When Sandeep Mohan’s first feature Love Wrinkle Free (2012) was given an A certificate by the Central Board of Film Certification, Mohan made two decisions about his next film Hola Venky (2014): to give the censor route a miss, and to screen the film to small gatherings such as cafes and pubs rather than on the big screen. Mohan’s latest production Shreelancer is being given the “Great Indian Travelling Cinema” treatment, as he puts it. Mohan has decided to roll out the film across 12 cities and give it a limited release.
Starring Arjun Radhakrishnan in his feature debut, the film is about 20-something freelancer Shreepad Naik, who battles incessant self-doubt and the pressures of an unsteady career choice.
The 42-year-old independent filmmaker spoke to Scroll.in about the Bollywood system and giving his upcoming film a chance while riding back home in a local train from a visit to the censor board’s head office in Mumbai. “Instead of waiting for people to come and discover me, I try and take it to the people,” he said.
What made you opt fop a theatrical release for ‘Shreelancer’?
Hola Venky was an experimental project, in the sense that I made the film knowing that I would not release it. The film was my own trip and was also a question to myself to see if I could survive in the field without going through the Bollywood system of big names and film festivals.
But Shreelancer, on the other hand, will definitely attract a bigger audience. Most of the times, travelling cinema is usually slotted as small films. I don’t want to get slotted into boxes. I am making cinema at the end of the day and I am thinking big. My films too can stand on their own legs. I didn’t want to limit myself and kill my films by not giving it a release. I make films for the big screen. So I just figured I should give Shreelancer a chance.
As the trailer suggests, ‘Shreelancer’ involves a lot of travelling in trains and buses, just like you travel with your films for screenings. Was that intentional?
Yes, it is. Travelling gives you so much perspective about life. Most of us don’t really travel places and we read about it in books and movies. When you travel, things fall into place and life becomes easier and simpler.
How did the film take shape?
I try to make films to explore myself. At that point of time when I was making the film, like all of us do, I was going through self-doubt about whether I was still good enough to make films. I wanted to explore that through Shreelancer. I started travelling a bit more and that is how the film took off. Shreelancer is part autobiographical and part fiction.
With a crew of barely 16 people (including actors), the film was shot across 21 days in Bengaluru, Chandigarh and Himachal Pradesh.
Hola Venky too saw you work with a crew of three.
My way of functioning is usually fast, and with a bigger team it gets difficult to work. More crew means managing more people and that becomes cumbersome. But a three-crew team was a little too less for Shreelancer.
How did Arjun Radhakrishnan become part of the project?
I met him at a film screening in Pune. Since I don’t have a casting director, I rely on Facebook for casting calls. I also don’t believe in auditions. I like to meet the actor and see if he can gel with me as a person instead. I met Arjun for a couple of times and found him to be very sensible and figured he was very easy to work with. And above everything else he looked the part too.
How challenging is the travelling cinema experiment, especially when it comes to making money?
Independent films take a long time to reach the theatre. Instead of waiting for people to come and discover me, I thought, why don’t I try to take it to the people? So that is how I started screening my films in alternate spaces like cafes and pubs and whichever place the people I write my films for, go to.
I look at these screenings as mini-variants of a film festival. When 40 people see my work, it is very reassuring to know that there is an audience for the kind of films I write. That gives me the confidence to keep on fighting. Otherwise it becomes very easy to give up. When I see them physically watching and enjoying the film, it keeps me going. The audience pays up if they like the film. As far as the earnings go, it is definitely not a revenue model as it covers only my cost of travelling and maybe for the speakers and projectors.
Hola Venky remains unreleased in India, but it got a small theatrical release in San Francisco and San Jose, where it had a three-week run. But I still have hopes to release Hola Venky in India as it definitely has potential. I can make a small-budget film, but for it to stand out, you need to pump in money. So I am still figuring out the economics behind its release.
