Bollywood Goes Hollywood
Hollywood's love affair with all things Bollywood has put one of its most notorious directors, Brett Ratner (of X-Men: The Last Stand and Rush Hour) at the helm of a remake of a major Bollywood movie — and in charge of reinterpreting Bollywood's vibrant, richly colored look for an American audience.
Kites, the original Indian-made action-thriller-romance directed by acclaimed Indian director Anurag Basu, is currently in theaters, and ranked number ten on the list of top U.S. box offices last weekend (the first time a Bollywood film has gotten that far). So the timing of Ratner's Kites, which debuts this Friday, is curious.
Even more so because the director is quick to point out that he didn’t take the movie in a vastly different direction. Every scene, he said, “had the same intention [as the original]. I just pulled it back. It was a different approach."
That may be, but sweeping changes were made in other ways. The director essentially transformed an elaborate 130-minute film studded with extravagant musical numbers, melodramatic moments and slo-mo action sequences into a more compact and contemporary 90-minute cinematic experience.
The film, which is in Hindi, English and Spanish, was filmed entirely in the U.S., between L.A., Las Vegas and New Mexico. Many of its backdrops — including scenes at the home of a casino king — are opulent and lavish, with wardrobes to match.
FOLLOW THE LEADER: Hrithik Roshan and Barbara Mori in Indian costume designer Suneet Varma's modern-cum-traditional looks.
Lead actress (and Mexican Telenovela star) Barbara Mori first appears in a sexy underground bikini shot, and later shimmers in a skinny gold gown. The wardrobe doesn’t have the micro-focus of, say, a Sex and the City film — and it's not steeped in traditional Indian clothes — but it's still an important part of the visuals.
New Delhi-based designer Suneet Varma, who is currently co-creating a handbag line with Judith Leiber, came up with the costumes. Varma has called the look “modern, edgy and youthful”, and gave Roshan lean jeans and T-shirts, and the svelte, green-eyed Mori back-baring halter tops, flowery sun dresses and, in one of the final scenes, a gorgeous flowing white dress.
Ratner says he didn’t change the look of the film, but focused mainly on the pacing and the sound. “All I wanted to control was the mix, the sound,” he said. “In a Bollywood movie, all the voices are looped, they’re up here, and they’re thin. American movies are filled with sound and it’s full and rich. These are huge action sequences and you want it to feel big."
He added, “You could give this to ten different directors and they would make ten different films. I just wanted to put on it an imprint of what a Hollywood move is. I’m not trying to make a Brett Ratner movie out of it, even if my name is on the poster.”
Gone are the extensive musical numbers from the original, which can feel repetitive for anyone unfamiliar with the Bollywood genre. As Mori points out, it was strange to see an actor one minute in a fierce gun battle, and the next dancing nimbly on the streets of Vegas.
Given that Kites is being positioned as male lead actor Hrithik Roshan’s big U.S. debut, those hyper-fantasy shots were kept to a minimum. But what Ratner did put in, which was left out of the original, was a sultry love scene between Roshan’s and Mori’s characters. “It’s this incredibly, sexy, beautiful scene that was never going to see the light of day,” he said. “But I told them, ‘This is going in’.” So in it went.
Kavita Daswani is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer who contributes to the Los Angeles Times, Women's Wear Daily, Style Section L.A., the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong and Vogue India. Her fifth novel, The Ring, comes out in spring 2011.