The 19-Year-Old Kid Who Edited ‘Satya’ Is Now Back With ‘Aligarh’

Apurva Asrani was a 19-year-old kid when he edited ‘Satya’, now ‘Aligarh’ written & edited by him will open MAMI 2015

Apurva Asrani was a 19-year-old kid out of college, cutting promos for films when the offer to edit Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya came his way. Satya of course went on to make history, and Apurva candidly admits that he got things too easy, too early in life, which sort of screwed up his head for a while.

But all’s well that ends well – years later, the former whiz-kid got his groove back after he was called in from his hiatus by filmmaker Hansal Mehta to work on Shahid. Now the more sorted and still charming, Apurva is the proud writer and editor of Hansal’s Aligarh, which opens MAMI 2015.

(Excerpts from my Q&A with Apurva below, you can watch the VIDEO or read through the TEXT version.)

While in college I got offered a job to work with this producer who used to do a countdown show for MTV. MTV launched in a 2 hour band that showed BPL Oye, which then went on to Channel V.

On BPL Oye, we were doing this very interesting thing called Masala Mix. We would take a Govinda song and cut it on a Samantha Fox video, that became very popular and I really enjoyed taking material and manipulating it to make it look like something else. It started with that. I then got a chance to do promos for Polygram, they were doing a promo for Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Khamoshi.

By 19, I had done a whole bunch of films, and I was doing the promos of Daud, Ram Gopal Varma’s film and that’s where we met. And he was very excited by the spin on his material on the table. I was already in awe of him and so the opportunity to do the Daud promo was something I put a lot of effort into. Ramu and I really bonded during that period.

One fine day, I was driving in Ramu’s car with him, and he just offered me Satya to edit, he just took a leap of faith and told me a bit about it being an underworld story and so on. That’s how it began.

We used to hang out at Ramu’s apartment at Versova, there used be this durbar where vodka and whiskey flowed freely and everyone from the film including actors Manoj and Urmila used to hang out and discussions used to happen, Anurag used to write something, Saurabh used to write something, something would be shot the next day, we would review it. I used to him assist him on set.

The entire period when we were planning Satya the press was full of stories about these extortion attempts. Satya was born in a very organic sort of manner. Gulshan Kumar was a friend of Ramu and had been very supportive. We were shooting at these tabelas in Goregaon, there was this scene where people come and ask for chanda, to extort money from Satya.

This was the first day of the shoot. During that shoot Ramu got a phone call that Gulshan Kumar got shot, not far off from where we were shooting, outside a temple. We stopped shooting for a while, and I could see that Ramu was really really afraid, because he was right in the middle of it, he was making a film on the underworld and that’s when it struck us all that how real this film is, it was no longer fiction.

But he gathered himself pretty quickly and it changed the way that scene was being shot, Sushant’s initial reaction was of anger when Satya slashes his face, but when we shot again, Sushant screamed like a little child, and fell down on the ground in horror, screaming and holding his face. That horror was real. That horror was the horror that everyone was feeling inside, that Ramu was feeling inside at that point of time.

The most challenging thing for me was that we had songs which had to be shot later on which then had to be blended into the film.

There was that Sapnon mein milti hai song the wedding song, that had to blend into the film and I was kind of cringy about that because, Saurabh Shukla who played Kallu Mama had shaved off his beard and he had to put on a false beard and come on set. I was cringing because I really felt that Satya shouldn’t have songs at that point of time.

The fact that the songs went on to do so well and became synonymous with the film, I’ve accepted it. But I had a difficult time fitting in the songs to the film.

Ramu is like this enigma, every fan of Ramu is tyring to figure out things about him even today and I am one of them. I think he gradually lost touch with every member of that magical Satya team. The film was really celebrated for its technical achievements, the writing achievements, acting achievements, the glory was really spread out.

I would have hoped that Ramu would have felt that this is his glory, everybody’s glory is his glory. But I suspect that at some point of time, he felt that too many people were enjoying the credit of the film when it was actually his faith in them, his handling of them which brought the film its success. I think, I might be wrong, I think that he was on this trip to prove that it was him and that he would continue to make films without these talents that were part of the film.

It would be very arrogant of me to actually say that something went wrong with him. If you look at it, he’s still doing what he did then. He is still making films that he believes in. He can have the most outrageous idea and go make a film. He picks talent from no where and makes films with them. That’s what he did then, that’s what he’s doing now. If you ask him, I don’t think he knows, because he’s doing the exact same thing that he’s been doing.

But there is something in the content which I feel that lacks the kind of connection with audiences that his earlier films had. I believe that connection comes about when you are connected to your people, when you have compassion. I have some bit of sour grapes within me as to why I didn’t get the opportunity to work with Ram Gopal Varma again. I would grab the opportunity to work with him even today with eyes closed.

