Vishal Bharadwaj wants to shake the audience!

Vishal Bharadwaj has an instinct for picking up the gritty nuances of our culture. He played with the quirks of the language brilliantly in Omkara, and is now set to do the same with Kaminey.

So is the milieu of the film Maharashtrian? Vishal says, “Kaminey actually has a lot of languages. We will soon be releasing promos which will have all the languages except Hindi. There are lots of cultures in the film. There are scenes of three minutes where people are talking in Bengali. You don’t understand what they are saying but you definitely get what they want to express through their gestures.Then there is some lengthy dialogue in Marathi. But I haven’t gone around explaining the dialogue either through other characters or voice-overs.”

It’s a refreshing take when the director refuses to dumb down the film to cater to the ‘masses’, even if it means going out on a limb. Vishal agrees, “I have taken a huge risk in this film. There are only two ways I can deal with such situations. Either I take for granted that my audience is dumb and I should come down to their level. Or I can tell my audience that they are intelligent and they need to rise above and show it. Today, 95 percent of films spoon-feed the audience. I want to shake them. I need a lot of attention from my audience as I am challenging them to use their intelligence. They can decode it themselves easily. I think people will be intrigued by this movie as part of it will be easily understood and the other part they will have to decode. But in the end they will understand everything.”

So keeping in mind the different milieus in the film, how difficult was it to do the music? Vishal thinks that composing the pub song was the real challenge. He elaborates, “I am very uncomfortable making this kind of music. Dhan te nan is not my basic nature. My basic nature is the title song of Kaminey or Pani Pani re. But to compete in the market and to remain in competition, these songs are very important. I want to make films my way but with budget constraints, so many things are not possible. For the Dhan te nan song I had to access my hidden quirkiness.

“The most interesting song in Kaminey is the title song because it justifies all the characters in the film. They are all mean; each one has his own agenda except one. He is very noble but the others are mean which I think all of us are. None of us is a saint. That’s what makes us human. So I have tried to underline the mean side of us but in a very naughty way.”

In Bollywood, the music matters a lot. This compels a director like Vishal to push himself out of his comfort zone and attempt what may not come naturally to him. He says, “Unfortunately, with me in films like Omkara and Kaminey, you need an item number. If you want to sell Pani pani re then you need a Chappa chappa and if you want Naina thag lenge to sell, you need a Beedi jalaile. So if you want a song like Thoday bheegey or Kaminey to reach the audiences, then you definitely need a Dhan te nan. At one level, it really hurts and irritates me that we need to do this but then, at another level when the song is buzzing everywhere, on the streets, in the disco, it gives me a lot of pleasure too as I am a music composer.”