Laila Majnu director Sajid Ali on brother Imtiaz: Film couldn't have been made without him

Debutant director Sajid Ali — a self-confessed unsocial and unromantic person — is candid enough to declare that he made  Laila Majnu  to please his filmmaker brother Imtiaz Ali , writer-director of intense love stories such as Rockstar and Tamasha. “My brother excels in man-woman relationship, whereas I have no clue about it. That doesn’t come to me naturally. I wouldn’t have been able to make Laila Majnu if not for him. A good romance is one of the highest forms of cinema and I don’t have the intellectual capability of my brother, or his poetry to justify something like that on my own. If I didn’t have my comfort and knew that I have an Imtiaz (creative director on the project) who I can go to whenever I get stuck while writing — to understand what this romance is all about, Laila Majnu wouldn’t have happened. It would be safe to say that he has directed me and I have directed this film,” says Sajid. [caption id=“attachment_5142071” align=“alignnone” width=“825”] Sajid Ali (L) and brother Imtiaz Ali. YouTube screengrab[/caption] So where does Sajid’s interest lie? “Politics interests me, society interests me, people interest me. I like to replicate what I see. Imtiaz takes you to that cinematic experience whereas I have to struggle to be cinematic. But I wanted to try my hands at romance. I can’t be a loser and say, ‘I will never be able to do romance, I don’t know the genre’. I have always tried to be like Imtiaz, mostly failed but still tried. So here the stakes were high for me, I didn’t want to disappoint Imtiaz,” says Sajid, further adding, “But Laila Majnu is more than a love story. It is a story about passion. It is about going crazy in love, it is not just love. The craziness came to me naturally and that I enjoyed. It’s actually liberated me and changed me forever for the rest of my life. I don’t fear people anymore by the virtue of this film.” Sajid says that the germ of the idea to film this modern take on the legendary story came in the form of a few scenes from Imtiaz, “which had to be contemporised and set in Kashmir”. “We then had to begin the casting process. I had the reservation of working with established actors because I am myself new, and secondly, we wanted fresh faces as we had to present to the world Laila and Majnu and not somebody playing Laila and Majnu. We wanted that freshness to remain and not get diluted under the weight of some established heavy-weights,” says the director, who has also written the film’s script along with Imtiaz. However, both, writing as well as casting for Laila Majnu was a long and tedious process, says the director. “Our casting went on for many years. Avinash (Tiwary)  was among the first guys I had liked and he was short-listed for about two years. And because of that, I thought we will get someone still better for the female lead, so we took another two years to find the girl,” says Sajid. And while talking about his selection of Tiwary, who made his Bollywood debut in the light-hearted Tu Hai Mera Sunday (2016) and also has a vast experience in theatre, television, short films, Sajid said, “I wanted a man, not a boy. There are many boys, young, nice, sweet but we lack men. I wanted a man with a strong face. Someone with a good personality, who exuberates strength and obviously a good actor. Avinash has both these qualities in good measure. He is actually going to surprise people. Theatre and anything he has done in life has helped him become what he is today. I was lucky to have an actor like him as it made my job much easier. If in execution, an actor doesn’t meet up to what we have written and imagined, then all your efforts go in vain. Avinash raised the bar. We pushed him really hard because he had the scope. He is not pretentious.” [caption id=“attachment_4814111” align=“alignnone” width=“825”] Poster of Laila Majnu. Twitter/@ektaravikapoor[/caption] “But”, he continues, “We found the girl towards the end when we had begun our pre-production. I had to leave for my recce but there was no use for a recce if we didn’t have the female lead. I remember, two days before I left, we locked her. Tripti (Dimri) is very spontaneous and an intelligent girl. Her first take is always special.” However, a contemporary retelling of the story and showing a reckless lover in present times when people don’t think twice before breaking up and moving on, was the most challenging part, revealed Sajid. “To show Majnu going mad, that was the challenge with this film. That is why I wrote this film for three years (laughs). It wasn’t an easy film to write. It doesn’t come naturally to me to imagine and be so creative about it. I like to keep it real so how can I write something which is unreal,” he says. Also, retaining the classical part of the story was utmost difficult, says the writer-director. “If I tell you that there is actually a sequence in the film where Laila’s messenger is a pigeon, she ties a letter to a pigeon’s leg to reach her lover, and that she feels love through the feeling of the pigeon. Obviously when I go to a production house and narrate this sequence, they will laugh at me. Nobody will invest in something that is so dated. The challenge in this film was to keep all that. Problem in scripting occurred because we wanted to keep that pigeon being the messenger part. We couldn’t change anything because Imtiaz had given strict orders to retain those things for that classical feel,” adds the director. Sajid, who has taken 10 years to make his first film, hasn’t decided about his next project, but he hopes his slice-of-life film Banana, which was made for John Abraham’s production company five years back, sees the light of the day. The film hasn’t found release yet. “I have been constantly working since 2008. I was constantly writing but many of these films didn’t get made except for Cocktail for which I wrote dialogues,” says Sajid while accepting that being Imtiaz’s kid brother definitely gets him in the eye but nothing more. “It makes you more accessible, gets you in the radar but it doesn’t ensure anything. You will be able to meet people, and whoever meets you, especially those who know their job, would know if you are deserving or not. But the biggest takeaway for me is the work ethics that I have learnt from Imtiaz which will set me up for a long time,” he concludes.