The Writers of ‘Airlift’ On How the Akshay Kumar Film Took Flight

The writers of Akshay Kumar’s ‘Airlift’ give a peek into what went into the writing of the big hit

Airlift was written by a team of 4 screenwriters

Bollywood’s first big hit this year arrived early in January itself with Airlift. The team of writers behind this Akshay Kumar-starrer includes director Raja Krishna Menon apart from Suresh Nair, Ritesh Shah and Rahul Nangia. I got Suresh and Ritesh to give me a peek into what went into the writing of Airlift.

Screenwriters Ritesh Shah (L) and Suresh Nair (R)

Q: Unlike doing a total fictional screenplay, adapting a real life incident into a script or screenplay is like a minefield. What were the major hurdles you faced in retelling the story of the evacuation of 1,70,000 Indians from Kuwait?
Ritesh: One problem I can think of is the paucity of actual personal accounts of people on the internet before the film.

<p>There are detailed American accounts though which provide you a glimpse of the prevailing mood. You will notice there are more Indian accounts of it after the film. If the film has prompted this - it is great for those who will subsequently attempt a retelling of the evacuation.</p>

Our aim was not that. It was to communicate that “adversity is the true test of character” and that many Indian people in Kuwait and India showed that and this is something to be proud of - whether it was the businessmen in Kuwait, bureaucrats in India, the Air India pilots - a lot of people who could actually help - helped.
Suresh: I’m not sure we saw anything as a hurdle while writing because for us the objective was clearly to tell an engaging story that would be realistic and yet appeal as mainstream cinema. And the best way to make that happen was to follow the journey of one character as a blend of all those real-life heroes of the evacuation – and through that journey we tried to incorporate as much reality of the real incident as cinematically was possible.
The challenge, of course, was all the other characters who join him on the journey – like Poonawala, George, Ibrahim, Tasneem – in our early drafts we had relatively more detailed introductions of most of them in the first 10 minutes of the film.

A scene from Airlift

Q: As a writer did you meet or speak to any of the people involved in the operation on either side (i.e. the evacuated or the Indian government’s side). Did you get a chance to get first person accounts from Mr Sunny Mathews or Mr Vedi, on whom Ranjit Katyal’s character is based?
Ritesh: Raja already had this idea and his research in place before we met him. I have met people who have been in Kuwait at that time before the scripting started, some of them were kids but never with the intention of turning their experience into a film because while you are just talking about days from the past you somehow don’t realise the enormity of things.
Suresh: Raja had done tremendous research and met everyone. Since we were blending and compressing most of the real life stories into a handful of characters in the film, we took material from his research and the rest we created out of our imagination.

A scene from Airlift

Q: If you were to find a ratio, how much of Airlift is based on factual events that took place in 1990 and how much of it is imagined? Or does the film just take inspiration from the fact that such a large scale evacuation did take place, and then make its own plot points, twists and turns?
Ritesh: The flights flew, the planes came to the rescue, the streets filled you with fear, there were people who lost everything they had - the rehabilitation came much later, some people from the Indian community took charge of things, soldiers often came for food, the schools were shut, the Kuwaitis were targeted much more than Indians, there was no Kuwaiti government, some of the people came back by a ship, they had to move to Jordan, the elite and the labourers ended up in the camps together. A lot of it is fact - maybe not exactly the way it happened but it did happen. And then there are blanks in between which we have filled with our imagination but not with any malafide intent but to tell the story in a compelling manner. We may not have got some facts right but we are assuming we got the sentiment right.
Suresh:

<p>The fact is we were making a movie and not a docu-drama so we had to take creative liberties to tell an engaging story. The idea was that we would use the reality to base our fiction in terms of depicting the problems the Indian community faced, the political fallout of the invasion, the Tipu Sultan being turned away, the journey to Amman.</p>

A scene from Airlift

Q: The problem with claiming that a film is based on a real-life person or incident especially in India is that, as creators you are bound to run into problems. You either end up offending someone, or find a lawsuit against you for misrepresentation. If you’ve read Khalid Mohamed’s piece, there is already a captain who is raising objections to the way the rescue has been depicted in Airlift. How do you react to this?
Ritesh: It is a professional hazard and it makes our choice of subjects very limited. I can tell you by experience that one has been scared away often from such subjects because right at the outset, legal advice has been to stay away.
Suresh: It’s an occupational hazard, I guess.

<p>But at the end of the day we’re making a movie that aims to entertain. So we’ve to walk a fine line between reality and fiction – otherwise we would have made a documentary. Those who understand this are less offended and more supportive than those will always see it differently and take offence to what we’ve shown, the way we’ve shown and what we chose not to show.</p>

A scene from Airlift

Q: The film is doing extremely well at the box-office, it has struck a chord with the audience, especially because of the patriotic element in it, even though Ranjit Katyal is not your chest-thumping, water-pump yanking jingoistic hero. Even in a fist fight with the Iraqi soldiers Akshay is shown being overpowered by them. The narrative is refreshingly restrained, was that one of the pre-defined guidelines that the script was to follow?
Ritesh: It wasn’t said or written on the whiteboard but everyone felt that, yes, this is the kind of story this is and this is how the scene work is going to be and this is how the characters will largely speak and behave.

