“It’s Not Working!” Shimit & Jaideep on 10 Yrs of ‘Chak De! India’

Believe it or not, ‘Chak De! India’ was simply rejected at initial screenings.

10 August 2017 marks 10 years since the release of Yash Raj Films’ Chak De! India, a film that scored a perfect 10 with critics and the box-office. The Shah Rukh Khan-starrer, gave India a much needed sports anthem and changed the way women athletes and hockey is viewed and perceived in the country.

So, how did Chak De! India happen? Why was the film written off during its initial screenings?

I spoke to director Shimit Amin and writer Jaideep Sahni about a decade of Chak De! India.

Q: Was it the victory of the Indian women’s hockey team in the 2002 Commonwealth Games that triggered off the idea for Chak De India? Also, 2002 was a different time in the Hindi film industry – what convinced you that a film about a Indian women’s hockey team could make for an interesting mainstream film?

Jaideep Sahni: Yeah, that and the Asia Cup, so both of them. Actually, it wasn’t so much the victory, in the sense, the victory was just a newspaper article, and the newspaper article led me to want to know more about them. It was the time that I spent with them, the actual team and the coaches and the staff. The time that I spent with them that kind of made me want to write a film about them.

At first, I thought I’ll write a book and then I thought I’ll may be do a documentary and then felt it’s better off as fiction.

Q: And you pitched the idea to Yash Raj Films?

Jaideep Sahni: I read about this during the time of Khosla ka Ghosla and the post-production also was kind of stopping and starting according to the availability of money. We were also waiting around for a long time to find a distributor. Around that time, I was still reading and finding out about this. So, this was like my side thing around that time. Then I got busy writing Bunty aur Babli and it still remained a side thing. Once we finished the readings of Bunty aur Babli and Shaad (Ali) and the cast went to location, Adi (Aditya Chopra) and I were discussing and he said, “What do you feel like doing next?”, then I told him I have this thing which has been in mind for many years.

So, I told Adi about the women’s hockey team and the coaches and the support staff and the campuses and the conditions in which they practise and how they keep winning and winning and winning and somehow, it’s still never enough to make them famous or for this country to recognise their talent.

So, I just shared the entire thing and I think, we would’ve spoken for half an hour or something like that and I said, this is what I want to do a story on and I think everybody needs to know about them. It can’t be that such special people and champions are like just few kilometres away from your house and you’re not even aware of them. They’re Indians too and there is something very unfair and odd about it. So, I told Adi about this and he said - let’s do it.

Q: Was it that easy? Yash Raj at that time was in that whole Dhoom, Salaam Namaste and Fanaa kind of zone, I am assuming it must not have been so easy to convince them to bankroll the project.

Jaideep Sahni: Not at all, he (Aditya Chopra) just said that this film should be made.

Q: At what stage did you share your idea with Shimit?

Jaideep Sahni: I worked on it for a couple of months. There was a stage, where I kind of figured out what exactly happens in the story, though I did not have a detailed screenplay then. The screenplay was also very technical in that sense, there was lot of hockey and playing and stuff, but I kind of got all the story beats and I worked out all the characters. Adi and I were just sitting and jamming and we agreed that maybe it’s time now to kind of start sharing the script with a director.

Then Adi said the best guy for this film would be the guy who made Ab Tak Chappan and as it turned out, Shimit and I had been friends for a very long time, so nobody was happier than me.

Shimit came over home, I told him about the story and about what I had seen and what I experienced with the athletes and their coaches, the campus, generally their whole life. I made him read the characters and the kind of story we had in mind and there was this thick file of research which I gave him. He called me the next morning and said - I want to do it.

Q: Shimit, what was your first reaction when Jaideep came to you with the idea of a film on the women’s hockey team?

Shimit Amin: At first, I was sceptical. Jaideep started describing the character one by one. We went through some characters like Bindya, Sui-Mui and so on and I was kind of taken away by that. This was because such characters were never seen in mainstream cinema. Initially, I thought that the concept could go a 100 different ways. But once I saw the characters, I was touched by the distinctive journey of each character in the film and that is what convinced me. No matter how basic the film we keep, the characters are going to convince it and they are going to ride it was the belief.

Q: As a writer what were the major stumbling blocks that you faced while writing? Do you recall any point at which you were stuck?

Jaideep Sahni: No, not really stuck. I mean it’s kind of an inspired job but there is also a certain amount of meticulousness which is kind of necessary. So, just two things, first, to find the balance between... there were so many characters and each had a story. Eighteen, nineteen or twenty characters and each had a story and each had a dialect, and then there were also stories of the team, the team was also a character in a way, and because it was playing other teams so other teams were also in a way characters. In the sense, the Koreans play in a certain way and Argentina plays in a certain way, so, to tackle them you have to adjust your game and play in a certain way, so for that you have to put some players in the front and some other players in the back.

