Shah Rukh Khan looks upto his Raees director Rahul Dholakia for many reasons. His clear vision and passion for the stories he tells aside, what the superstar really enjoyed was the ease with which they could joke about their respective commercial and artistic sensibilities. No wonder, Raees is a mainstream film that has a very substance oriented narrative.
I’ve done more commercial cinema, he’s done less commercial cinema, and the other way around. He’s done more niche, artistic cinema, I’ve done less of that. When we’re doing a scene sometimes and I say, ‘Yaar Rahul, isko aise kar deta hoon. And he’ll say, ‘haan, par yeh thoda commercial ho jayega.’ Sometimes he’ll say, ‘isko tu artistic hi kar de, ekdum honest kar de’. So we can laugh at ourselves. We can enjoy that we’re both coming from a different space. Somewhere we both agree that our methods are different and we’ve had a great time working on Raees together.Shah Rukh Khan, Actor
It’s quite rare for a Bollywood film to sit comfortably between subtle and over-the-top narratives. But Raees looks like a story of honest characters living in real scenarios, with hints of mainstream grandeur. And while most films are either arty or box-office driven, there are several factors that make Raees one of the few films, that have the best of both worlds.
The Coming Together Of Shah Rukh And Nawazuddin
Giving Shah Rukh Khan’s superstardom is Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s realistic persona. His tough cop act in Raees pitches him as king Khan’s arch nemesis and he pulls it off with great conviction. Nawaz has the reputation of all his characters. He etched a niche for himself in the industry with critically acclaimed performances in Black Friday, Peepli Live, Kahaani, Badlapur, Gangs of Wasseypur and Manjhi-The Mountain Man, to name a few. He’s always kept it real and some believe that his ability to do that is what stands between him and superstardom. While Shah Rukh’s cinema has mostly had him come out looking like the star, which his fans and the box-office love, Nawaz’s focus lies is camouflaging with his on-screen character, till you can’t imagine him existing otherwise. Bringing SRK and Nawaz together on-screen in itself is like building a bridge from one end of Bollywood to another. Rahul Dholakia plays with our curiousty by pitting India’s biggest superstar opposite India’s finest actor. Only magic can come from this.
A Gangster Story Written By Real Journalists
As much as we love an action-packed thriller, a ruthless don with a good heart and chase sequence heroics, Raees has more. Journalists Niraj Shukla, Harit Mehta and Ashish Vashi have many years of research on prohibition in the state of Gujarat backing their Bollywood story. They reportedly took two and a half years to script Raees and it was their several weekend trips together to the border villages of Gujarat, that strengthened the idea and the characters of the film. Dholakia was an integral part of their process of course, and the way he weaved their research into the film’s plot and dialogues, make the idea of Raees even more interesting. The journalists-turned-writers add another layer of realism to what could have resembled a typical Amitabh Bachchan starrer action flick from Bollywood of the 70s or 80s. The films’ dialogue promos are proof that the characters of Raees are as real as they are dramatic.
Rahul Dholakia Ki Daring
Rahul Dholakia is in the business of telling stories that he believes need to be told. Even though he doesn’t have an exhaustive filmography, his cinema has always been conscious of what he wants to say, rather than solely what an audience would like to watch. But Rahul believes that not being in the thick of things in Bollywood, helps him retain his perspective. He said in a recent interview that when he started working on this idea based on prohibition and the illicit liquor business, it was meant to be an indie film, which was likely to have been funded by a liquor lobby in the US. But as he got his journalist friends on board and dived deep into their research while travelling the length and breadth of Gujarat, what emerged was a larger than life story that demanded a superstar and a big Bollywood banner backing it. Rahul has indeed come a long way from his controversial docu-drama Parzania, to the potential blockbuster Raees. His storytelling might have changed in its form, but his need to tell a powerful story remains unchanged. Rahul’s documentary background makes him fearless and that’s probably what gives him the courage to make a commercial giant like Raees, something he too is doing only for the very first time. Parzania won the acclaimed director his biggest honour, the National Award for Best Direction in 2007. In 2010, he also made Lamhaa starring Bipashsa Basu and Sanjay Dutt, the story of an undercover intelligence agent in Kashmir valley.
Rahul thinks that a commercial biggie like Raees happened to him because young producers today are more ‘ballsy’ and give new directors the freedom to tell a real hard-hitting story, that’s far removed from a formulaic sensibility. But we think Raees has a little bit of Rahul in him when he says, “Agar katne ka darr hota na, toh patang nahi chadhata, firki pakadta.”
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