<p>Yes, and there was no pressure from anyone to make it more ‘commercial’. Nobody said let him play the helpless businessman in the previous scene and in the next one have him beat up fifty soldiers.<br></p>

Suresh: I think the patriotic tone is often defined by the genre of the film. Here we’re being as real as possible. Ranjit Katyal was never to come across as a superhero or Akshay Kumar the star. He wasn’t to suddenly take off his shirt and drop kick one of the soldiers. His attack had to seem a spontaneous reaction – a glimpse of the more reckless Ranjit Katyal before the invasion changed him!

A scene from Airlift

Q: There were some scenes in which you’ve employed silence quiet effectively, instead of taking the usual Bollywood route of filling a scene up with melodramatic dialogues. The two which come to mind immediately are -when Katyal goes to meet his driver Nair’s wife and then in the climax when George just hugs and Katyal and moves on. As writers were you in agreement that this is how the scene should play out or was it improvised during the shoot?
Ritesh: Akshay’s scene was silent in the beginning although there were broken lines kind of dialogues in another draft, eventually Raja and Akshay were sure that it should have no lines and we were extremely happy with this. George was never supposed to thank him but that gesture at the airport was never scripted - it was improvised and what a moment. There are several occasions when we writers are pleasantly surprised by things which came up during the shoot. Usually we are shocked, I’m just kidding.
Suresh: Interestingly, Katyal’s meeting with his driver’s wife went through a couple of drafts.

<p>In our first draft he reacted the way he finally did in the film, but then there was a draft where we tried doing it with dialogues – which was thankfully junked! Akshay himself preferred it without dialogues - and you can see how touchingly he conveyed his emotions through body language and expression. No dialogue could beat that!</p>

Again, George’s final transformation was something we toyed with as happening during the final encounter with the Iraqi soldiers. We wrote a draft where he does his bit to save Tasneem from them. But there was never any doubt that George would never have expressed his gratitude with words – it’s just not his character. Apologising doesn’t come naturally to him. Having said that, there is always improvisations on the set.

A scene from Airlift

Q. Suresh, you are a Malayali and have also written a popular Malayalam film with Mohanlal in the lead. Isn’t it surprising that the Malayalam film industry, which is a thriving and extremely creatively vibrant entity didn’t stumble upon the story of Airlift first, since a majority out of those 1,70,000 Indians evacuated would have been Keralites. And maybe the success of Airlift will now see some revisiting of the episode down south?
Suresh:

<p>Coincidentally, just when we’d started filming <i>Airlift</i>, I was approached for a Malayalam film on the Gulf War, something in the same genre. It was being planned on a grand scale with a veteran and respected Malayalam director at the helm.</p>

I think the big hurdle for Malayalam film industry when it comes to such stories is the limitation of budget. I think there are many movies based on real incidents like this that Malayalam filmmakers are keen to make but are unable to do because of economics.

A scene from Airlift

Q. Both of you were incidentally also co-writers for Namastey London another Akshay Kumar film with a patriotic theme to it, almost 10 years back. Do you think there has been a shift in the audience’s taste over the years, especially the way they’ve been receiving more restrained, less melodramatic and more real stories than before? And do you take that into account while writing or do you follow the producer or director’s mandate on a project?
Ritesh: Yes we do sense a certain shift but the ‘sur’ is ultimately decided by the director and we are happy to play along. What is to be communicated is important - one can compromise or re-tune the manner in which it is done.
Suresh: I think a lot depends on the director. I mean Raja Menon’s idea of patriotism would differ from Vipul Shah and they will both differ from, say, Rajkumar Hirani – and they are all equally effective in their own ways. When we did Namastey London, the India Shining speech was written last and the whole idea was to keep out obvious things that we pride on like Gandhiji or contribution of zero to mathematics, etc. That apart, like I said earlier, the tone of the film will depend a lot on the genre – Namastey London or Singh Is Kinng will obviously be written differently from Kahaani or Airlift.

Q: Something one hears in almost every director or producer’s interview is their angst that there aren’t enough good writers in the industry or enough original stories around. This is then followed by their own admission of how writers aren’t given the respect or the money they deserve. As writers, both of you have been in the industry for over a decade. Have things changed?
Ritesh:

<p>They have improved immensely - yes. Have they improved to the extent of attracting more talented people to writing - no!</p>

Suresh: Yes and no. There are enough writers with enough good stories if studios are willing to back them. As for respect and money, the situation has gradually changed. And it certainly gets better when you have a body of work. But, what’s funny is when you see some filmmakers not practice what they preach. For example, some of them, when asked in the media about their film, will talk about “oh, I’m still writing it” or “when I wrote the script…” with no mention of the writer he’s hired to write it - as if the writer had only been there to take dictations!

Q: If there was one thing that you would want the industry to change in its attitude towards writers, or if you had one wish professionally to make things better for a writer in the Indian film industry what would it be?
Ritesh: Residuals. Give us our rightful share from remake rights and subsequent revenue streams.
Suresh: The over-dependence on remakes!

<p>It’s easier to convince studios and actors with the DVD of a foreign or South film than with an original script! I say this despite having been part of a few remakes myself. But more importantly, I’d like to see script development being taken seriously in terms of investing money and time in it.</p>

(You can connect with Suresh Mathew on Twitter @Suresh_Mathew_)