Indian Auteur talks to Tariq Tapa, the director of the much acclaimed independent film, Zero Bridge; as he elaborates on the method in the madness that is independent filmmaking.

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1) Tell us about the period of your growing up as a cinephile. What were the films that helped shape your initial ideas about cinema? Who and whose works were your formative influences.

It’s hard to pinpoint a beginning, but there were certain personal milestones. I can tell you I started early, as a child. I didn’t have a camera for a while, but I was drawing comics constantly, creating puppets, writing short stories and plays – and I knew that I wanted to make films eventually.

First of all, I was fortunate to be born during the start of the VHS boom, and to be living in New York City long before Mayor Giuliani’s reforms raised the rent and drove away many of the great cinephile hangouts. So, all different kinds of films were always available to almost anyone who happened to be living at that time and place. The first big discoveries for me, until I was ten or eleven were: the Fleischer Superman cartoons, Dumbo, Popeye, Batman: The Animated Series, Vertigo, The Snowman, Empire of the Sun, The Red Shoes, Goodfellas, The Red Balloon, and The Purple Rose of Cairo.

Second, I was fortunate to have an encouraging mother, who is an artist, and though we had very little money, she made every effort to make things available to me. My parents and I watched Jewel in the Crown when it aired on TV in 1985, and they took me to see the four hour re-release of Lawrence of Arabia at the Ziegfeld Theater, partly because my dad bore more than a passing resemblance to Omar Sharif. I was probably five or six years old, but I remember the part in the middle when Daud drowns in the quicksand and Lawrence is powerless to do anything except watch his friend die right in front of him. God that was so terrifying that I just remember sobbing so loud right there in the theater. After that, my mother got a VHS camcorder, and I started using it to make meaningless little short movies, having to edit in camera. Editing, however crudely, was my first real taste of power as a kid, and that helped make the world seem a little less scary. I started watching movies every day, and the movies I sought out were the ones that had a point of view, and which told a story that felt honest to somebody’s experience. The movies that meant the most to me (and the kind I decided I wanted to make) were like that. So, I can mark certain periods of my life based on what I was seeing.

At age eleven I went to the theater alone to see Woody Allen’s Manhattan and then I saw Taxi Driver at Film Forum. That was a day I’ll never forget. What a revelation to see those two movies, side-by-side, because they really captured everything that could be said about what it was like to live in New York City at that time, the romance and the terror. It wasn’t just about going to the movies anymore: those movies really were about things I felt everyday but couldn’t express myself, and which nothing else around me was even attempting to express. And that was when I realized that someone actually made those movies, and that that person felt the way I did. It was like magic.

My mother had a book of Pauline Kael reviews, which was useful for tracking down titles to see. So I began working through the lineage of directors. From then until fourteen, other big movies for me were: M, Dog Day Afternoon, The Blue Angel, The Conversation, Belle de Jour, Barry Lyndon, Casino, The Good The Bad and the Ugly, Pinocchio, Seven, Crimes and Misdemeanors, The Vanishing, The Wild Bunch, Paris Texas, Unforgiven, Nights of Cabiria, Chinatown, A Woman Under the Influence, and Long Day’s Journey Into Night. My best friend in school heard me raving about Network one day, and so even though he wasn’t really a film fan, for my fourteenth birthday he actually went out and got me Lumet’s book Making Movies. That was a life-changing book. (And a life-changing friend). Near the beginning of the book, Lumet mentions his favorite director: Kurosawa. So, I went and saw my first Kurosawa, which was Yojimbo. And that led to buying a paperback copy of Kurosawa’s autobiography, which really changed my life. After reading that book I came up with my life’s plan, according to the advice to aspiring directors Kurosawa gives in the book’s appendix. And I realized recently that in almost fifteen years since that milestone, I haven’t really changed or deviated much from that life plan. So you see, I’m actually very lucky to have had such encouragement. People don’t encourage each other nearly enough, when just a little bit goes such a long way.

Of course, there have been many other great directors I’ve gorged through since – Capra, Ozu, Lang, Olmi, Melville, Cassavetes, Rossellini, Renoir, Kubrick, Bresson – but no other living director I’ve come across has been able to improve upon Kurosawa’s very simple and useful advice from 30 years ago. (Actually, there is one living person who actually surpasses Kurosawa’s advice and talent, and that is David Milch, who as the writer-producer of 400 hours – equal to 200 feature films – of some of the greatest television drama ever, now leaves even some of our best film directors in the dust. But I digress.) But why so few people who want to direct have apparently not read Kurosawa’s book is really a mystery to me. If you want to make films and you’re reading this right now then for God’s sake stop reading this and go get a copy of that book and keep it with you!

