Encounters Specialist

Filmmaker RITESH BATRA puts ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances and makes it believable through his storytelling

- Priyanka Bhadani

When filmmaker Ritesh Batra started writing Photograph, his fourth film, in 2013, the biggest challenge was to make it believable. The story is about a unique bond between a photographer at the Gateway of India, Rafi(Nawazuddin Siddiqui), and Miloni (Sanya Malhotra), a middle-class Gujarati. Rafi, who is originally from Uttar Pradesh, is being pressured to get married by his grandmother. And, after he clicks a picture of Miloni, he convinces the reticent girl to pose as his fiancée.

It could be described as a rich girl-meets-poor boy love story. “We have seen many of those in India—a motor mechanic falling for a rich saheb’s daughter,” says Batra, 38. It is not by chance then that Teesri Manzil becomes a crucial part of the film “A lot of drama followed in those films, from kidnapping to fight scenes. But, there was never an attempt to make it believable,” he says.

And, if it were not believable, the film would have lasted for only seven minutes, he says. “To really sell this story, we needed to bring that curiosity in both the characters for the life of the other character,” says Batra. “In our country, or perhaps in any place in the world, bankers and plumbers are never going to grab a drink together. That is just a fact. Maybe in America it is possible because a white-collar kid and a blue-collar kid went to the same school. But if you think of the United Kingdom, never! It is such a classist society. In our country, neither. We, too, are a very classist society.” Batra does not blink an eye before saying this. “The relationship that you see in the movie would never happen in real life, anywhere in the world,” he says.