The films I make raise some questions, says Hansal Mehta

After his highly acclaimed films Shahid and Citylights, Hansal Mehta has bettered his own oeuvre with Aligarh, a look at the life of Aligarh Muslim University professor Ramchandra Siras, and his fight against persecution for being homosexual. Aligarh “came” to Hansal at a time when he was at a loss about what to film next; this was when he was editing Citylights. Hansal narrates how he made Aligarh:

I woke up one morning and there were no mails in my inbox. So I checked my junk mail. It had one which said ‘True story for you: Urgent’ from a sender called Ishani Banerjee. I opened it and read it and the story caught my fancy. I called Ishani to Mumbai to meet with Appu (Apoorva Asrani, who was editing Citylights) and me.

I asked Appu if he wanted to write the story and he agreed. Then I got my friend Shailesh Singh to put in the seed capital. The big challenge was — what to do with the film Would a studio take a film about an ageing professor, suspended from his university for being gay Who would buy it A broker fixed up a meeting with Eros. I had five-six ideas, but narrated this one first. Their response was instantaneous: They said, ‘Let’s make it’. Within a month of signing the contract, we had started shooting.

We wanted to shoot it in Aligarh but we were worried that the university and the people might be antagonistic. The film doesn’t really point fingers, but we wanted to shoot in peace. We found a similar place in Bareilly and in other towns in UP. The challenge was to find that place.

We were shooting in excessively cold weather; we would be freezing, as a lot of it was shot was night. Also I like shooting my films in real locations — and real locations are nice to look at, but they are also small and claustrophobic.

The least of my challenges was getting my actors to perform, I had country’s finest actors. It was like watching two musicians perform.

The locations we chose, no film had been shot there before, so it was a new thing for the crowd. It became an evening thing ke ‘Chalo shooting dekhne chaltey hain’. The film is quiet, poetic, but outside there would be hungama. The entire film has been shot in sync sound; I don’t dub my films. Now how do you silence these people They are not used to the discipline of filmmaking. No matter how much the bouncers would intervene but they would keep talking, someone would shout action in between or say cut, so it was very messy.

People in general were very welcoming. There was a place called Jhagde Wali Mathiya where around 10,000-12,000 people had gathered. That night was quite scary. I kept asking them to go back but they wouldn’t listen. We were worried that if a mishap takes place, then not only will the shooting fall apart, there will be a big scene and we will have to leave Bareilly.

The kind of films I make are not only satisfying cinematically, but also raise some questions. In the times to come, if the world becomes a slightly better place because of the debates that my films generate, I think as a filmmaker, I will have fulfilled a duty towards my children.