Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s 12th Fail about a real-life IAS aspirant who literally made it from zero, was the sleeper success of 2023. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that Vidhu Vinod Chopra created history with a film that no one seemed to believe in.
Doff of the cap to that.
And now onto a film about the filming of 12th Fail . I would like to request Mr Chopra for a film on how he convinced his team to make a film on the filming of 12th Fail. Or perhaps , he did no such thing. Mr Chopra is known to do his own thing. As one of the distinguished alumni from the VVC University quipped, ‘With Vinod it is more a scream effort than a team effort’.
This creative creature is known to lose his temper while shooting. Mr Chopra’s screaming bouts with his actors, from Nana Patekar in Parinda to Vikrant Massey in 12th Fail are part of filmdom’s folklore.
We get a glimpse of the temperamental creator in this interesting but pointless documentary: interesting, as director Jaskunwar Singh Kohli keeps the pace even, even when the interest level is in serious danger of flagging.
The endeavour is nonetheless pointless, as it doesn’t amplify or augment the content of 12th Fail in any way. Would anyone who sees this documentary—and there were only seven people in the theatre with me—be prompted to return to 12th Fail after watching the director’s travails while making it?
Sadly, no. When a client dines at a restaurant he is not inclined to visit the kitchen to see how the dish was made. What Vinod Chopra sees as a struggle to create a film which no one believed in, is a struggle many brilliant filmmakers from Satyajit Ray to Sanjay Leela Bhansali have faced.
At one point in the narration we are shown how much trouble Mr Chopra had with the crowd scenes and how difficult it was to stop the crowds from looking into the camera.
Prakash Jha one spoke to me about this perennial problem in his cinema. “Ever when they seem to understand that they are not to look in the camera, a handful of them from the hundreds in the crowd will do it. What do you do? You edit crowd scenes carefully.”
What a filmmaker doesn’t do is, make a film on the making of his film. Even Raj Kapoor was not that vain.
