Spice of life in a dabba

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“It’s the beginning of the beginning of the changing face of Indian cinema,” says Ritesh Batra, whose debut feature The Lunchbox didn’t just get rave reviews and win the Viewers’ Choice Award in the Critics’ Week segment at the recently concluded Cannes International Film Festival, but also did good business with people from across the globe buying the rights to screen the film.

With its typical Indian story, the film has already travelled to festivals around the world. Batra, who worked as a consultant with Deloitte before getting into the business of films, says that like his journey into filmmaking where he felt like a “citizen of the world”, The Lunchbox seems like that too. The film that stars Irrfan Khan, Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Nimrat Kaur, has a simple story that starts with a wrongly delivered lunchbox in the teeming city of Mumbai and becomes an agent of creating a bond between two strangers.
The filmmaker believes movies are always about understanding relationships and taking them a notch above. “If you don’t understand relationships, you shouldn’t be making films,” he remarks.
Work on the film, that was initially supposed to be a documentary, started way back in 2007. “I worked with the dabbawallahs in 2007 for a week, made friends with them and got to know many stories about the houses they picked dabbas from,” he reveals, adding that it was then that he got the idea of writing a story on his experiences.
And it wasn’t at one go that he wrote the story. “It was something that was there. I did other things in between — made other short films, wrote more scripts and kept coming back to this,” he states. He finally sat down in 2011 and wrote the first draft. “It was always something that was percolating,” he says.
Something that helped the film a lot was the international collaboration, admits Batra. Because of its quintessential storyline, the script drew a lot of attention internationally in the initial stages, bringing a lot of people to the table. Now, the film is an Indo-French-German production with a German sound designer, German composer, French colourist and American director of photography (DoP) on board. “These collaborations were pretty close and the people involved became the first audience for the film. It gave me a chance to stretch out the film to many smart people,” he says and adds that it also helped him realise that his film can travel, carrying the essence of his own country.
Some filmmakers in India often complain of a slapdash system and lack of technology in place in the Indian film industry. Asked about his views, he says, “I don’t think there’s a lack of technology. We just lack detail orientation.” He praises the Indian technicians and other experts who worked with him on the film, but having a first-hand experience with people from the international arena, he says, “They have an eye for detail. They would give their entire time to one project. In Mumbai, which is a very big, growing industry, often what happens is that people work on a lot of things simultaneously.”
Having started as an independent filmmaker, Batra has seen the other side of the industry. While he knows that the audience for intelligent, alternate cinema is growing, he also knows that there’s no mechanism in order currently to promote such films among the right people. “But it has begun. People are travelling more than before and are getting exposed to newer things. With their demands changing, we’ll see everything change,” he says.
Ask the filmmaker, who is working on his next script titled Photograph, if he would ever like to make a mainstream Bollywood masala film and he quips, “I guess Lunchbox is quite mainstream. But if mainstream means making a bad movie, then I guess I won’t.”