Abhishek Chaubey: The book is always better than the film

The book is always better than the film
Abhishek Chaubey, who has written the script for three films based on Shakespearean tragedies, on translating literature to celluloid.
The recently-concluded Lucknow Literature Carnival saw UP lad and filmmaker Abhishek Chaubey talk about the much-discussed topic of adapting books into movies. Abhishek, who was the scriptwriter for all three of Vishal Bhardwaj’s onscreen adaptations of Shakespearean tragedies – Maqbool from Macbeth, Omkara from Othello and Haider from Hamlet, spoke about the challenges associated with bringing Shakespeare to the screen.
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On whether the film is better or the book
If you’ve read the book first, the book is always better.A film at best recreates the impression of the original text. It is slightly unfair on films that are adapted from literature. However, we (the scriptwriters) do play fast and loose with the script.
Intimidated by Shakespeare? Heck, no!
At the risk of being pompous, I’ll say that we didn’t take Shakespeare too seriously. We were not intimidated by the idea of doing Shakespeare in the first place. What appealed to Vishal was the core conflict of Omkara. There are places in the script which resonate very carefully with the text. However, it is a free-wheeling adaptation. The author isn’t the supreme authority. Once you’ve written the book, or a script in my case, it doesn’t even belong to you anymore.
Write a script in 25 days? Bring it on
Othello wasn’t even intended to be made into a film. It so happened that during the editing of Maqbool, we had a lot of free time. Ajay (Devgn) showed his keenness to do a Shakespearean adaptation and that’s how Omkara happened. The film was written in 25 days! What was terrible about it is that after that we thought that we can write any script in 25 days. However, we were lucky because a lot of groundwork had already been done with Vishal over several drinks. We spent 15 days in Meerut where we met all sorts of colourful characters, and then we went to Mussoorie to write it.
There’s poetry in the crass language
There is a great amount of poetry in Shakespeare’s writing. Doing a literal translation of that poetry is ridiculous. You cannot do it in today’s cinema. And Omkara was a fairly realistic film – with criminal gangs in Western UP... we couldn’t have Omkara going into soliloquies and talking about how he is trying to deal with his jealousy. So, we used a lot of colourful language, which got a lot of backlash. The Censors thought that it’s not cultural, but it was intentional. The crass language sounded almost foreign to the mainstream multiplex audience. In a very strange way, it was coarse, yet poetic. That is how we tackled the problem of poetry.
‘Rural Cool’ is the in thing
A lot of work is happening now in Mumbai regarding the Hindi heartland. I think it’s got to do a lot more with filmmakers coming from there. The audiences are still in the big cities though. That’s where the revenues are coming from. Whatever little change has happened has happened primarily because of the filmmakers coming from these places and making films on their experiences. That’s why filmmakers like Vishal (Bhardwaj) and Anurag (Kashyap) are now doing something called the rural cool – the gamccha-clad hero and all.
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