Ram Gopal Varma
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Achievements, as in 2015
Kaveree Bamzai, December 7, 2015: The Times of India Today
Ram Gopal Varma likes to shock. His memoir delivers many but also shows a talented filmmaker who loves living in the moment.
"Most fight sequences in Shiva were choreographed by me and that is why you see Nagarjuna hitting mostly with a hook or stomach punch. That's because I knew only those two punches from my boxing days." Well, Ram Gopal Varma's armoury of punches has grown considerably from his first film. The director of movies such as Rangeela, Satya, Company and Sarkar doesn't spare anyone, least of all himself. From his often cruel neglect of his wife, to his rebellion against his father, to celebrating his birthdays as death days, he likes to tell it like it is.
In his memoir, quite aptly titled Guns and Thighs (aforementioned gun being in his idol Amitabh Bachchan's hand in Zanjeer and thighs belonging to his first crush Sridevi in Himmatwala), the former video parlour owner whirls us about in some select parts of his life-his education as an engineer at Siddhartha College in Vijayawada to his encounters with various musicians and actors (a violin player who went on to become Ismail Darbar and a chat with Aftab Shivdasani to explain who filmmaker Basu Chatterjee is). From how he made Satya (largely improvised though he had on board both Anurag Kashyap and Saurabh Shukla as scriptwriters) to how he framed a particular scene in Company to show the hierarchy of criminals, Varma's memoir has as much about his view of the world as it does about the craft of filmmaking. Despite his best efforts to seem nihilistic, Varma, who took to storytelling because of Mario Puzo's The Godfather, actually comes across as an awfully talented pussycat who adores movies and everything that goes with it. From his distaste for the media (he charmingly compares them to striptease artists, only the media strips others to make money) to his admission of his own failings in making the champion turkey, Ram Gopal Varma ki Aag, this is almost as enjoyable as some of Varma's iconic films. Follow the writer on Twitter @kavereeb
EXCERPTS
Amitabh Bachchan
Me after three-four vodkas
In all my association with him, I can recall any unpleasantness on only two occasions. One was when I was shooting the confrontation scene with him and Kay Kay, who played his son in Sarkar, and he disagreed with me on a certain reaction I wanted him to give. In spite of my trying to explain, he insisted that I do it his way and I had to relent. But after the shoot, late at night he called me and said, 'Ramu, I have been thinking about it and I think you are right. Let's do it again.' Once I re-shot it and showed him the edit, he was very impressed.
The other famous or rather infamous incident was when I tweeted something very abusive about him. After seeing him playing old-man, Alzheimer's-patient kind of roles for many years, I flipped on suddenly seeing the vintage Bachchan again in Bbuddah Hoga Terra Baap. In that frame of mind, and under the influence of three-four vodkas, I tweeted, 'Amitabh bachchan is a c*****a for not doing more roles like this and directors like me are l****s, for not realizing this.' Understandably, all hell broke loose. The only man who immediately understood it to be a compliment was Amitji himself.
SRIDEVI
Sex symbol serves tea
Her popularity and stardom had to be seen to be believed. We were shooting for the climax of Kshana Kshanam in Nandyal, and the whole town came to a standstill. Banks, government offices, schools, colleges, everything in town stopped functioning as everyone wanted to see Sridevi.
When we were on location, we used to know when Sridevi started from her bungalow to come to location, because we could see a column of dust travelling towards us from the distance. The dust was kicked up by the thousands of people running behind her car.
Well anyway, to cut the long, touching story of my feelings for Sridevi short, I finished Kshana Kshanam and then went on to make Govinda Govinda with her. In due course I saw her undergoing a lot of personal tragedy like her father's death and her mother's mental illness.
The woman who was the object of lust of the entire nation's male population, was suddenly left all alone in the world till Boney Kapoor stepped in to fill the vacuum. So, straight from her super-stardom, magazine covers and her dazzling beauty on the silver screen, I saw her in Boney's house serving tea like an ordinary housewife. I hated Boney Kapoor for bringing that angel down from heaven to such an ordinary, humdrum existence.
URMILA MATONDKAR
When a star is a simple sweetheart
I was mesmerized by Urmila's beauty-from her face to her figure?everything about her was just divine. She had done a few films before Rangeela, which hadn't done well and she hadn't made much of an impact on the audience either. Then after Rangeela, she became the nation's sex symbol. That doesn't mean it was I who made her look beautiful. I would say that she was a painting and I simply framed her. Apart from the frame, for a painting to be truly relished, it also needs the right place for it to be displayed in, and that place was Rangeela.
I don't know how this may sound, but my biggest problem with Urmila on a personal front was that I just couldn't accept her being an ordinary human being. She was, in person, a simple sweetheart, but I very selfishly always wanted her to be larger than life even in real life.
