Decoding Madhur ‘Repeat-kar’ Bhandarkar’s Style of Filmmaking

Why does Madhur Bhandarkar keep making the same film over and over again, with different actors?

Every filmmaker has a certain signature filmmaking style. This ‘signature’ may or may not be intentional from the maker’s side, but no matter how versatile a director is, it becomes easy to spot his style just by watching a scene or two from his films. Spielberg has the ‘Spielberg Face’, Michael Bay has the low angle rover, Tarantino has the car trunk.

But these signature shots are subtle as compared to certain Indian filmmakers like Madhur ‘Repeat-kar’ Bhandarkar. Mr Bhandarkar not only puts his signature on his films with an ink pen, but takes a factory sized supply of ink pens, crushes the ink out of them with a road roller, smashes a rubber stamp the size of a bulldozer on the ink and crashes his insignia on to his films. Check out this decoded guide to how Bhandarkar does it-

In fact he takes his style so seriously that he keeps making the same film with different actors. Whether it’s Page 3, or Corporate, or Jail, or Heroine – every film takes the viewer through the eyes of a wide-eyed, good hearted middle class woman newly recruited in a powerful industry. She is first shocked by the industry’s murky elements, then corrupted by the very same elements, and is then forced to make a righteous decision with some collateral damage. She’s eventually left distraught and destroyed, and a successor takes over the mantle, to finally reflect that the shady industry continues to win and the righteous always lose, because that’s the way the world works. And all his films are so similar that it is impossible to point out which is which. If you’re still wondering how Bhandarkar manages to accomplish the amazing feat of filmmaking, check out the following five facts that define his approach to filmmaking:

1. Finding the Right Story

Legend has it that Bhandarkar had a very radical approach to choosing his projects. Industry insiders have claimed to have noticed a giant dart board at his home, with strange letterings. Recently a reporter was sent on an investigative mission to uncover the truth and we are shocked with the findings. The dart board is partitioned into various ‘social message’ sections, and at night Bhandarkar blindfolds himself, and vehemently shoots darts at the board from a distance. After exhausting himself, he carefully removes the blindfold, and chooses to write a script based on whichever social message section of the board the darts have landed on.

2. Writing the Screenplay

Writing is often regarded as the most joyous and rewarding creative process of an artist’s life, and Bhandarkar shortens this process while still deriving the joyous rewards. Our investigation has revealed that a decade ago Bhandarkar bought a tech startup named Ypoc to design and maintain a special machine for him. This machine has three sections – the first compartment in which a bound copy of an existing script is placed, the central section called ‘The Brain’ which scans and processes the script and creates a new script by changing only the character names, and the second compartment that seamlessly spits out a fresh bound copy of a new script, ready to be made into a film.

3. Research and Recce

Mr Bhandarkar audaciously skips this step because this process has already been accomplished in his first attempt at making movies, and the films that follow are mere copies. His motto remains ‘Research is for newbies’.

4. Filming

During filming Bhandarkar is always in ‘zen’ mode because he knows exactly what he needs from the shots, and is confident of the result. To derive the correct output from the footage, his cameras are attached with concentric circles of three lens filters – Voyeurism, Cliches and the Quintessential Gay Character. These filters make sure no matter what scene one enacts as the camera rolls, the captured footage will always have at least two of these three filters in every scene. So when a character makes a sardonic remark about the industry that he works in, there are shots of scantily clad nubile ladies and a homosexual overacting. Or when a character is suffering because of ‘the system’, it is because he or she is being sexually exploited.

5. Post Production

While most filmmakers sit with their DOPs to tweak and color grade their films, Bhandarkar employs a much different technique for postproduction. He asks his editor to find the most caricature-ish takes from tabloids and dailies and strings them all together. This way, the entire film has a special ‘over the top’ nature, in which the actors behave and speak in a tonal level higher than any real human would. The final stage in Bhandarkar’s process is to deliver a line in all his pre release interviews that would make his audience believe that he makes sense. That line is simply this: his films have clichés because clichés reflect real life. A National Award placed in a government cabinet is polished harder with every utterance of this line.

(Graphics created by Megha Mathur)