Ramesh Sippy, director of the 1975 Bollywood classic Sholay, reminisced about the making of the film and said he ‘cannot make another Sholay as he delivered the Satyajit Ray Memorial Lecture at the 31st Kolkata International Film Festival.
“Sholay started as a two-line idea, probably a four-line idea… it’s a film that Salim-Javed put on paper very nicely. Once we okayed the outline for the whole script, Javed [Akhtar] sahab came to the office… I had told him only one thing: the character of Gabbar I imagine a very impulsive a very heady kind of character who would smile and lambast the next moment,” Mr Sippy said, speaking about the inception of one of the film’s most significant characters, by the film’s screenwriter duo Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar.
He said that, after that interaction, Mr Akhtar wrote the first scene and narrated the scene to Mr Sippy. “Immediately I knew he had caught on, what I wanted was there,” Mr Sippy said at the KIFF.
This year, Sholay, an action-adventure Bollywood epic directed by Mr Sippy and written by Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar, celebrates 50 years since its release on August 15, 1975. The soundtrack of the film was designed by the famous RD Burman, who, in his address at KIFF, Mr Sippy referred to by his nickname ‘Pancham’ and emphasised as belonging from West Bengal.
“Between Amitabh Bachchan and Jaya Bhaduri, there were no lines. There was silence, there was a lamp, and there was music, which Pancham — RD Burman — Bengal’s RD Burman, played beautifully. He created that mouth organ piece and it was a masterpiece,” he said.
Mr Sippy added that initially, the story of Sholay was initially imagined around two “mischievous boys and an army gentleman who remembered them”. But he said it was changed to a former police officer because the filmmaker was apprehensive of difficulties in consulting and acquiring permissions from the Indian Army while filming.
Mr Sippy also reminisced the casting process behind Sholay, saying that actor Dharmendra, who played Veeru in the film, had initially proposed to act in Thakur Baldev Singh’s role, for which Sanjeev Kumar had been cast, and in Gabbar Singh’s role, which was eventually given to actor Amjad Khan. Amidst laughs, Mr Sippy claimed that Mr Dharmendra finally decided to play the role of Veeru after hearing that Basanti, played by Hema Malini, was Veeru’s love interest.
“[Dharmendra] was very lighthearted about it, but it was a genuine feeling with all of them… all the roles were well conceived, well brought out, well-written,” Mr Sippy said addressing the audience at Kolkata’s Sisir Mancha on Friday, November 7.
The Sholay director also spoke about people’s expectations on him making ‘another’ Sholay in the form of a sequence to his box-office magnum opus, saying that he cannot make do so when people have not forgotten the original film.
“I had an opportunity to be in Toronto for the Toronto Film Festival recently couple of months ago. The audience in Toronto reacted in exactly the same way they did 50 years ago in Bombay. How do you beat that? It’s not possible. It’s better to keep trying to do something else… but it cannot be Sholay,” Mr Sippy said in his address.
He added that people’s ‘expectations are such’ that a second Sholay would not be possible.
Mr Sippy also spoke about the films that inspired him during the making of Sholay, mentioning Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) as well as The Magnificent Seven (1960). “The Magnificent Seven was inspired by Seven Samurai by Akira Kurosawa… I saw Akira Kurosawa’s film later, but at the time I was making [Sholay], I had watched The Magnificent Seven,” he said.
In his address as part of the Satyajit Ray Memorial Lecture, Mr Sippy also advised current filmmaking students to do their best and to not think that “the time for cinema is over”.
“There will be more cinema to come, and I am sure, it will find its place again… taste cannot be the same from person to person… So please take this with you as a very positive feeling. Don’t think that cinema is dead, it is very much alive. And then when that hit comes along, you wonder, where did that audience come from? They do come, they always come back when there is a good film,” Mr Sippy said.