Shoojit Sircar on ‘October’: ‘We always talk about unconditional love, but what is it really?’

In the trailer for Shoojit Sircar’s upcoming romantic drama October, the night jasmine or the Parijat flower adds a balmy touch to the grey winters of Delhi. As the trailer opens, Shiuli (Banita Sandhu) spends a moment with the white-petalled and orange-stemmed coral jasmine as she picks it up from the ground. She is named after the flower, after all.

The trailer hints at a deeper connection. The Parijat flowers bloom at night and fall to the ground before the morning sun. Most people see the flowers only after they have fallen from their tree and graced the ground with their sweet fragrance. Shiuli’s relationship with her colleague Dan (Varun Dhawan) seems similar. Shiuli and Dan work at a luxury hotel, but Dan barely notices her even as we see her look at him from afar and smile when she sees him. He does notice her finally, but after he learns that he is the first person she asks about as she is lying on a hospital bed.

The parijat even adorns the title of the April 13 release. “Yes, the flower has a small significance in the film,” Shoojit Sircar told Scroll.in. “I don’t want to say more. In fact, the film is littered with such small significant things. Juhi [Chaturvedi] and my writing process is such that we work on a thought and borrow elements from our life experiences to explain and elaborate that thought. Here, the parijat is highlighted. You’ll find many such everyday things, things that you have seen but didn’t make a big deal of when you did.”

The idea for October has been with Sircar since 2004. “It is an intensely personal story,” he said. “Juhi and I have spoken about working on a love story. I gave the brief of this story to her and then we talked about making a film. My films are not about a sequence of events – they are not about what happens after this and after this and so on. They are based on a single insight or emotion. As writers, we hold that thread and we work on it.”

October explores the idea of unconditional love, added the filmmaker who has delivered critical and commercial entertainers in the recent years. One way of explaining the director’s recent journey is to say that Sircar is steadily moving up the human body – from a tale about sperm donation (Vicky Donor, 2012) and constipation (Piku, 2015), he has now reached the delicate but critical heart.

“We always talk about unconditional love,” Sircar said. “But what is it, really? I don’t claim to be an expert on it but in October, I’ve tried to create a situation where we can really experience what it means. It is going to be a simple story. Not some complicated thriller.”

This will be the third time that Sircar is collaborating with Chaturvedi, who has written Vicky Donor and Piku. It is important for Sircar that he involve himself in the early stages of a script. “Writing is the most important process of my filmmaking,” he said. “I enjoy that the most, and I burst out with all my emotions while writing. That’s when one is creating something. Whether it is Juhi or any of my other writers, I always need to have people with a particular bent of mind – they have to understand where I’m coming from, and they need to be people who can relate to social issues and politics that I can also relate to. Then only we can write a script together.”

Chaturvedi and he share similar ideas about filmmaking too.

“The good thing is both of us don’t have any commercial interests,” he said. “In Bollywood, generally, everything is box-office driven. But we have always been fearless and not worried about who we are writing for or how we should go about it. We just write what we feel. We come up with a thread and keep bouncing ideas. We argue a lot. The making part of a film is easy for me, sometimes boring too.”

Filmmaking is also about telling stories that are personal and close to his life, Sircar revealed. “All my films are about experiences I have gone through in one way or another,” he said. “Nothing, not even a character in my film will be someone who I have not engaged with or seen or been through. While writing Piku, for example, we brought in a lot of our personal experiences.”

Sircar began working on October while making Piku. But he cast his first actor in September 2016, when he chanced upon Banita Sandhu. “My endeavour is always to cast fresh, new faces in my films,” he said. “I got a chance to work with Banita during a commercial for Doublemint. That was also a romantic and mushy advertising film. I saw her eyes and I thought they were very expressive. The way she spoke and the age she was – she also looks like the girl next door – it all fell right into place. I showed her photo to my producer Ronnie [Lahiri] and he agreed too.”

The selection of Varun Dhawan was unexpected. “We were looking for the boy in the story all around the country and wondering who to cast,” he recalled. “I haven’t seen Varun’s films – just in bits and parts. My world and his are completely different. He had wanted to meet me for a while and somehow that wasn’t materialising. One day, in November, I was about to leave for Kolkata and he texted asking if he could come. I asked if he could come right away. He said he had just woken up and was dressed shabbily. I insisted that he come to my office the way he is. He walked in and sat in front of me. Believe me, I have lived with Dan’s character for a long time – I looked at Varun’s eyes and saw a lot of innocence in them. Also, the way he was talking, I could see that he was ready to surrender, which is the only question I ask my actors.”

For October, Sircar’s first task was to teach his main leads to get in touch with their calm side.

“I told them to meditate for ten minutes after they woke up each morning,” he said. “I’d warned them not to touch their phones as soon as they woke up, which Varun said his mother was very happy about. Each filmmaker has his or her process – some do workshops. My workshops involve such things and they are unorthodox and unconventional. The meditation continued for three months. I also asked Varun to find a plant in his house and sit in front of it every day for ten minutes. Just stare at it, I said. I also made the actors listen to my kind of music – the theme track of October was done almost a year before the film’s shooting began.”

Sircar lets his actors gain a sense of the world of the film he is directing by talking to them about it. “I talk a lot and sometimes the actors get really fed up,” he said. “They say they have enough in their brain’s hard discs, but my idea is to fill it up as much as I can. That’s my way of bringing them into my world. It’s a difficult process.”