Srijit Mukherji brings back Uttam Kumar in his film, Oti Uttam
When it comes to pique the audience’s interest with something novel, no one does it quite like filmmaker Srijit Mukherji. This time, he has played around the eternal fascination of Bengalis with legendary superstar, the late Uttam Kumar. Oti Uttam, his first light-hearted romantic tale with a happy ending, sees Uttam Kumar playing himself in one of the key roles. Sounds incredible? We felt so, too, till Srijit shared his arduous journey of achieving the impossible feat.
What was the idea behind Oti Uttam?
The concept of Uttam Kumar helping a young man in love, I owe to Anindya Banerjee. He was toying with this idea of Uttam Kumar from his film Chhadmabeshi coming down to help a boy in love. Then I also heard author Anustup Basu having an idea of a political film where Uttam helps a person in love. It was in 2018 that I decided to do something along similar lines and called up Anindya to share my interest in exploring the idea. When he gave the green light I proceeded to develop the idea further. I went beyond Anindya’s original plan of sticking to Chhadmabeshi alone and wrote an unconditional script keeping in mind as if Uttam Kumar is alive. Then, over the next two years, I went through all his films to find relevant dialogues suiting the script. I literally scoured through 87 films and closed in on 54 out of them for suitable clippings and dialogues.
Then began the tedious process of tracking down all the 23 producers – big and small – for rights, which took me another year and a half.
The next difficult part was, of course, shooting with actors and a non-existent actor called Uttam Kumar. For every shot I had to keep a stand-in (actor Smaranyo) and everyone was acting around him matching the look line, post which I superimposed the clippings.
For the audio part, I got the dialogues dubbed by Surojit Bandyopadhyay, a brilliant Uttam Kumar voice, and then took the help of AI to convert the dubbing into Uttam Kumar’s voice.
Tell us how much of an influence did Uttam Kumar films have on your own love life?
A lot. His on-screen presence was so soft, cultured, so chivalrous, so mischievous and at times, in films like Saptapadi, quite sparring. I learnt sparring wittily in romance from Uttam Kumar.
Your upcoming projects?
My Puja release, Tekka with Dev, Rukmini and Swastika Mukherjee is ready. There are a few Hindi projects including Shekhar Home starring Kay Kay Menon and Rasika Dugal that’s ready for release. There is also another web series in the biopic genre that I will be starting to shoot apart from two other Hindi films in the drama and biopic genres. There’s another social drama in Bengali called Sotti Bole Sotti Kichu Nei that I am filming. It has an ensemble cast including Kaushik Ganguly, Kaushik Sen, Anirban Bhattacharya, Anirban Chakraborty and Ritiwck Chakraborty among others. We are also filming another Feluda series Bhuswargo Bhayankar and my film on Mrinal Sen called Padatik is ready for release this April.