{"id":51912,"date":"2012-10-20T18:39:46","date_gmt":"2012-10-20T18:39:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/test.tehelka.com\/?p=51912"},"modified":"2012-10-20T18:39:46","modified_gmt":"2012-10-20T18:39:46","slug":"like-films-science-uses-known-facts-to-create-a-new-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/like-films-science-uses-known-facts-to-create-a-new-world\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Like films, science uses known facts to create a new world\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Q&A<\/span>\u00a0Bedabrata Pain,<\/strong>\u00a0Filmmaker
\nAFTER 18 YEARS<\/strong>\u00a0as a NASA scientist\u00a0Bedabrata Pain<\/strong>\u00a0(48) makes his directorial debut with\u00a0<\/em>Chittagong,\u00a0a film about the 1930 Uprising where young men and women, led by schoolteacher Surya Sen, took on the British Empire. Pain talks to\u00a0Aradhna Wal<\/strong>\u00a0about recreating history and reaching for the arts via science.<\/em>
\nEDITED EXCERPTS<\/strong>
\n

\"Bedabrata<\/a>
Bedabrata Pain<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nHow did\u00a0Chittagong<\/em>\u00a0come about?<\/strong>
\nAs a Bengali growing up in Bengal, I was so familiar with the Chittagong Uprising, I didn\u2019t think a movie could be made of it. I\u2019d read books on it \u2014 Suresh Dey\u2019s first hand account of the Uprising\u2019s Battle of Jalalabad. Talking to a Delhi University student in 2006, I realised people from outside the state didn\u2019t know the story. As I started voicing the idea, someone told me about Subodh \u2018Jhunku\u2019 Roy, one of the participants in the struggle. I rushed to the hospital he was admitted to and met him two weeks before he died. I decided to tell this fascinating story from a boy\u2019s perspective. Manoj Bajpai (as Surya Sen) and Nawazuddin Siddiqui have meaty roles. But the frail 14-year-old that Jhunku had been, the youngest boy to pick up a gun, is the mainstay of the film.
\nWhy cinema after working with NASA for 18 years?<\/strong>
\nMy mother tells me that I was a great storyteller as a child. I\u2019m a very visual person. Even as a scientist, when I made pitches to sponsors I\u2019d keep seeing what I was saying in my mind\u2019s eye. That\u2019s what cinema is. Seeing and saying come together. My life has been the\u00a03 Idiots\u00a0<\/em>story. I was good in studies, told to go to IIT, topped my department and got an Ivy League scholarship. During my PhD, my friends and I invented the active pixel sensor and that set my life for the next 15 years. You get addicted to the work, as one would get addicted to cocaine. One day, my colleagues told me to plan for life as a chief scientist, and I had a vision of myself as doddering 60-year-old at NASA. That scared me. If I wanted to do something different with my life I\u2019d have to do it now. Much as I love science, performance arts have an excitement that science doesn\u2019t.
\nHow has the transition been?<\/strong>
\nWhat\u2019s tough is that I\u2019ve gone from being the top person in my field, to scraping the bottom of the barrel. But, luckily for me, in the past five years independent films have been given unprecedented space.
\nAs a scientist, what do you bring to film-making?<\/strong>
\nStructure. I went through 36 drafts of the screenplay, tracking each character to make sure their arcs aligned. Science is also about creativity, which many people forget. It\u2019s about using known facts to create a new world with its own logic and rules. Force will be mass into acceleration, but you can go beyond that to come up with the theory of relativity. That\u2019s how, using history, I\u2019ve brought a film into existence. Every night, as everyone else slept, I would close my eyes and think of what I wanted to see.
\nHow did you fund the film as a newcomer?<\/strong>
\nWhen I came up with the script in 2008, people loved it. Prasoon (Joshi) took it to Reliance who wanted to make the film. But, at the end of the year recession hit and I got caught. We were supposed to start shooting on 15 December 2008, but I was told that it had been put on hold. Then Ashutosh Gowarikar announced his film on the same subject(Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Sey)<\/em>\u00a0and I knew that I wasn\u2019t going to get any money. Early 2009, I got the money from my patents and put every cent into this film. I am the producer director and writer of this film. It\u2019s my baby.
\nWhat about the reports that Amitabh Bachchan stalled your film to push Gowarikar\u2019s?\u00a0<\/strong>
\nAmitabh Bachchan came and blessed my film. I\u2019ve grown up watching him and Jaya Bachchan on the screen. It was a dream come true. What more can I say?
\nAradhna Wal is a Sub-Editor with Tehelka.<\/em>
\naradhna@tehelka.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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