2) How much do you think your education at CalArts has influenced your filmmaking aesthetic, which is far more typical of say, an Iranian or a Eastern European film; than of an Indian film? Also, was it a conscious decision to distinguish yourself from the run-of-the-mill Indian film?

I enjoyed my time at CalArts a great deal, but it’s difficult to say what its influences were on me compared to anything else going on in my life. Thankfully, the school doesn’t have a “house style” to which it expects the students to conform. Zero Bridge was written, planned, and filmed on the other side of the world, so probably the one thing I was influenced by during my time at CalArts was the encouragement to take risks, to be bold and fall on my face. Looking back, I don’t think I did that nearly enough. But by the time I graduated I think I had broken the ice with myself more than when I started. Because of that it was a good experience and I’m grateful to those who shared their time and skills with me.

In general I try not to watch run-of-the-mill films (from any country) so I can’t say I was reacting against the ones from India, per se. All I wanted was to tell a story.

But I think nationality is a useless way of classifying directors, because the truth is that it’s a director’s point-of-view, finally, that distinguishes one film from another. And point-of-view is the only thing that stands the test of time and transcends nationality.  How else could you explain why Satyajit Ray, De Sica, and Renoir have more in common with each other than they do with their fellow countrymen?

In fact, cinema is the history of people (mostly men, sadly) who constantly borrow from and inspire one another, in endless permutations. It’s not necessarily the finished films themselves that inspire: often it’s a person’s process, or attitude, or perceptions. In my case, the extent to which people want to point out that Zero Bridge bears the traces of Ermanno Olmi is absolutely fine with me, but it’s beside the point. (For one thing, even when Maestro Olmi himself saw Zero Bridge with me at the Venice Film Festival, he didn’t agree at all with my claims that certain scenes of mine were lifted directly from his films!). So you see, the deeper truth is not in the question of one’s influences but in one’s own point-of-view.

3) What led to your choice of the digital medium as the format to shoot your film on? What is the camera you used, and what other equipment did you employ? Do you believe, thus, that digital cinema is the way to go for the independent filmmaker in the future?

I used the DVX100B, three G-Tech external hard drives, three Sennheiser microphones (one shotgun and two lavs), a set of binaural microphones, a Mini-Disc recorder, and a 13” MacBook without the video card. Everything fit in one carry-on backpack, for the cost of what the average person spends on a car.

Economic and logistical necessity drives every decision on every film that anybody makes anywhere. That’s always a given. The real question is how to turn a problem of spirit into a problem of technique? How to turn something you are forced to choose into something you actually want? In the case of Zero Bridge I chose 24p DV because 1) I knew I would have the most freedom financially, technically and logistically for making a film with no crew in Kashmir, 2) it handles close-ups very well, which is how I knew I wanted to shoot my story, and 3) it converts to 24 frame HDCam quite easily during post-production, for creating high-res exhibition masters.

Digital is already here. This question is settled. All post-production is digital, all delivery platforms are digital, more and more theaters are converting to digital. The quality, quantity, and versatility of codecs are increasing at a geometric rate. Soon, all imaging will be digital too, and celluloid will occupy the same role as vinyl records: kept alive for a small but devoted following.

Personally, I’m glad that The Vinyl Record That Is Celluloid Release Printing is finally on its way out. Film is obscenely expensive to shoot, develop, and print. So only wealthy or lucky people get to tell stories and get them seen. Besides, it’s a reckless format that allows a careless lab to ruin the one film roll with the one magical take. It forces the production to interrupt actors’ concentration every few minutes just to reload film magazines, when the actors should be the most important equipment on the set. Just to handle film you must have extra people around, which means the whole set works more slowly. In fact, film itself is really what has made actual filmmaking so damned cumbersome all these years. Digital means freedom. That doesn’t mean a director should be wasteful or lazy with these freedoms. Indeed some digital filmmakers are lazy and they are the ones that give digital a bad name. But except for the rarest projects (like IMAX), a film’s potential should never be compromised by something as mundane and arbitrary as how much shooting stock is available. Imagine if a novel’s length were determined by how much paper the writer could afford! If paper is cheap for writers, and if paint is reasonably affordable for artists, then so should image stock be for filmmakers. Now it finally is. And it’s only going to get better.