I did contact him, there was this whole phase where I had a career slump, where I was not getting much work and so I ate humble pie. So I went to him, I went his house, he invited me for lunch, I tried to get myself back to work with him, to edit for him but he was adamant that he would not repeat me or many of us.

I remember him saying to me at lunch at his dining table, when I had gone to ask him for work, it was post Company. He said to me – “Apurva, you went on that show on TV and said that I cut that sequence and I wrote that sequence and I did that, do you really think that you did, you really think you did it? Ok, do it”. And he was still offering me chicken masala while was saying this.

I mean, he liked me and I’m still extremely fond of him, but I couldn’t answer that. I have to admit I am one of those few editors who come out and say that I did this and I cut that because, I believe that editors are very unsung, editors and writers, they are capable of weaving a lot of magic and they have a very strong hand in putting together some great films. But we have this whole thing ki editor ko behind the scenes rehna chahiye. Why?

I was asked for years – are Ramu and Urmila having an affair? Have you seen anything? All throughout the shooting of the film, people used to ask me. I could never spot it, we used to be hanging around in the same room and I could never spot it. There she was so grateful to be doing a film like this when everyone was typecasting her.

Sameer Gautam Singh and Hansal had already been working on the script of Shahid. I had moved to Bangalore, I had completely moved away from films and stuff.

I used to write reviews for a website there, I used to cook, I had a garden, got a dog and all of that. I had settled down, had a 9 to 5 job, cheque in the hand at the end of the month. And I got an email from Hansal, it had the poster of a film and it said – ‘based on a true story’ – it had a silhouette of Rajkumar Rao and it had credits which had Hansal as director, Anurag as producer and myself as the editor of the film and the email said, “Book your tickets, come down”.

There was never a discussion about it. At that point of time, I was like, Anurag has never called me after Satya, now I am working on a film that he is producing. I always wondered, because Anurag had actually hugged my after Satya and said “Apu I want you to edit all my films, par tu nahin karega”, I said “Kyon?”, he said “Meri biwi edit karegi”. I used to be like damn! When I heard they had separated, I tried again, I said “Ab?”, he just laughed.

Hansal had very little money, he was putting his own money and getting some from Sunil Bohra and he would shoot a little bit, stop, shoot again, not know if he would ever shoot again. But at that time we kept ourselves excited by editing. Let’s try and do this with the cut, lets try and go in this direction, what if we don’t put this as the next scene, what if we cut out this sequence completely that you are planning to shoot, what if we create a sequence like this, so we would discuss it like that.

We would discuss those scenes which got written and eventually became part of the film. And now he had those scenes which he had to shoot. So it was built like that because we had those periods. And also, there would be scenes that I would just write there. There was more than just reshaping the film. I got a chance with Hansal and Sameer in actually writing scenes.

Hansal got an email from this young girl in Delhi who worked in a corporate job – Ishani Banerjee, she had seen Shahid and she was very moved by the film she sent him an email saying there is this case of this professor, I don’t know if you have heard about it but I really think you should make a film about it.

Hansal woke me up in the morning and asked me, “Apu do you know about this incident?”, I said, “Yeah, the day he died a news channel called me to their studio to talk about it”. Hansal asked me whether I would like to write this film, I said I would love to write this film. It’s very personal, I identify with the character and I want to write the film.

And immediately we started working on the film, there was no delay. We started researching, Ishani came down to Bombay, she brought research, she brought the story material and I started working on a screenplay. And before we knew it, we had the film ready, it’s been just over a year since this email.

Writing is more painful because the editor always has a chance to rewrite your stuff later. You never know if what you wrote will eventually be the film. Editing has this advantage of being the final opportunity to make the fim. Writing has that whole creation wala joy.

But they are both pretty much the same thing. Neither of them requires you to go on to set, working with actors and all of those things. There is a lot of imagination involved. Its very solitary. You’re taking ideas, thoughts, characters and you’re moving them around and you’re building narratives and you’re deciding how much is too much and how much is too less and whether this character is required or not required, whether you should say those lines, not say those lines, whether you should say anything at all. Where do I end the film, where do I begin the film, both give you the chance to do those things.

Writing is more gratifying because there is recognition for what you do. You can listen to a dialogue and say – yeh isne achcha dialogue likha, ye isne achcha scene likha. You can’t see an edit and say – haan yeh editor ne kiya tha. So people take those short cuts and say – pace achcha hai film ka editing achcha hai. That is infuriating.

Even on Shahid, I have been recognised more for my writing on Shahid, because I won an award for screenplay which I shared with Hansal and Sameer because of that. There is recognition for that.

And I think as an editor it (Shahid) is my most accomplished work but there was very little recognition of that even in the best Indian reviews of the film. And somewhere at some point of time you feel like you don’t want to be invisible any more. Writing allows that kind of visibility. With the visibiility there is more power. With power you are able to do more work that you like to do. Which is why that power is important.