Filmmaker Anant Mahedevan on choosing the lives of Jyotiba and Savitribai for his film, Phule

Phule is a biopic in a way and also an interpretation of social issues, and the reason I made this film is because I felt it is relevant even today. You don't just pick up any historical character and make a film on him, if it isn't relevant at present. It has to have some kind of relevance or an importance or some kind of an inspiration for the generation of today. So, when you consider Phule, it was based on extensive research with a lot of books that we got. And we got almost five hours of material from that and we had to reduce it to say two hours, 15 minutes. And you could imagine the amount of filtration that it went through and we had a trying time deciding what to keep and what not to see but then we had to prioritise certain events.

Both Jyotiba and Savitribai Phule are some of the first pioneers of social revolution in India. They realised, if they did not approve it at that time, this will go on for hundreds of years, and probably even today, 200 years later, we still have fragments where caste and gender discrimination is so dominant. The relevance of that is what we have brought to the film because simply making a biopic as a historical document doesn't make sense because cinema has to, in a way, be a director's interpretation, be a certain perspective about why this film is made. But the question remains, why Phule? And this is the reason is that it is so much beyond biopic, beyond a social comment. The fearlessness and the futuristic vision of that couple is something to salute and marvel at.

Almost two years because we had to collect all the material available and everything was not really easily available in the public domain. We had to literally hunt books from shops, libraries and archives and manage to put all of them together. Some of them were in Marathi, some in Hindi, and a couple of them in English. So we had to put all that together. And then, like I said, the filtration process happened.

We designed the whole film because I was very adamant that I will not use sets or anything artificial. It had to be real locations. We went location hunting down the entire stretch of Maharashtra from Pune to Goa to Satara to Kolhapur, and we got all the real locations with the years embossed in the bricks. 

No, we didn't need to because you see that is a very cliched thing to do. You know, when you want to show a newspaper at that time, you suddenly show a very torn old, worn newspaper. The newspapers were fresh and new during those days. You're showing that time, you see. We're not showing something that is of today. At that point of time, the colours and everything was just as it is. I mean, just to give the feeling that this is a 19th century thing and deliberately grading it that way didn't make any sense to me. So, we have gone with true colours.

You see, it is very interesting because all that we had for reference was sketches from that era. They were not photographs. We took out all the sketches that came and we did a look test on Pratik and Patralekhaa. Pratik has the quality to mould into a character seamlessly. So was Patralekhaa. So when you put them together and you put the old sketch together, it looks like the sketch has come alive. 

Well, I have three plays running at the moment. I have Blame It on Bollywood which is a fun comedy, a wedding satire on Indian weddings by Bollywood. Then I've got Mahesh Dattani’s Dance Like A Man, and Nathuram Godsay Must Die where I play a double role- Gandhi and Gandhi's son.

There's a new film that I just completed shooting, and it’s in the process of editing and doing the post-production. That should be my next release during the second half of the year. It's based on a true story and is a very powerful emotional film okay and is about a boy who tries to find his origins and is shocked by the results.