Karan Johar believes there are two kinds of people – the good guys and the bad guys. My Name is Khan, he says,
is about keeping things simple and uncluttered by any sort of grey
But, then, doesn't this hold true for much of Bollywood? True, but for Karan Johar, this truism is the starting point of his film, My Name Is Khan. “My opening thought for the film is that there are two kinds of people: good and bad. And that actually is a child-like philosophy. You have bad thoughts in your head, you are a bad guy – you could be of any religion. And that is pretty much it,” he says, talking about his latest film, which has Shahrukh Khan playing Rizwan Khan, a man with Asperger’s syndrome.
As the movie gets ready for release, Johar is reluctant to dig out amusing incidents to share. “We have crossed 250 locations on the film. I can’t think of a single funny day we had. It was a production nightmare, it was a direction stress and it was actor exhaustion that crept into the making of the film on every level. There were some tiring days, some cold days, some really rule and regulation days because after all, it is a union film,” he says.
Associating with Fox and Searchlight as distributors amongst other new ties, says Johar, was another defining experience. “It’s a studio film, a Screen Actor Guild film, so we had to adhere to many rules. For instance, if a child actor reports on the sets at 2.03pm, then at 6.03pm you have to wrap up, even if you are in the middle of a take or a shot. No matter what, the teacher will come and take the child away. When you deal with kids you don't work more than four hours, you can’t even cross it by a second. There was a lot of stress on that account.”
What it’s not
But Johar can always be nudged to speak about his film-making. Reacting to being slotted as a bubble-gum film-maker or as a maker of family movies, he is keen to list what his movies are not about. He does not like being slotted. “I hate generalisations in general.” His movies are not for an NRI audience (“I don't think I make movies for an NRI audience. How can you have one category like that? Do they even know that all NRIs are not one community? The US is full of the IT crowd who behave like people from Mumbai. On the other hand, the UK is more traditional than India. 3 Idiots is not an NRI film yet it is the biggest overseas hit”). Nor does he make ‘family movies’, he says (“Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998) was not a
family movie. K3G (2001) was. Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003) was about a dysfunctional family and about losing your loved ones. Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna (2006) was about the breakdown of family. These are brain-dead observations”).
And certainly, this movie is not about a hero with an ailment. “This is a film about a man who has Asperger’s and who embarks on a mission for love. While he is on that mission, the film unveils. We needed the protagonist to not be neuro-typical. We needed him to not think the way you and I do. Scriptwriter Shibani [Bhatija] researched that and went into the realms of various types of autism and we reached upon Asperger’s because it suited our narrative, our character, our protagonist’s mission in the film,” says Johar.
A simple world
While Johar is quick to point out that the movie is not about an Asperger victim’s married life, the syndrome does leave its mark in little ways in which Khan reacts. “Shahrukh met a couple who has written a book on Asperger’s, Chris and Gisela Slater-Walker. Chris has Asperger’s and he’s married a neuro-typical lady. Their relationship taught us a lot about how we could incorporate that between our couple. There was a cinematic slant that we had to coat it all over with,” he says.
In some ways, that simplicity of worldview has found its way into the movie’s narrative. “The film is about how the good and bad guys do not have to belong to a religion to be so,” Johar says, a reaction, obviously, to the global climate of fear, enhanced security, religious profiling and how it affects individuals and families striving for ‘normal’. “It is all about goodness that we seem to have forgotten. There is so much of a layer of greyness over what we do – there is cynicism and skepticism,” Johar says.
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My movie, myself
While MNIK does come from a personal sense of a global, stereotypical world, Johar says it is way out of his comfort zone. “Every other film that I made was an internal experience. KKHH was a world I knew. K3G was about your parents – you know that. Kal Ho Na Ho was about losing your loved one, you fear that. Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna was about broken marriages – you see that around you all the time. This film was external. It was about dwelling in a zone that I did not know anything about – about a disorder that I had to research. About some global facts and some social facts that surprised and shocked me.”
Johar is also quick to assert that the movie is not about terrorism. But it does use the current global village as its backdrop. And he says he was moved by the stories he heard when they went researching. “We went to America to organisations like say, the ACLU, which actually protect minority rights and we heard stories about people and what they had to deal with post 9/11. Sometimes it’s not the large things. When you are hit on your face you react with anger but when somebody gives you a stare and looks away, the awkwardness that comes with that is much tougher to deal with it than a slap on the face. A slap is instant, wrong, you react, it’s out of the way. But what happens when you get a stare at an airport, at a railway station, a person or a friend at your workplace who suddenly starts ignoring you. These are life tragedies that can actually eat into your personality, mood and character. That mother who told me that she was so comfortable with another American mother whom she met at the park where children used to play in the evening... and suddenly, that woman never sat on the same bench with her anymore. It’s those moments that really moved me.”
Kajol-ing an actor
Ask him about Kajol, or as he calls her, Kajal, and there is instant admiration. “There is more focus, much more understanding of the craft. There is a tapping of internal sources to derive an external performance that never happened earlier. Earlier it was all spontaneity. Spontaneous is when you react in front of the camera without thinking what you are going to do. Now there is a thought behind what you are going to do. She’s natural but it comes with a certain method now. ”
And you don’t even have to ask him about Shahrukh Khan. Johar says, "I am glad I have access to him. I’ll be an idiot if I didn’t work with him.”
