Hell’s Angel!

doweshowbellyad=0; ZOOMING AHEAD: Sanjay Gupta with his mean machine (TOI Photo) Park your toys at the kerb, John and Salman, the ultimate street bike is here. It���s the Suzuki B-King, the world���s most whacky futuristic motorcycle. India got its first one last week. And taking off the covers to let BT have a peek was its proud owner Sanjay Gupta, head honcho of White Feather Films.
The bike was a birthday gift to himself when he turned 41 last week. Who said only Bollywood���s macho actors can ride! But that is Gupta, a somewhat hatke filmmaker, who calls himself a storyteller ��� but he actually reads, writes, directs, edits and produces films. Bollywood thinks he���s a genius willing to take risks. Only he would have dared to make a film like Dus Kahaniyaan involving ten stories, 24 stars and six directors.
Right now, Gupta���s got ten more on the floor, he named some of them for me, films with titles like Milte Hai, Dalhousie Caf��, Khottey Sikke, Blade, Woodstock Villa, The Great Indian Butterfly, Pankh, Acid Factory and Alibaug.
On which he���s harnessed a bandwagon of directors to work, including Meghana Gulzar, Hansal Mehta, Sudipto Chattopadhyay, Yusuf Khan, Rohit Roy, Sarthak Dasgupta, Suparno Varma and Pooja Bhatt. While Gupta, who has boundless energy and prides himself on time management, is directing Alibaug and Khote Sikkey himself.
He���s hand-on till the scripting and styling, then its upto the director, he steps in again post-production, taking complete control also over the music. Add to this full plate the deals he���s cracked with other leading production houses, including a Rs. 2.6 billion one of 15 films with Eros International, and his plans to set up a film studio in Panvel, a post-production outfit in Mumbai, and you have a one-man industry on whom much business and several careers are riding.
He had the vision to do several films at a time when he thought that standalone producers were facing extinction. ���With the corporates coming in, even the biggest producers don���t have a single film on the floor, so White Feather Films decided to pull up its socks,��� he admitted.
Now, like Karan Johar who has three or films on at one time, Gupta has joined the trend of big players. ���The only guys making films are the producer-director types,��� he said, but he has gone beyond being even that, he is now a Bollywood businessman, he deals in cinema equipment and studios besides making films. He talked about his vision for the Panvel studio: ���In this city, it���s impossible to commute, and there���s not a single stage available to shoot. Films are being made in shutdown hotels and factories. Even then, it takes the stars two-and-half hours up and down. So, with most stars having homes and farmhouses in Karjat, Khandala and Lonavla and preferring to stay there at weekends, I thought why not look for a place outside the city for production.���
But there is more to Sanjay Gupta than making films.
That he���s been doing since he was 22, when he was directing Aatish, a big banner and cult film at that time in the 1990s, produced by G P Sippy and with some of the industry���s hottest stars in the line-up. The ride has been as smooth as it has been bumpy. No producer wanted to touch him for years, especially when he approached them with scripts like Kaante, they thought it was too dry, that it lacked humour and music.
���But that was its USP,��� said Gupta who took the risk, picked up money from the market, and in a do-or-die bid plunged ahead with producing the film himself. And once he formed White Feather Films, he had the freedom to introduce a new genre of ���dark��� films. Like Shootout at Lokhandwala. ���A documentary, it���s non-fiction, why do you want to make it, I was asked,��� said Gupta. ���But I brought in the stars, threw in naach-gaana, packaged it like a blockbuster... and there was a hit. Now I intend going even darker, crazier, deeper, but with a tight budget and substantial marketing, I will minimise the risk.���
And Sanjay Gupta���s doing all this in a five-day week, he keeps his office shut on the weekends, he���s looking at working out with the trainer who got Shah Rukh Khan his six-pack, he���s keen on making his staff self-sufficient so that White Feather Films can run on its own. ���Then I can take off and ride my bike, I want to be like one of the Hell���s Angels,��� said the avid biker who on location in Cape Town last fortnight rode a Harley while his crew went around in cars.