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Ayan Mukerji’s debut movie is about Generation Yawn, reports Suhani Singh.
“My biggest fear in life was that I’d really amount to nothing and do nothing,” said 26-year-old Ayan Mukerji, director of the forthcoming Wake Up Sid. The hero of his debut feature shares that fear. Sid (Ranbir Kapoor) is 21, fresh out of college and loath to start working any time soon. Wake up Sid is the story of Sid’s journey from adolescence to adulthood – and of Mukerji’s own conquest of his aimlessness. “Part of the script is drawn from my experiences, from the films that I have watched and the books that I have read,” Mukerji said. “It is a very personal film.”
The movie also stars Konkona Sen Sharma as a writer with a Time Out Mumbai-style magazine called Mumbai Beat. Written in 2007 after Mukerji spent a year bumming around, Wake Up Sid’s screenplay created considerable buzz within the film industry even before Dharma Productions put it on the floors. Part of the expectation stems from Mukerji’s lineage. He is from the famous family of actors and producers – his father is actor-producer Debu Mukerji, his uncle is actor Joy Mukherjee (Ayan Mukerji spells his surname differently), and his cousins are Kajol and Rani Mukherjee. Ayan Mukerji wears his film connections lightly, and considers himself a product of conte-mporary and world cinema rather than of the romances and melodramas that made his relatives famous.
“I don’t know what happened in the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, I only know about them theoretically,” Mukerji said. “I pretend to have watched Sholay when people talk about it because I feel embarrassed to admit that I haven’t seen it. My Sholay was Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge.” Among his favourite directors are American indie darlings Sofia Coppola, Wes Anderson and Alexander Payne. But can a director weaned on such determinedly offbeat movies as Coppola’s Lost in Translation and Payne’s Sideways connect with mainstream Indian audiences? “That’s a constant fear,” Mukerji admitted. “But you just do what you gotta do. You take a chance because you feel it is better than being false or trying to do something for someone else and not enjoying yourself.”
Wake Up Sid’s coming-of-age tale has drawn comparisons with Farhan Akhtar’s similarly-themed Dil Chahta Hai and Lakshya. Mukerji said DCH is a film he deeply admires, so the chatter that his film is tribute to Akhtar’s 2001 movie doesn’t bother him. “I don’t think Farhan and I are the same people, so I’m sure our films will also be different,” Mukerji said. “I haven’t tried to consciously make it different from any film. I really think that that every film is very individualistic.”
Wake Up Sid opens on Fri Oct 2.
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