Shoojit Sircar on 12 years of Madras Café, “Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination completely shook me”

Filmmaker Shoojit Sircar’s Madras Café completed 12 years yesterday. Starring John Abraham and Nargis Fakhri, the movie was inspired from the assassination of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. On the film’s anniversary, Sircar looked back at it in an interview with us.

Madras Café is your most political film?

Madras Cafe was a very personal film, as it was very shocking for me when that incident happened where Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated. I was in Delhi and it shook me. Before Rajiv Gandhi, even Indira Gandhi was also assassinated. So, you know, I was in Delhi during both the tragic events. This happened and, you know, it completely shook me, especially Rajiv Gandhi's assassination. Since then, I was always reading newspapers and articles about and following what was happening in this South Asian part of the world between Sri Lanka, Tamil Nadu and the central government here in India and who all were interested in this particular politics, geopolitics, you can say.

Madras Café still feels urgent and unrehearsed?

It's a film where I didn't know where I was heading. One, because it was a very, very difficult subject and it involved real people, real names, which was difficult at that time because I didn't have a backing of any book or something because it was purely based on newspaper articles that I have read. And basically political essays from that time.

So, how did you solve this crisis of substantiation?

So, me and Somnath Dey and Shubhendu Bhattacharya and two of my dear friends again from Chennai, Sadapathy and Mahesh, we all sat together and started working on this script for a long time. Because it was in my head and I could just pour to them whatever I had in my head. And then the script actually, the politics of it actually came from Somnath Dey and Shubhendu. Of course, then came Juhi also to write the dialogues of the film because we had to crack the dialogues in Hindi and somewhere felt not to feel like, you know, feel very natural how R & AW operated at that time and on field.

R & AW was not part of our cinematic universe back then

Madras Cafe is one of those first films which involved RAW, you know, and also the special forces and how they played the world politics. I mean, it was a path-breaking film 12 years back, but when I still watch it, it still feels quite pioneering. The reason being, when the assassination happened and then we started researching about it, we found there were many, many loopholes. Who all were involved? There were loopholes in that. Was there a foreign hand? Was there, you know, the Tamil, the revolutionary force, the LTTE? So, there were many articles written, many kinds of things happened, many which were unexplained. So, being a filmmaker, taking a very central line and not get opinionated about it and present it with as much authenticity as possible, that's what I tried. That was a huge challenge.

At one point, you decided to shelve Madras Café?

Yes, at some point, I thought of not making it, you know. While we were almost halfway through the film, I said, no, it's a very difficult film. I won't be able to pull it through. But then, it was an everyday affair. We had to recreate the entire Sri Lankan Jaffna in Kerala, in Tamil Nadu and the RAW part of it we shot it in Delhi.

This remains one of John Abraham’s most understated performances

I still think that it was John's best. John Abraham was all there; he was also aware of this scenario because he was also growing up at that time when he heard this.

A tough film to make?

The most important also fact was Ronnie coming in and backing me, Ronnie Lahiri, my producer friend. It really takes guts to produce this kind of film at that time. But we both wish we could have named real people but we had to take a lot of clearances and, you know, what you call the rights and all that was too much of a headache. So, we had to, use fake names. So, yeah, I just regret that sometimes. I wish I had used real names.

Also Read: Shoojit Sircar on Abhishek Bachchan’s Melbourne win: “He melted into the character completely”

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