97th Birth Anniversary Interview of Dev Anand

Day before yesterday Saturday was the 97^th birth anniversary of the late of DEV ANAND and we at bollyy.com and Mayapuri pay our belated tribute and homage to him by reproducing an interview by JYOTHI VENKATESH that appeared for the first time in the now defunct FREE PRESS BULLETIN dated August 4, 1979, exactly 41 years ago.

The venue was the posh discotheque cellar at the Oberoi Towers. The day was last Tuesday. It was a normal working shift for the unit of Dev Anand’s Loot Maar. Devsaab was seen briskly pacing up and down the floors when I peeped in to have a chat with him. Dev was supervising the lighting arrangements and at the same time waiting for Tina Munim to report for the shooting with her make up on. A unit hand told me that Tina was doing her makeup in a suite Dev had booked upstairs in the hotel and the moment Dev was ready for the shoot, she would breeze in.

It is indeed difficult to keep pace with the energetic Devsaab. It is a treat to watch him in action as a director without the grease paint on his face. The moment he notices me sneaking into a corner of the discotheque Cellar to have a dekho at him in action, Dev is all smiles and asks me to be seated beside him. Shakti Kapoor is sitting in front of Dev awaiting instructions from him. Shakti tells me that he is playing an air force commander in the film. I wonder since when our air force has started tolerating men with unkempt and unruly long hair and silly side burns. Talking about the film, Dev said that he is confident that Loot Maar would turn out to be one of the biggest money spinners of the year 1980. “It is almost complete. By the end of this year, I plan to complete the film and release it early next year.”

Even though Dev had shot the film earlier at Simla with Tina and even had a few schedules at the Mehboob Studios and then Film City with Simple, Mehmood etc, he has booked the discotheque Cellar for two days. I asked him whether there was any necessity to shoot the film at a five star hotel disco like The Cellar at immense cost. “I needed a disco where I can shoot the scene in which Tina is dancing with her friends and Shakti Kapoor is eyeing her on the floor. I went and saw for myself each and every disco in Bombay but ultimately found only this one the ideal one for my film because there are secluded corners where Amjad Khan can sit and observe Tina without Tina knowing that she is being slyly and stealthily watched.”

“Aren’t you afraid of  the Censors clamping down on violence since your film boasts of  not one  but as many as seven villains- Amjad Khan, Prem Chopra, Shakti Kapoor, Sudhir, Ranjeet, Ajit and Narendranath?”, I ask Dev. Dev almost blows his top when the word Censors is mentioned . He is naturally sore that the Censors had certified his Des Pardes for Adults Only just because he showed the bar as the backdrop of the film.

“Loot Maar will deal with violence. I want to show that as long as there are positives in the world; negatives also will continue to exist. Raakhi plays my wife in the film. She gets killed and the track of revenge starts. Violence is the mainstream of life. If violence does not exist, how can one glorify non violence? Nobody can or for that matter should set out to prevent a filmmaker from making what he has conceived. Governments may come and go but filmmaking will continue to remain an obsession with me.”

Why do you not work for outside producers these days? Is it because the offers have stopped coming your way? I ask him gingerly.  “As an actor, ab mazaa nahin aata hain. Aaj kal scripts are never ready and money arrangements are not good. If some worthwhile offer is coming my way, I do not rule out the possibility of my taking up an acting assignment. I acted in Lashkar because I knew the producers Jagdish and Kadar Kashmiri then. Though I am acting in Aman Ke Farishtay, the film has been plodding on for the past five years and I do not know when it will see the light of the day”.

Looking back at your illustrious career as an actor and filmmaker how do you assess yourself and your growth during these last four decades? “Look here. I have grown in films. I am still a child of cinema. I enjoy what I do. Others think in terms of dus lagaya magar bees nikala. I cannot think of any profession other than films. How can I get out of it? I cannot sell meat or potatoes. Can I? By and large, I work in my own pictures. I do not seek roles as an actor or films as a director outside. I do not have the time to look back. I am concerned about what I am doing as an actor in my current pictures, whether the critics or for that matter, the audiences accept it or not, because their norms of judgment are quite different from that of mine”.

What do you think of the audience? “Unpredictability is the name of the audience. A wave of raves comes all of a sudden. I am used to what people say. I take it philosophically. I think over the years, I have mellowed down, though temperamentally today I am the same as I was say 40 years ago. Over the years I have slowed down my pace. In my entire career as an actor, I think I must have acted in only around 100 films. In the last 20 years, I did very few films either as an actor or as a filmmaker. If I wanted to, I could have owned the entire city of Bombay by signing on films left right and centre indiscriminatingly”.

What do you have to say to the criticism that you are a non- actor? “It is after all very easy to destroy something which has taken years to build but very difficult to construct. The so-called criticism is after all just a one man’s point of view. As long as my fans continue to look forward to a film of mine and still ask me why I am not acting in my own films, why should I pay cognizance to such hollow criticism?

In spite of you having given him two opportunities, your son Suneil Anand could not click as an actor. Anand Aur Anand was a flop while Main Tere Liye has not seen the light of the day. Will you give him one more opportunity? I try to provoke Dev who does not fall for my bait. “As his father, I owe him one more chance. Suneil is now keen on taking up direction. I will help him make his own film and try his luck. He has already written a script for a film called Master which deals with martial arts. I have warned Suneil that he should have a good team with him to help him in the making of his film, not just a group of yes men but knowledgeable people. I intend to listen to the subject once before I okay it and then leave him to do his job the way he deems it okay. I will not interfere with what he is doing as a filmmaker. Let him learn what filmmaking is all about by his own trial and error method. It will stand him in good stead”.

Did you have to struggle to get your first break with Hum Ek Hain? For two years, I had struggled in Bombay. I survived because I had strong will power and steely nerves. Did you know that at that time I was living in chawls in Bombay, commuting by trains and buses,  hopping in and out of trams doing odd jobs in the military census for a monthly salary of Rs 150 which was considered princely  in those days before The World War II? The World war ended in 1945. I was staying in this very same place as a paying guest of an elderly aunt in a wooden structure (He takes me to the window and points out to a skyscraper nearby where the wooden structure used to remain at one time)

What do you think about the challenges posed by satellite and cable? “As a filmmaker, you have got no other alternative but to accept it gracefully with all its challenges. Yes. It can be detrimental because it cuts into your revenues as a producer but do not forget that it also increases your audiences manifold. In the long run, any film will make more money even if it loses in the initial stages. If your film has a universal appeal, you can recover your cost from additional ancillary avenues like the cable and satellite and yet make quality films which have a worldwide standard. There is no doubt about this”.

What has the film industry taught you? “It has taught me what I am today. It has given me a hell of a lot of experience, not only as an actor, but also as a writer, producer and director. There are no set rules, canons of how it functions because it is very unpredictable as far as the box office is concerned. Today with four decades of experience behind me, I am a wiser man. I am very much in the know of what is happening. Making a film, conceiving it, mounting it, introducing new and bright people with it, distributing it, selling it etc is a mountain of work which keeps me involved almost 15 hours a day both mentally as well as physically. I’d love to die with my boots on”.

Sadly a day after the IFFI wound up in Goa which he had visited as a chief guest, Dev Anand breathed his last in Mumbai nine years ago, on December 3, 2011. I miss him dearly every day. Adieu Dev Saab!