‘Satya’ was an accident: Ram Gopal Varma on 20 years of the film

Satya, since its release on July 3, 1998, has garnered cult status as a gangster drama for its realistic depiction of the Indian underworld. It was an accident, says director Ram Gopal Varma, sharing the "truth" about what went behind the making of the "great film".

The filmmaker had done extensive research on gangsters and the underworld, and passed on the baton to first-time writers - Saurabh Shukla and Anurag Kashyap for the screenplay. In a lengthy post, the filmmaker revealed how he stumbled upon the subject idea of making a film on Mumbai's underworld. Here are some excerpts from his post :

On the eve of SATYA completing 20 years I looked back upon it and a ray of sunshine fell across my various fond memories of it and I started remembering the origins of its various aspects . When I first came to Bombay from Hyderabad to shoot Rangeela in 94 I couldn’t get over the experience of a train ride I had through the Dharavi slums. It looked like one single roof and I wondered how people live there, ... I was fascinated by many such shocking examples of this large but ultra congested city, where the super rich and downright poor lived side by side Once in a while in due course of me living there I used to hear the word Underworld. I heard about Dawood Ibrahim and some other gangsters names because of the serial blasts which happened a year before in 93 .

A friend of mine who lives in Oshiwara on the fourteenth floor, told me about an instance. A guy lived in his building somewhere in a flat above him. My friend used to bump into this guy in the building’s lift once in a while. And they used to exchange pleasantries....And then one day my friend’s wife told him that this guy has been arrested and taken away. The thing about Mumbai is that you may live for years and years in a building and yet have no idea who your neighbour is? That was where I got the Urmila’s track for Satya. The fact that Urmila’s character doesnt know who Satya really is but yet ends up in having a relationship with him...

I went to a beer bar in Borivali to check some location and happened to meet a guy who was supposedly an ex-gangster. He made me feel very uneasy with his behavior and attitude. Then later on when I met him while I was shooting in that area, he was very friendly and he looked like a different person altogether. Then I realized that the first time I met him he was trying to play up to an image which he thought I had of him because he knew that I knew who he was. Many celebrities do that… if they think that anyone thinks very highly of them, then his or her body language changes. It happens because they tend to pretend. That is what this gangster was doing. Obviously anything you pretend you can’t sustain it for long period of time. So after some time he became normal. That’s what I took for Kallu Mama in Satya.

Then one day at a place called Bara Chawl, I met a man who supposedly belonged to Arun Gawli’s gang. There was so much of a build up that people gave me about him on how dangerous he is, but when I met him he came across as a cute guy. In every sentence he will use the name of Gawli, “Gawli bhai ne yeh kiya, Gawli bhai ne woh kiya, Gawli bhai ne mereko ghar leke diya”. So his whole existence was about his awe of Gawli and he doesn’t have any identity for himself. That I took in Chander’s character. So likewise each and every character in Satya was modeled on someone I had met or someone I had heard of . Everyone had a reference point.

Once I decided that,this is a kind of film I wanted to make, the first person who came to meet me as a writer was Anurag Kashyap. So, I got him on board and he got Saurabh Shukla. We discussed a lot but nothing was clear. So there was no script on the day we started shooting. I went half by instinct and half by Anurag’s manic way of writing highly realistic dialogue which mostly used to happen on location

In the first scene we were shooting, this Sushant comes to Satya for hafta and Satya slashes a knife on his face. In my mind the moment he slashes would be the cutting point of the scene. But before I could say ‘cut’ Sushant screamed, and his scream startled me because I wasn’t expecting him to do that and so I forgot to say ‘cut’. Because I didn’t say ‘cut’ actor Manoj Pawa who was showing the koli improvised saying, “Oh ho pani lao paani lao”. and literally the scene made itself without anyone really planning anything ..That is when it finally dawned upon me how Satya should be made.. . All realistic performances in Satya came in because I stopped telling actors what to do. I just wanted them to improvise whatever they feel like. Actors were instructed not to follow written lines but just say whatever they feel like, so most of the times the content was told to them and they kept on improvising and I controlled it in the editing.

The interesting thing to note here is that the style of making Satya originated largely due to Sushant’s unexpected scream. If he had not screamed or if I had told him before itself that shot will cut on the slash, Satya would not have been the same.

Where Satya’s character is concerned things went wrong compared to most of the others because of my non-clarity of what the protagonist was really about . So I kept on changing it for the convenience of the plot line. Whereas Bheeku Matre, Kallu Mama, Muley… all these people could be consistent because there was nothing for them in the main plot of the film which was primarily the growth and decline of Satya affected by his love story . Satya slashes someone in cold blood in one scene and in another scene shyly smiles at Bheeku Matre after killing Jagga in the bar and when Bheeku Matre is having a fight with his wife,he stares at them like a zombie . Why did he do that? He did that because I told him “do it”. So that inconsistency was because of me...

So to cut a long story short, when people ask me today, if I realised that Satya would become a great film , I will have to say No

That is because great films happen and no one can make them on intention ....

Lastly I want to end this article by thanking all those who contributed to Satya ..i am not trying to be modest when I say that It’s faults are solely mine and all it’s merits genuinely belong to others ..I just swam blindly through the wonderful current of energies namely Anurag, Saurabh, Manoj, Urmila, Chakri, Makrand, Vishal, Sandeep,Allan and Gerard among others and somehow accidentally managed to reach the shore of success ..This is the actual truth of SATYA

with inputs from agencies