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'I have always intellectually dwarfed myself'
Vidhu Vinod Chopra's next project is a 'thriller of the mind'
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Jeet Thayil
Director Vidhu Vinod Chopra is excited about his latest venture, an English supernatural thriller Chess, with a tagline that goes '2 players, only 1 is alive'.
The film has two players are engaged in a tense game of chess. One tries to decipher the story of the other's death through the moves in the game. By the end of the game, and the film, the player is changed forever.
Chopra's principal scriptwriters are Suketu Mehta and Vikram Chandra. The latter is one of India's better-known writers and a frequent collaborator on Chopra's projects. Chopra is also married to Chandra's sister, India Today special correspondent Anupama Chopra.
Chess has been in the works for some 14 years, when Chopra wrote the first draft of the film's script. Over the intervening years and other projects, he decided Chess could not be made in Hindi. "I realised I had to make this film for a world audience," he told rediff.com. "I have always intellectually dwarfed myself in order to communicate to a large (Indian) audience, which I am not going to do with Chess."
The film is a landmark project for Chopra, a director who has been critically acclaimed for bringing a new grittiness to Indian cinema. He plans to make the film in the United States for an international audience. There will be virtually nothing Indian about the film, other than its director and the presence of actor Amitabh Bachchan.
"For me, Chess is really the liberation of my cinematic soul," said Chopra. A short silence follows, and then he laughs: "Not a bad quote, huh?"
Chopra has a method of working with scriptwriters. He holes up with the writer in a house and does not leave until he has a working script in his hands. This was exactly what he did with Mehta. He moved into the writer's home in Brooklyn, New York, and when he left three days later he had a script.
"I had very little choice in the matter," said Mehta, the father of two boys. "Until the script was done and Vinod was satisfied, I couldn't get on with my life." Chopra, Mehta and Chandra also collaborated on the script of Chopra's last project, Mission Kashmir. The film was listed on the Top 50 list of rentals compiled by the Internet Movie Database.
Chopra has said that Mission Kashmir was born out of a single image: a houseboat going up in flames. The once pristine state of Kashmir is never far from his thoughts. He was born and raised there.
Mission Kashmir generated enough curiosity in the United States to give Chopra the feeling that the time was right for his long pending English language film. He has now secured an American manager and agent and is revved up and raring to go. "It's time to make cinema where I don't have to ask myself every minute, 'Will they understand this?' and 'Where do I fit in the songs'?" he says, sounding almost bitter about the Hindi movie conventions that he has followed and subverted for most of his life as a director.
Not that he has been hesitant about commenting on Hindi movie traditions in interviews, most notably in a recent comment in The New York Times. He was quoted as saying that a Bollywood film was like putting 'The Godfather and The Sound of Music in one movie.'
When seen in the context of Bollywood, Chess is an unusual project. "Apart from one character whose grandfather was Indian, Chess is a totally American project," he says. "It will probably have only one Indian actor. I will make it so there will be an Indian sensibility, but it is for a world audience."
Chopra has also considered making it an independent project. He has raised about $3 million for the film. He says if he can raise another $7 million he may go independent. But considering that Columbia Tristar has "already shown interest" it may become a larger, more ambitious film. 
"As hopes would go there is a role I'm hoping to get either Paul Newman or Dustin Hoffman to play," he says. So far the only actor who has committed to the project is Bachchan.
Chopra will be in the US until November, when he will return to India to produce and shoot another film, Munnabhai, MBBS, with actor Sanjay Dutt and his father Sunil Dutt. "This is Sunil's first role in 18 years," said Chopra. "And it is his first ever opposite his son."
Chopra graduated with a degree in economics from Srinagar, and studied moviemaking at the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune. FTII is India's only established film school and has produced many of the country's most notable talents. Chopra's student diploma film, Murder At Monkey Hill, won a National Award for Best Short Experimental Film and the Guru Dutt Memorial Award for Best Student Film. His second film, An Encounter With Faces, was nominated in 1979 for an Oscar in the short non-fiction film category.
"That was the year The Deerhunter won," he says. "I was nominated for the Oscar. I said I would come back one day and win it." On the strength of the nomination he applied to the University of California at Los Angeles, but was rejected for being over-qualified. Chopra's first feature length films were Sazaa-e-Maut and Khamosh. The third, Parinda, won a host of awards and was celebrated for changing the way Bollywood portrayed Mumbai's underworld. Observers have said the film influenced cinematic representations of the city's gangsters.
His next two films, 1942 -- A Love Story and Kareeb, were love stories. The first was set against the events of India's Independence movement. It, too, won several awards. Kareeb was set in small-town India.
With Chess, the innovative filmmaker has set a challenge for himself: to take himself out of his familiar comfortable environment and aim for achievement that will be measured against the best names in the business. "I was very comfortable in India," he says. "At home, I don't even carry my own briefcase. It is difficult to now get up and make your own tea."
In Mumbai, he has a staff of 22, with seven drivers. He lives the life of a tribal chieftain or feudal lord. In the US, he is an immigrant with a good idea and a fine resume.
Chopra says Chess is not a horror movie as much as "a thriller of the mind." In the movie a murder is connected with the question of the existence of God. By the end of the film, its protagonist is a believer.
"There is nothing left to chance," states Chopra. "That is what Chess says."
The movie's premise resonates in its director's own life. "The time has come for me to make this movie, so I am making it," he asserts. "But when you make a move, your next ten moves are predetermined."
Whether making moves or movies, Chopra is an interesting mix of intuitive action and intellectual distance from his own forward momentum. His film should be nothing if not interesting.