Star Power

Srijit Mukherjee,like several of our clan,grew up worshipping Satyajit Ray’s Nayak. Arindam’s anguish,fears,obsessions are engraved in the Bengali sensibility like nothing else is. So when Mukherjee decided to make his first film,it was difficult to drive it out of his subconscious. “That’s when I decided to pay a tribute to the stalwarts of Bengali cinema – Satyajit Ray and Uttam Kumar. It’s just twice that the giants have together – once for Chiriakhana and once for Nayak,” says Mukherjee. Autograph revolves around a successful actor who with time has turned into a loner,as aspiring actress and a director who is an outsider in the industry. Nayak is the film that the young director in Autograph,tries to re-interpret in a contemporary setting.

“Nayak is almost like a backdrop in my film. The main thread of the narrative doesn’t bear any resemblance to Ray’s classic,” says Mukherjee. The cast of the film includes Prosenjit Chatterjee,Nandana Sen and Indraneil Chatterjee. Prosenjit was the obvious choice when it came to playing the superstar. “He would play himself on screen. In a Bengali film,choosing Prosenjit for such a character is but obvious,” says Mukherjee.

Indraneil,who plays a young director trying to make inroads into the film industry,was chosen because he is a face not over exploited according to Mukherjee.

Mukherjee maintains that Nayak cannot be remade,it’s a classic. But for a Bengali filmmaker,it’s also difficult to resist the temptation of interpreting Nayak his own way.

Since,Autograph is not a complete re-interpretation of Nayak,Mukherjee was not apprehensive of the film’s reception. “If I was remaking a classic like Don or Dev D,I would have been apprehensive. But since Nayak is more like a sub plot in the film,the challenges are less.” “However,since the director,created by me in the film re-interprets Nayak,I get an opportunity to place Nayak in our times and talk about it,” says Mukherjee.

Mukherjee’s Nayak does digress a little from the original but the director refuses to divulge the details as of now. “Since the film is set in the present time and is being directed by a young director,it has to reflect his vision and also our times,” he adds.