of the film was in place, there was a lot to be done from the overall production standpoint as well. For these three women who didn’t really have much to refer to internally as far as the dynamics of filmmaking were concerned, making Amit Sahni Ki List surprisingly turned out to be a smooth process.
“We used to think that only people from film background and family can make a film. However, when we embarked upon this, we realized it was a myth,” says Kavita, “We wanted to bring in certain discipline so that everything is well organized, and we succeeded. Guess our corporate background helped as we could bring in some method to chaos. We also realized that industry has a lot of professionals who do things methodically too. That helped. While we wanted to make intelligent and content driven cinema, we didn’t want to move away from mainstream; we wanted to be in an entertainment space. This is what Amit Sahni Ki List stands for.”