Besides, think of how painting was revolutionized once paint factories developed the technology of putting paint in cheap little tubes, and how that liberated painters worldwide to paint outdoors and without a gaggle of assistants. Could a genius as poor and irascible as Van Gogh have been able to paint without the saving grace of being born during such a revolution? Digital puts everything into a backpack and gives complete control to the maker. Digital made a rarity like Zero Bridge possible, because it affords the most valuable currency of them all, which is time. Time not eaten away on relighting and reloading for film is time spent on the story and performances. And I think digital democratizes the medium and liberates it from wasting precious time to the extent that cinema finally has a chance now to grow up, to let new people sit at the adult’s table.

4) We noticed while watching the film that you were constantly trying to subvert the conventional cinematic notion of Kashmir – that of an insurgency-ridden state which is under constant turmoil and where life only revolves around one topic, which is terrorism – a notion that films like Mission Kashmir and Fanaa try to strengthen. While insurgency is one of the vague subtexts in your film, you seem to be more interested in presenting the people in Kashmir as having, first of all, human concerns, and only then, larger social concerns – just like people in any other corner of the world.

No, I wasn’t interested in subverting anything, because life anywhere is always about survival, period. I haven’t seen those other films you named. As I mentioned, I am strictly interested in storytelling, which means being true to the behavior of the fictional characters. The fictional people in the film wouldn’t be likely to have a strong political consciousness because as you said, they have human concerns. But not because I’m making a statement such as “people in Kashmir are people too” but simply because these are fictional characters and that’s how they behave.

By contrast, some actual living people that I have met who are Indian or of Indian-origin already have strong opinions about Kashmir and terrorism, which they use to judge this film whether or not they have actually seen it first. But after listening to them talk I get the sense that few of them have actually been to Kashmir, beyond more than a few days as tourists. I must say, although I live in America I would bet that I’ve probably spent more actual time in Kashmir than those who have been the most vocal about my film’s politics. But that’s okay, they’re entitled to their opinions. Mark Twain said, “In matters of politics and religion, most people’s opinions are gotten second-hand from third-rate sources.”

Regarding those people who aren’t familiar with Kashmir but who still liked the film by saying it feels like “a truer depiction of life,” then that simply reflects the power of art, rather than the power of politics. It means that the film’s storytelling was what touched their emotions, not their prior knowledge of Kashmir. In fact, whenever we as audience members bond emotionally to a story, we articulate the response verbally by saying: “That’s real, that’s what life is really like.” Even when a story is set in outer space, if the audience bonds emotionally to the story, they walk away saying: “Of course, that’s what outer space is really like!” In fact, Kashmir might as well be in outer space, as far as the rest of the world is concerned. But I believe that we are, above all, emotional beings, and our brains construct all kinds of justifications to explain what we feel but can’t describe rationally. How else could you explain the utter irrationality of someone who has never been to Kashmir saying: “I know now what it’s really like to live there.”

5) Why do you believe a film like Zero Bridge still remains unreleased? We seem to think that it is an important film about Kashmir – much important that the ones which only confirm the populist notions about the people of your state. It is a truer depiction of the state and its people than all those films. Do you feel cheated that it still does not get a mainstream release as such?

No, I don’t feel cheated at all. I’m proud of the work we did, and the film has had a much wider response than we ever imagined when we made it, which bodes well for future films I want to make. Regarding Zero Bridge, distributors have said they liked the film a lot but don’t understand how to market it, which I confess I don’t understand because it’s already pretty obvious who the immediate audience would be and how they can be reached without great expense. Not to mention the crossover audience the film has found internationally with audiences who just like world cinema. Right now, there are some tentative discussions about doing a Limited Edition DVD release. We want to just make the film available for people who want to see it, and that may help with a limited theatrical release. But it’s very tentative right now. We’ll be posting updates through our Facebook page and our website.

6) One of the more important themes in the film is the suppression of an individual desire in order to fulfill a social role – Dilawar being consistently made to fend for his uncle, and Bani for her family, in a move reminiscent of Maria Full of Grace. What attracted you to this particular theme? And also of the consequent unsuccessful rebellion by these two against the circumstances?

