Photograph by Wesley Law
The director and screenwriter will join us soon, Shri Thanedar promises; it was a late night. I perch on a rounded black suede sofa with a winglike red suede back and look around at gleaming black, red, and gold surfaces; no pastels or subtle matte finishes here. Thanedar had his nouveau Ladue mansion designed to look like a cruise ship, with sybaritic plumbing fixtures and plenty of glitz. He's sailed far from his childhood in Belgaum, India, where he was the oldest of seven, dowries had to be found for his five sisters, and there wasn't money to buy even one of these sofa pillows.
Sanjay Surkar, a director in the Marathi-language film industry that's far older than Bollywood—but beginning to attract similar attention—strolls out, his blue shirt untucked and tight across his tummy, his goatee silvery. He greets me, palms together, then adds an American handshake. Thanedar chose Surkar from a long list of directors: "His life has the same struggles and overtones as mine. He, too, comes from a small town, not having this sophistication, and he goes to the big city for his MFA, and in Mumbai, he sees films being made purely for entertainment purposes, romantic love stories and musicals, and he thinks, 'There is no substance to it.'"
Thanedar's "common-man story" will have plenty of substance. Poverty. A great roar of ambition. A lonely arrival in New York, cut away from the warm pulse of family life. A doctorate in chemistry but no job to follow, thanks to the 1982 recession. The purchase, for $75,000, of Chemir Inc., then a small chemistry company with annual revenue of $150,000 (last year it was $60 million). Marriage to a neurologist, who killed herself when their sons were small. Remarriage.
His fear is that his life doesn't have enough suspense for the typical movie arc.
"Where is the climax in my movie?" he asks. "Up and down, up and down, but no big car chases, no obvious ending." He tried weighting the film with his wife's suicide, but "that didn't feel right," he says, "because even though that was the saddest moment in my life, the character doesn't get consumed by defeats and sadness and failures. He always overcomes it."
So Thanedar, realizing he could improvise, decided to inject a little drama. "The character goes back to India and solves a big, huge crisis—there's a big chemical factory that's blowing up!" He tells me his idea with boyish eagerness, then his face falls. "It just didn't seem right. So that's what we were up late talking about. And then we said, 'How about just telling the story the way it is?'"
Surkar leans forward, speaking a stream of Marathi, assuring me there is a beautiful story here and it will be enough to tell it well. By now, screenwriter Kiran Yadnyopavit has joined us, sleepy-eyed but swiftly alert, with a neat mustache and soft voice. He makes an effort to translate for Surkar, but Thanedar, in his enthusiasm, keeps jumping in. This project started with a private memoir, Hee Shrichi Ichcha (translation: This Is Shri's Wish): "It all flew very easily, because I decided, 'I'm going to say it just the way it is.' My wife's suicide was very much of a taboo, especially in India, where people only want to show the good face. But hiding is so much more stressful."
Friends read his memoir, he says, and told him, "If you can do all this, I feel like I have to take care of my own problems! I can't believe all the stuff you went through!" They urged Thanedar, who had by then remarried and grown his business exponentially, to publish the book (now in its ninth printing in India). "Hearing people, I began to realize, 'Yes, I did have a tough life!'" he says with a grin.
Yadnyopavit says quietly, "He comes here and has no friends, nobody to talk with in his sorrow, but he doesn't lay down and doesn't feel lonely. That is with me; we are not trying to put this into the story, to make it heavy. It should come as a byproduct. We are trying to tell a life."
Surkar nods. "His struggle itself will show his loneliness, instead of addressing it directly," he says.
"I was more alone than lonely," Thanedar inserts. "It gave me courage—not blaming someone else or relying on religion, just saying, 'I've got to make this happen.'"
When Slumdog Millionaire came out, he couldn't resist joking about the parallels, but in all seriousness, he says, "We are not playing that big. There are similarities, but a lot of his success comes from coincidences. There's more chance and luck and not so much struggle to make it happen. Our character makes it happen. The temptation now is to give up the struggle and say I have arrived—but any time I get into that kind of thought, I immediately pull myself back and say, 'OK, what else can I do?' I will never feel that I arrived. I never want to feel that I arrived."
This is Surkar's and Yadnyopavit's first trip to America, and they've spent it scouting locations, not sightseeing. Still, they've absorbed the country's contrasts: the rough drama of New York, the oily sheen of South Beach, the static calm of St. Louis. It would be less expensive to choose one location only—but how, they ask, brows furrowed, how can any one of these places capture the moods of the others?
They have to decide soon; they want to finish the film by year's end, after 35 days of shooting, maybe 15 in the United States and 20 in India.
And what about casting?
"I am not going to play myself," Thanedar says firmly. "No. I want the movie to succeed!" He starts laughing. "I was watching an Indian movie with my wife and my 16-year-old son, and I said, 'Oh, maybe I should think of him,' and my son said, 'Dad! He's too good-looking!'"
Thanedar promptly agreed. He doesn't want his movie to be slick. "In most lives, there is a lot more unhappiness and failure than there is happiness," he says. "I wrote the book for that young person who has ambition but no means; the idea was not to talk about my success so much as my struggle. The best thing we can give each other is our experiences."
Staff writer Jeannette Cooperman not only loves Indian film but also has won national awards for her coverage of immigrant and multicultural issues.
