Vidhu Vinod Chopra pours his heart out

There was a spring in his step when filmmaker Vidhu Vinod Chopra came to Bengaluru earlier this week to show his first Hollywood production, Broken Horses, to a section of the media. “You are the first set of people to see my film in India,” he says with a broad grin, showing no sign of jet lag after having flown in directly to the city after a screening in Los Angeles.The glowing response he received for his adaptation of his 1989 classic Parinda, clearly has him on cloud nine. Why Bengaluru, though, to start off? “I had a great time when I was shooting 3 idiots! here. This is a city that can send the right signal to the country and the world. It is a city that understands cinema,” says Vidhu.
Twenty-five years hence, and after 62 drafts of writing the re-imagined version, Vidhu admits that the ‘original’ had its flaws. “I am clearly more experienced as a filmmaker now, which makes Broken Horses a far superior film,” he says, explaining that making the character Buddy, played by Chris Marquette, (Jackie Shroff’s Karan in the original) ‘slow’, was an offshoot of that, whereby he could better explain how Buddy gets emotionally manipulated by Julius Hench (Vincent D’Onofrio) into a life of crime. “There was also a lot of thought into getting a big guy to play Hench and a small-built actor for Buddy. I wanted audiences to feel the emotions at play when Hench holds Buddy close,” he adds.
Vidhu maintains that Broken Horses is his way of making a point about Indian filmmaking in Hollywood. “They look down on Indian cinema and its loud ways,” he says.
Was adapting a Bollywood film, then, a conscious choice? Why not start with an original story? “This adaptation started as a joke. Abhijat (Joshi) and I were on a train ride, having just seen The Departed. We had also seen the original, Infernal Affairs, which was better than the remake and wondered why the Americans were raving about The Departed and not the original. That’s when Abhijat suggested we adapt Parinda and we started writing it. This film was initially based in New York City, but I realized that I do not know it at all. And that I would make a fool of myself and my audiences if I had set it in the city. For me, this film was a matter of bringing pride not just to myself, but the country as well. So we devoted five years in unlearning the Bollywood way of making films, learning the ropes in Hollywood, and writing the film in a goon town in New Mexico,” he says and adds, “How do you create a character like Hench? Not by sitting in Mumbai. For instance, if I want to make a film about Bengaluru, I have to live here. I have to study the city to understand its bad traffic.”
Despite his years of experience, Vidhu was a total newbie in Hollywood. “The best thing about Hollywood is that they respect talent. My script was appreciated. James Cameron spoke about it, and the whole world got to know about my film. The script attracted a lot of talent, and that is how I got most of my cast.”