You mentioned Maria Full of Grace. After Zero Bridge was completed but before it premiered, Paul Mezey, one of the producers of Maria, became an executive producer of Zero Bridge, and he’s been extremely savvy about navigating this little film out into the big world.

Yes, you’ve touched upon an idea that is part of a larger theme I’m interested in, which I would call “the weight of the past on present behavior.” To me, that is the real subject of every story, because it is the secret subject of everyone’s life, including mine. When explored in a setting such as present-day Kashmir, that theme resulted in Zero Bridge. Right now I’m in the midst of writing something where that theme is set in a much different world: the early days of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Settings are really just pretexts for enacting the human drama. If you take a biological view of man, you realize that human behavior never changes however much societies do.

7) You have cited Bicycle Thieves as one of the major influences on the film. Elaborate on that.

It wasn’t the film itself that I found most inspiring, although of course it is perfectly made. But to me it’s the ideas that film presents which liberated me in a similar way that seeing Taxi Driver did when I was eleven. Basically, both films, however perfectly-crafted as stories, are ultimately trying to achieve a higher purpose, which is to engage with the world around them. Those movies made me realize that there are really only two kinds of directors: those who are basically interested in the world, and those who are basically interested only in themselves.

The ones interested in themselves make movies that are usually about other movies they have seen, seen through the prism of the director’s own personality tics. And those movies are really for an audience of people with similar concerns, which basically is why they go see them: to reaffirm themselves. By now, I’ve realized that I will never fit in with that crowd.

But I feel a kinship with the directors interested in the world. For one thing, they are harder to pin down, because they tend to make themselves disappear into the work. That isn’t to say that those directors interested in the world only choose to make “realistic” films. (Kubrick is a perfect example of someone interested in the world but whose work is dreamlike). But it is to say that they aren’t just making films for films’ sake. They aren’t made just to appeal to one’s small immediate circle of friends, colleagues, critics, bosses, teachers, or neighbors. They are made to be in conversation with as many people as possible; ideally, with the whole world. Those directors choose to speak straight from the heart because they know that what comes from the heart goes to the heart. And if cinema has one distinct advantage over every other narrative form, it’s that it more immediately accesses the pre-verbal, subconscious emotions. Because pure cinema is not restricted by language. Only music can achieve the same immediate power, can produce the same energy in the viewer/listener. (Kurosawa mentions this).

I believe that there really is an energy felt from a work of art. I’ll give you an example. Let’s say that a film (whether it’s Sleeping Beauty or Seven Samurai, it doesn’t matter) made by someone from another time and place is viewed and enjoyed by someone else – you – in another time and place. Even though the filmmaker is not with you in the room when you watch it, when something – even if it’s bizarre or disturbing –speaks to your inner life, that lifts you up. Doesn’t it? You feel alive, alert. You feel – briefly – part of something.

When that happens, it means that some force had to have given that spark rise, to allow it to cross the distance of space-time to make itself emotionally vital to someone whom the artist never met and maybe never will meet. Yet, a connection was made, however improbable and ineffable. And I think that that whole process just defies rational explanation. It can’t be commoditized or politicized or owned. But it can absolutely be felt, when it happens, and it happens of its own accord. And that kind of almost-religious experience scares people because it’s so personal and emotional. People are ashamed to talk about it without seeming old-fashioned or crazy, so they usually assume a posture of irony to protect them from being mocked. Because we live in a world that suffers from the absence of secular faith – a genuinely questioning perspective which is unpolluted by fundamentalism or commerce, but where people can still seek something greater than themselves. The absence of this is now the reason why secular people, whether they realize it or not, turn to art. Even those who don’t believe in God still want to find something meaningful to do with their time on this planet. Art is the place to connect, even if it’s a disturbing connection. And the most alive art form, to me at least, is cinema.

That’s why I’ve chosen to work within a mass medium, because I’m taken with the idea that art can be the vessel for shaping experience into truth. Whenever anybody picks up a camera and tries to give shape to experience, it proves the validity of the idea that cinema can be a bridge to humanity, even if that bridge leads to the darkest parts of our nature. Someone said that the highest possible compliment to give to a work of art is to say that it’s not only beautiful but that it’s useful. Well, what could be more useful than something that shows you that there is a way back into the world?

Tags: Indian Cinema, Issue no-8 2010, Tariq Taqa, Zero Bridge

Posted By IndianAuteurTm | Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 | Filed under Cover Story, Interviews