The whole gaming strategy of it was something that film scripts do not have to deal with. So, I tried to learn a lot of that from hockey people and their coach Kaushik and all of them taught me a lot of that.

So, there was a lot of things to balance and then because it’s very rare that you get a chance to do so many characters from different kind of ethnicities and religions and regions from the country, then you can’t let the chance to let go of the chance to talk about other things. Whether it is gender or racism or religion or the rest of it. So, it’s all very exciting and it’s all something that is coming from your heart, but it also has to finish in 2 and a half hours, and it also has to merge, in and out of each other in a manner which doesn’t reek of mathematics. That gets difficult.

Balancing so many things that you want to say, so many pre-conceived notions you want to take on, so many characters you want to represent. So many things which people think about North-East people, South Indians think about North Indians, this religion feels about that religion, then hockey people feel about cricket people. It was like it was full of people who kept feeling things about some other people. There were certain things that the Indian team feels about other teams, the other teams deal with the Indian team in a certain way, some people would look down upon some other teams, other coaches would think of Indian coaches in a certain way, and then the coach had his own demons to address.

So, there was a whole bunch of things, it’s one thing to have the greed to take it all on, but to manage it seamlessly in 2 and a half hours is, I mean, you have to be kind of lucky to get it right.

Q: The character of Kabir Khan, a hockey captain wrongly accused of letting Pakistan win a crucial game, who is maligned, his identity as an Indian Muslim who has to prove his patriotism is something that could have come across as a big cliché, but it worked. Were you at any point doubtful that this may not work or be the best way to act as a motivating factor for the coach?

Shimit Amin: Well, I was incredibly sceptical on it. I thought and was confused that we shouldn’t being exploitative or making it tasteless. I was scared that the film will turn out to be soapy or pushing the button unnecessarily.

Everything has a cause, you just want to make sure that the context is correct and you are doing justice and the tone is right. Even today when I watch it, I may feel like may be that doesn’t work so much. I haven’t seen it lately. I kept second guessing and hoping that we didn’t go overboard.

That time when we were making it, we were just in so much pressure to do it and finish the film in time. We had a deadline, so I never gave it a thought. I was very very very scared that this would come off, and become something that really we wouldn’t have watched, you know? I think such kind of pressure was always there on me.

Q. You were apprehensive that it might look like you were playing the minority card with Kabir Khan...

Shimit Amin: Not apprehensive, I was sceptical it would work. I was sceptical that I won’t be able to pull it off and make it convincing, non-exploitative. I was sceptical with myself about trying this thing and making it work.

Jaideep Sahni: See, one is just the job of a coach of a government funded sport. That’s one part of it. If you look at a SAI campus it’ll look like, “Ok coaches are like this important, powerful guy”, but on the other hand, when you start seeing what they have to go through when they are trying to demand resources for their team, whether it is a high protein diet or a certain type of shoe, a certain kind of training regimen or videography or a type of equipment, then you realise that they have to put up with a lot to do just their job. They should just have a lot of things which coaches of other countries take for granted. So, that was one bit of it that I wanted to address.

And the other is, like I said there was this opportunity to address all these issues of caste, class, religion or gender which doesn’t come very often. This was another big thing - the Partition or the aftermath of the Partition are still being felt and even when people start forgetting it, there are enough and more people who revive things again for their benefit and then again they scratch the old wounds. Every time it looks like we are about to shake off these things, people revive it again. I’ve been through two riots in my life and I’ve seen what being in a minority can be like.

Anyone can be a minority, a women‘s hockey team was in minority in India then, when we wrote it. Within the women’s team there can be somebody in minority, somebody from North-East or Jharkhand maybe a little in minority, in Delhi a girl at one at night is a minority, a handicapped person trying to get into a Bombay local train is a minority. If you think you are not a minority, I can make you a minority in two minutes.

I can place you in a situation where you will be in a minority and then you will know what that pain and helplessness is. It always used to bother me, I’ve seen 1984 because I am from Delhi and then while I was doing my engineering I saw another riot in 1988. I’ve seen how the whole thing is done, it was just a chance and I grabbed it and I just hoped that I would be able to somehow express things from somebody else’s point of view without being over presumptive. So, that was the idea and that kind of became the Teeja Tera Rang... track too.

Also, there was this whole thing that this is a Shah Rukh Khan movie and it doesn’t have a love story and I was like, it has a love story, it’s between Kabir Khan and his country, and it even has a song... it’s a love song, at least we made it like a love song, a love song between a man and his country. So, I didn’t think there was no a love story in the film.

Q: Did you revisit the character of Kabir Khan once Shah Rukh Khan came on board?

Jaideep Sahni: No, no, I didn’t rewrite the character, we just narrated it out to him and he just knew it. He knows his world actually, he was his college hockey captain so he knows this world a little bit.

Q: Shimit, for you, this was your second film and in the first film, the biggest actor you worked with was Nana Patekar and suddenly you were working with Shah Rukh, were you nervous?

