Ram Gopal Verma made gangster classics like Shiva, Gayam, Satya, Company to attain the name, he enjoys today. He shared many interesting and intriguing things about Shiva for more than 10 years now. He never talked such passionately about his other movies but he decide to do so, on the eve of Satya completing 20 years. Here is his full truth behind making Satya, without any edits from our side. Believe us, it is an intriguing read.
“On the eve of SATYA completing 20 years I looked back upon it and a ray of sunshine fell across my various fond memories of it and I started remembering the origins of its various aspects . When I first came to Bombay from Hyderabad to shoot Rangeela in 94 I couldn’t get over the experience of a train ride I had through the Dharavi slums. It looked like one single roof and I wondered how people live there, .. I saw children 2-years old crawling just about 3 feet away from the railway track while the trains were rushing to and fro. I was fascinated by many such shocking examples of this large but ultra congested city,where the super rich and downright poor lived side by side Once in a while in due course of me living there I used to hear the word Underworld.
I heard about Dawood Ibrahim and some other gangsters names because of the serial blasts which happened a year before in 93 . But I never consciously thought about what exactly the underworld is?
Then one day I was sitting in a Producer’s office and he got this call that a prominent person was shot dead by some gang. The producer was telling me that the person who was killed,woke up around 7.00am and had called him in the morning and said that at 8.30 am he was supposed to meet some friend of his and then he will come to meet him but he was killed around 9
People have this habit of recounting each and every moment what happened before someone met with a violent unexpected death. While the producer was talking, since I have this tendency all the time to think cinematically, I thought “If the person who got shot woke up at 7 o’clock, then at what time would have the killer woken up? Did he tell his mom to wake him up because he has some work to do? Did he have his breakfast before killing or after killing?” These things were coming into my head because I was trying to intercut the moments of the man who died with the man who killed. Then it suddenly struck me that we always hear about these gangsters only when they either kill or when they die. But what do they do in between? That was the first thought of mine which eventually resulted in Satya.
While being in that frame of mind, I saw some photographs in Times of India of arrested gangsters covered with black cloth on their head. Seeing their thin hands and mostly lean frames , nothing about them looked like how Bollywood portrays the bad guys. They are like any other ordinary people. The guy walking on the road could be a gangster. Even the guy living next door could be a gangster. The whole point of it is that they have to mix up in the society and look like anybody else so as to operate in secrecy
A friend of mine who lives in Oshiwara on the fourteenth floor, told me about an instance. A guy lived in his building somewhere in a flat above him. My friend used to bump into this guy in the building’s lift once in a while. And they used to exchange pleasantries, “Hello, how are you? Happy Diwali” etc. And then one day my friend’s wife told him that this guy has been arrested and taken away . The thing about Mumbai is that you may live for years and years in a building and yet have no idea who your neighbour is? That was where I got the Urmila’s track for Satya. The fact that Urmila’s character doesnt know who Satya really is but yet ends up in having a relationship with him.
Then one day I met a guy called Ajit Diwani an ex-secretary of Mandakni, who was at a time Dawood’s love and because of that association, Ajit reportedly knew and interacted with some of the gangsters. In my conversations with him he told me an experience he had,when he went to a gangster’s house whose brother was killed by the police. His brother also was a gangster. Ajit said that the gangster was abusing his brother’s dead body for not listening to his advice which resulted in his death. That startled me as I have never heard a reaction like that of a person abusing a dead body. Then I figured that a gangster is a rebellious power and the brother by not listening to his advice and getting himself killed, took away his brother’s power to save him and that is what brought out the anger. His grief came out as anger. I took that as the soul of Bheeku Matre’s character which reflects in the scene where Bheeku Matre abuses the dead Chander.
