Letters from Sydney: Episode 3

Hello All,

Here's letter 3.

Still sincerely hoping that you like readin em...

----------------------------------------------------------------------



Film School is like a film set. It’s constantly buzzing with activity, people screaming, shouting at each other, creativity oozing out of each pore of the walls, out of each cell in your brain. It’s a feeling I can’t really put in words, when people are just yelling your name, when you direct, everyone from the gaffer to the grip, from the 1st AD to the DoP, from the spot boy to the focus puller; when everyone wants a piece of you, of your brain, of the thing in you which made you director. You need to know very well, in fact more than just bloody very well, what you want from who, how you want to frame a particular shot, how much time you have to shoot it, how much stock you have to shoot it, what exactly you want the DoP to do, how exactly you want your actors to emote. You should be prepared and you shoot be prepared like what you are shooting would perhaps be the last thing you are shooting.

This is what The International Film School of Sydney taught me by the end of the second week. We hadn’t shot on film yet, but our professors made sure that we knew all that we needed to know. The kind of scripts we were made to write, all of us were made to attend an acting workshop, framing, mise-en-scene and what not, the first two weeks packed in so much that people were almost getting floored by the indefinable stress levels.

Picture this: My screenwriting professor, a true genius in any sense of the word, asked us very casually to write down the most intriguing, the most impacting, the most loved, the most weird and etc. characters from our own life. I personally wrote down the characters of Ramgopal Verma, The Pretty Girl in Pink, Pavan, My dad, Shahrukh Khan along with a few others.

Cut to two days later, when all of us had forgotten about the characters we had sketched, the same professor asked us to write down ‘one illegal, irrational and crazy thing we would have wanted to do’. I personally wrote down, for reasons still unknown to me, to perform a major international drug heist. I was in the shock of my life when he then asked us to write a movie script about this crazy, irrational and illegal thing I wanted to do by taking 5 characters from the ones I had written before, making them do the heist for me.

Agape and astonished, I looked at the note-book in front of me to check the toughest creative challenge I had faced in my life: To make my dad, The Pretty Girl in Pink, Pavan, Ramgopal Verma and SRK to perform an international drug heist, albeit without getting caught.

I was quite worried about how I would get all these people together in the first place. Making them do an international drug heist without getting caught was an altogether different issue. But my professor told me just one thing, which I think is going to be my mantra for life;
He said, “Nikhil, 5 people, no matter how different they are, can always come together and do any damn thing you want them to do… you know why?”
I threw an I-am-so-frustrated-I-can’t-think glance at him.
Understanding my glance to the T, he smiled and took a swig of his coffee, he said, “Because you are a writer… and you are fuckin good one.”
Raising my mug of coffee in anticipation to the words of praise, I took just the bit of it that I had to take, “I was a writer… and I could make my characters do whatever I wanted them to.”

When people say something, a bit of it is the truth, the other bit is what ‘can be’ the truth. The same thing applied to my professor’s sentence. Some of it was true; some of it could be true.

Coffee break was over, Thinking about the 5 characters exercise, playing with Hasse’s cap, much to her annoyance, we walked in the lobby, Nicolas gleefully flashing his card at the door to let us in, the Sin City poster greeted us and we walked up the staircase towards the 100 capacity theatre, 15 days after we had first had entered it.

Splashing water with my Nike shoes, I remember running towards the school, the raindrops bouncing off my red windcheater. “I am 22 and am going back to school”, I laughed at the contradiction, running as fast as I could, ensuring that I didn’t get late for the 9 a.m. reporting time. I reached the school, breathing heavily, I bent down to look at the school building through the old-tree-arch, could see a couple of Japanese students sipping coffee standing outside, another student, perhaps an Australian smoking. Wiping a bit of water of my hair with the back of my hand, pulling my wet hair back, taking the jacket off, I walked through the pathway, smiling at the three, who obligingly smiled back. They asked me if I was a first tier student, to which I said yes, introducing them to me and vice versa, one of them flashed his card at the door, unlocking it and letting me in.

As I entered, I could see a flock of equally nervous students sitting around the lounge area, some making coffee, some reading newspapers, some looking here n there and some just looking at me, perhaps because I was the latest entry in the lot. Smiling at whoever I liked on instinct, I found myself a place on a couch, right under the Sin City poster. I turned back and was looking at it when I could feel a cold hand on my shoulder. I turned back to see the cutest girl I had ever seen, correction: the second cutest girl I had ever seen, a mop of curly blonde hair on her small, squarish round face, a smile that illuminated the entire room, in a blue-black striped T-Shirt and a pair of denims quite same to the shade I was wearing. I looked at her, almost breaking into a 400 watt smile, inspired because of her equally powerful smile, before I could speak, she spoke.

“Heeeylo!!! I am Hasse, from Holland”. She smiled again, the moment the sentence was over.
“Hi”, I said, still pondering over how she could smile so genuinely, “I am Nikhil, from India”
“Oh!” she smiled, wider this time, “It’s colder in India, aint it?”
“Not at this time of the year”, I said matter of factly, “It’s quite warmer and nicer”.
“Is it?” she enquired, charged full on with curiosity, “Even Holland has better weather…” she sounded terribly homesick for those two split seconds.

Before I could say anything, we were asked to come up to the theatre space for our induction. Hasse and I started walking upstairs, the others following us. I knew at that moment that Dutch people are extremely warm and friendly. What I didn’t know then was that one of them was going to be one of my best friends and that too, for a lifetime.


TO BE CONTINUED