Shimit Amin: Shah Rukh is so low key and low maintenance. People think of him as a big star of course, but he is very professional. I had seen him on set before that and I had been around his office before. He is a very normal guy. He is projected as he is a star but he is actually very down to earth.

Q: I remember there was talk during that time that Shah Rukh wasn’t actually convinced about the film or that he wasn’t confident that the film will do well, was there any truth to all that?

Jaideep Sahni: No, not in this way. Actually what was happening before the release was that we were showing it to various people, like friends and family, like our friends, Shah Rukh’s friends just to get a sense because there was nothing like it before.

What had happened was we had made this video of introducing these girls and sent it to multiplexes and there was this song Ek Hockey Dungi Rakh Ke... and the multiplexes had sent it back saying that people are hooting in theatres and making fun of the girls in the song and said - just stop running this thing or else nobody is coming for this movie.

The feedback was that people were hating these girls, and ‘how can they be Shah Rukh Khan’s girls’ because that was the only way people could imagine ki ‘Shah Rukh Khan hai toh heroine hogi aur agar heroine hai toh yeh kaisi heroine ho sakti hai?’ Then it’s another matter that one year later the same people couldn’t have enough of the same girls. But, I guess that is what a character can do. In music videos you can’t see the character, you don’t travel the character’s journey with the character.

So it was a learning for us also and when in the film the same audience goes through the character’s journey then suddenly, the look, the height or weight stopped mattering. But in a trailer kind of a thing, they are expecting a kind of heroine they are used to seeing and when they don’t see it they say “Fail!”.

Q. So Shah Rukh was slightly ruffled when he got this sort of a feedback?

Jaideep Sahni: No it wasn’t that... so the kind of feedback we were getting from everyone was that it’s not working, they were saying it’s not like a film, they couldn’t really get into it. The feedback we were getting wasn’t very encouraging and it was uniformly discouraging - our friends, Shah Rukh’s friends, everybody’s friends. So then it was like a bunch of three or four guys - me, Shah Rukh, Shimit and Adi sitting and listening to these guys screening after screening saying “This sucks!”. So Shah Rukh was always like - ‘it doesn’t matter guys, I’m happy with it, we should be proud of what we have made, maybe we made something other people don’t get’.

Q: Shimit, what was your mind space like with all this negative feedback during the initial screenings?

Shimit Amin: Basically, the post production of this film was very difficult because it was such a massive film and I had a deadline. So, I had no breathing room.

When we finished and the final print that we showed to the audience and the reaction we got, I just didn’t comprehend it. I wasn’t even in the space to accept it, because I was like, this is what I could do, I can’t change it, 10 of August is coming and I can’t change it or rework it now.

Basically the criticism was the second half was all matches back to back, things like that which we couldn’t fix. I was like, this is what we have, we changed the length a little bit, but that was an earlier thing, not after everyone had seen it.

There was nothing I could do to fix the problems that were being said. They felt the second half too fast, someone felt the first half was too slow, I said I can’t fix that because in the first half I need to get the characters to grow, let the audience sink in. I need to make that happen in real time. By that time it was anyway too late to do anything. So, we just left it and my feeling was one of sheer exhaustion and that I can’t fix it and just let it go.

We felt it was fine, but of course we have to consider the audience reaction. We went with the faith that we’ve messed up maybe but we can’t fix it.

It just shows that some film have a life that you can’t pre-screen and judge, which is pretty scary actually for all of us who makes films. Sometimes you have films that everybody likes at test screenings and when it comes out nobody likes it. I wish there was a guarantee that when you read a script you get to know that this film will work. But it’s a long process from writing to shooting to post production, whatever can happen.

Q: What’s the most memorable feedback that you got for Chak De! India, something that will stay with you.

Jaideep Sahni: I was very happy when players, from both hockey and other sports, especially women athletes from the age 70 to the age 13 or 12, uniformly the message that came from them was that - ‘You guys got it or you guys got us or you got us right!’

Then the song, Chak De India... kind of became the sports anthem because it plays for every sport now. The spectators sing it for every sport, which is what the producer wanted from us because he never asked for anything, this is the only thing he asked us, he said India has a national anthem, a national song, but it doesn’t have a sports anthem, can you give me a sports anthem which plays for every sport India has and any team that plays it. We just thought we’ll try it, we can only try, you cannot engineer it but it happened.

Q: So, what is Shimit Amin upto? Rocket Singh was quite a while ago, we are all waiting for the next Shimit Amin film.

Shimit Amin: I keep working on projects. I still have a contract with Yash Raj and I am working towards a film. Hopefully in the next year I can do something.

Q: And that question goes for you too Jaideep...

Jaideep Sahni: I really enjoy writing only when I care for the subject I am writing about. If I try to write just as a professional job, I don’t enjoy the quality, so that’s a problem with me. But there are two things very exciting for me and both are kind of done, something I have never tried before. I’m yet to give the final draft to the studio and stuff, but you’ll hear something soon.

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