I went to a beer bar in Borivali to check some location and happened to meet a guy who was supposedly an ex-gangster. He made me feel very uneasy with his behavior and attitude. Then later on when I met him while I was shooting in that area, he was very friendly and he looked like a different person altogether. Then I realized that the first time I met him he was trying to play up to an image which he thought I had of him because he knew that I knew who he was. Many celebrities do that… if they think that anyone thinks very highly of them, then his or her body language changes. It happens because they tend to pretend. That is what this gangster was doing. Obviously anything you pretend you can’t sustain it for long period of time. So after some time he became normal. That’s what I took for Kallu Mama in Satya. When the builder comes to meet him, Kallu Mama basically pretends as if he is some big-time gangster… but actually he is a clown in the gang which people come to know later. Since the builder is coming with an awe that he is talking to a dangerous gangster he just creates an image to live upto it.
Then one day at a place called Bara Chawl, I met a man who supposedly belongs to Arun Gawli’s gang. There was so much of a build up that people gave me about him on how dangerous he is, but when I met him he came across as a cute guy. In every sentence he will use the name of Gawli, “Gawli bhai ne yeh kiya, Gawli bhai ne woh kiya, Gawli bhai ne mereko ghar leke diya”. So his whole existence was about his awe of Gawli and he doesn’t have any identity for himself. That I took in Chander’s character. So likewise each and every character in Satya was modeled on someone I had met or someone I had heard of . Everyone had a reference point.
Once I decided that,this is a kind of film I wanted to make, the first person who came to meet me as a writer was Anurag Kashyap. So, I got him on board and he got Saurabh Shukla. We discussed a lot but nothing was clear. So there was no script on the day we started shooting. I went half by instinct and half by Anurag’s manic way of writing highly realistic dialogue which mostly used to happen on location.
In the first scene we were shooting, this Sushant comes to Satya for hafta and Satya slashes a knife on his face. In my mind the moment he slashes would be the cutting point of the scene. But before I could say ‘cut’ Sushant screamed, and his scream startled me because I wasn’t expecting him to do that and so I forgot to say ‘cut’. Because I didn’t say ‘cut’ actor Manoj Pawa who was showing the koli improvised saying, “Oh ho pani lao paani lao”. and literally the scene made itself without anyone really planning anything ..That is when it finally dawned upon me how Satya should be made.. . All realistic performances in Satya came in because I stopped telling actors what to do. I just wanted them to improvise whatever they feel like. Actors were instructed not to follow written lines but just say whatever they feel like, so most of the times the content was told to them and they kept on improvising and I controlled it in a couple editing.
The interesting thing to note here is that the style of making not originated largely due to Sushant’s unexpected scream. If he had not screamed or if I had told him before itself that shot will cut on the slash, Satya would not have been the same.
Like I said I didn’t have a clear story. I kept on changing my mind every day about the story flow but i was very clear about the characters except for Satya ..Where Satya’s character is concerned things went wrong compared to most of the others because of my non-clarity of what the protagonist was really about . So I kept on changing it for the convenience of the plot line. Whereas Bheeku Matre, Kallu Mama, Muley… all these people could be consistent because there was nothing for them in the main plot of the film which was primarily the growth and decline of Satya affected by his love story . Satya slashes someone in cold blood in one scene and in another scene shyly smiles at Bheeku Matre after killing Jagga in the bar and when Bheeku Matre is having a fight with his wife,he stares at them like a zombie . Why did he do that? He did that because I told him “do it”. So that inconsistency was because of me.
Just on a pure chance I happened to meet Sandeep Chowtha at Nagarjuna’s home where he made me listen to a theme he had made and I simply fell in love with it and I took him on board ..Though Vishal’s songs became blockbuster hits, I think it is Sandeep’s background score which really caught the spirit of the film
So to cut a long story short,when people ask me today,if I realised that Satya would become a great film , I will have to say No
That is because great films happen and no one can make them on intention ..The proof of that is none of us, whether it’s Anurag or Manoj or me,could reach beyond Satya in the last twenty years ..if we knew how to do it, why dint we do it again ?
Lastly I want to end this article by thanking all those who contributed to Satya ..i am not trying to be modest when I say that It’s faults are solely mine and all it’s merits genuinely belong to others ..I just swam blindly through the wonderful current of energies namely Anurag, Saurabh, Manoj, Urmila, Chakri, Makrand, Vishal, Sandeep,Allan and Gerard among others and somehow accidentally managed to reach the shore of success ..This is the actual truth of SATYA “
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