Interview : Many regular actors can’t even act properly, how will they act as a transgender? : Dibakar Banerjee!

#EktaKapoor produced #LoveSexandDhoka which was released in 2010 and is considered a sleeper hit. It featured #RajkumarRao, #NushrrattBharuccha, who were newcomers then, now enjoy star status. Writer, director of #LSD is coming up with it’s sequel #LSD2 and interacted with our Sr Efitor Keerti Kadam.

What prompted you for the sequel of LSD?
Though LSD part 1 was successful, I never had it in my mind to make a sequel. Somewhere in 2020 I got a call from Ekta and she said, Dibakar, let’s make a sequel of LSD. I told her to give me some time to think. It felt like so many years have passed by and we have lived our life, so now we have some Masala to make a sequel. Around 2012/15/16 nothing much had changed in the society, so we didn’t have anything interesting on hand to make a sequel. And if we don’t make anything new then it will be a waste of time. But in 2019-20 when Ekta told me that the generation has changed and now we have the ‘masala’ to make a sequel. The 2012’s India and 2020’s India is completely different. At that time I was working on some other project and then COVID came in and everything came to a standstill.

What are the similarities in part 1 and part 2?
I think that the similarities are like there are 3 stories. In those stories there’s some kind of weird connection. Like how it was there in LSD 1. But now there are no similarities and the generation for which LSD was made has grown up. The kid who might be playing football when he was small at that time is now a 25 year old grown up adult who will be watching this LSD. So I am making the same LSD, only just I am shifting the time and making a parallel universe. So let’s dive into the stories of the movie. One talks about a transgender and one is about a reality-show and another is about a viral video.

So if such happenings occurr in reality how will you react?
The thing is all of such things happen in reality which is how I make a film. It’s not like I get to see all such things after I have made a movie. All such things play out in front of me and then I make a film. So I was watching reality shows, vloggers, gamers, following someone, unfollowing someone. So you get to know that one thing that has happened after LSD that we are living a different life, it’s a virtual life. And we are the ones carrying the story. It’s like we are writing our own biopic. We are the actors, directors and producers of the film. And the life we are in and the ones we try to show people has a dark side to it and thats what makes the difference.

During that time you did something really different by making a Digital Film. So what are you planning to do this time?
I think after that movie all the movies were made in a digital form. And after that I didn’t feel like doing anything different. But I don’t think the movie we are making is something that has been made before in India. We’ve used Deepfake, we’ve used motion capture, we’ve used animation. We have used all the tools.

Tell us more about casting. How do you go about with the selection of the artists?
Well all of that is done by the casting director. We have a really good team of casting directors. We auditioned around 6000 people. We had to cast a 18 year old gamer, an influencer who uses abusive language a lot and has own swag and is quite famous with the young generation. So that was the kind of guy we wanted. And for Kullu’s story we needed a transgender actor who have lived that life and knows how it’s like. I am not a transgender, I am a straight male, so I can’t know the experience of a transgender. So we found a transgender actor and did lots of tests and like last time we selected two actors for all the main characters and we kept on testing them, carried out workshops and then selected one each in the end. So that was one part of it.

The second part was for the last part of the story of Noor. No one knew that a man was acting the part of a transgender. Because when we were making the film we thought that
one transgender actor is enough, if we keep two then it will look niche. So a weird thing that happened was that the transphobia we were trying to show in LSD it was now seen in the making of LSD 2. Because we were told that the audience is transphobic and they won’t come to see the film if they find out that there are two transgenders in the film and they will think it all about transgender issues. And we were told to cast a girl as a transgender and I was like that it won’t be right because we are making LSD which is going to show the topic of transgenders for the first time in India. And if you cast a female as a transgender then people will call you a hypocrite. So then we started looking for a man who actually is as a transgender and has gone through transitional surgery to become a woman.

Can you tell us how and why you selected Anu Malik as a judge?
Well we became good friends during the making of a song for Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar. It was really fun to sit with him and compose that song. So I asked him to be a judge since he is the ‘judge of the judges’ (laughs) and asked him to come and do the role.

Just like LSD, you have cast newcomers. Why?
So what happens is that for a film like LSD, not everyone does it because they have their own name and brand and they don’t want it to affect. So we had no choice but to cast new actors because the film’s treatment is really bold. And also where will I find transgender actors in Bollywood. Many regular actors can’t even act properly, how will they act as a transgender? Another thing was that I wanted a 18 year old gamer boy so where will I find
him? And there’s verbal abuse going on so who will do that? If I ask a normal actor he will say that ‘sir my brand will get affected’, ‘sir I can’t do something like this’ or else their agents, parents or companies handling them will call and say they can’t do this.

How do you make movies on such bold topics and face the reactions of people?
See if we don’t talk then there will be just silence. And silence is not good for the society. It’s not good for the democracy. And this is not good for our society. As long as there are conversations going on its fine.

Any censorship issues for this film?
Well surprisingly this film didn’t have any censorship issues. We didn’t go through any such issues because the broadcast had already told us that we can’t make any mother-sister related verbal abuses. Then I was like that if I can’t say ‘Mardarchod’ then can I say ‘fatherchod’ (laughs). So then I was like let it be, let’s not go on family. Then I suggested that should I say ‘Dadarchod’ and they told me that Dadar people will get offended. We couldn’t use any abuses related to mother-sister. Another thing is that in the film, Abhinav Singh, who is our gamer boy is naked throughout the cilmax. And there’s a law that in Indian Cinema you can’t show frontal nudity. You can’t show any mother breastfeeding her
child or anyone taking a shower. And if you want to show a sexual video then it ends up looking like a music video. So we had to blur out things same as we did for LSD 1.

Will LSD2 be informative or will people gossip about it?
See I am not sure how people will react. It’s really hard for a Filmmaker like me to survive. Sandeep and Pinky Faraar released during Covid 1 and then it got released on Amazon during Covid 2. Then people started talking about it and we got awards and nominations. Now I am able to show a movie like LSD 2, it’s a big thing for me. That’s what I wanted. And as for the expectations, this is what happens to all my movies. A person told me after watching LSD, Sir your film has neither love or sex there’s only ‘dhoka’. (Laughs). So that I kept in mind and kept it as lyrics in a song of LSD2.