Film
Kenny Basumatary on making indie kung fu films
The IIT-Delhi dropout made two hilarious Assamese martial arts comedies for, quite literally, less than a (Bollywood item) song. He tells Suprateek Chatterjee how he made them.
According to a popular guesstimate, about 75% of all smartphones, laptops, and computers in the state of Assam have on them a (usually) pirated copy of a 2013 Assamese comedy called ‘Local Kung Fu’. This is, at least, what its maker, 36-year-old actor-writer-director Kenny Basumatary has been told. It is probably an exaggeration. Yet, when you watch the film — a subtitled, 84-minute cut of which is available on YouTube for free — it isn’t hard to believe. ‘Local Kung Fu’ is a scrappy, bare-bones indie shot on the streets of Guwahati. It's a madcap martial arts comedy, a first of sorts for Indian cinema. For all its lack of cinematic technique and aesthetic polish, it is a frequently amusing little experiment with tremendous cult value. Think ‘El Mariachi’ meets ‘Dude, Where’s My Car?’ imbued with the spirit of Jackie Chan action-comedies, all shot on a digital SLR camera by a one-man team. Who wouldn’t want to get their hands on that, especially if it depicts the milieu that they’re a part of?
A Mumbai resident, Basumatary, an IIT Delhi dropout, has been working in movies for nearly a decade. In 2012, he appeared in Dibakar Banerjee’s ‘Shanghai’, in which he had one major scene with Abhay Deol. He was already, by then, a regular on a Channel [V] show called ‘Bollywood Nonsensex’. In more recent work, he is in Tigmanshu Dhulia’s just-released ‘Raag Desh’ as Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose. However, to followers of indie and regional cinema, he is best known as the man behind ‘Local Kung Fu’ and its sequel ‘Local Kung Fu 2’, which released in April this year and is also available online
Indies are frequently described as ‘shoestring’. It’s a cliché, but ‘Local Kung Fu’ earns that description better than most. In 2012, Basumatary got around Rs 1 lakh from his mother, a former civil servant, of which Rs 43,000 was spent in acquiring the camera on which the film was shot. Effectively, an entire feature film with a cast and fight sequences was shot with a budget of Rs 55,000-57,000. “Around that time, ‘The Untitled Kartik Krishnan Project’ [by Mumbai-based filmmaker Srinivas Sunderrajan] had come out, which had been made for less [Rs 40,000],” he says, from his home in Guwahati. “There were also films like [John Carney’s] ‘Once’ — which was shot on two Handicams, I think — and [Alex Holdridge’s] ‘In Search Of A Midnight Kiss’… and others that made me realise that I could make the film I wanted on a really low budget.” The biggest costs were those of food (momos and chowmein) and transportation for the actors, who were paid token amounts (“I think I paid them… Rs 3,000?” he says).
A booming laugh follows. “Now when I look back at it all, I wonder how I did it.” The plot of ‘Local Kung Fu’ revolves around Charlie (played by Basumatary), a young man with a ‘sensitive’ stomach who is trying to win over his Hindi-speaking Malayali girlfriend Sumi’s stern uncle, a local excise inspector. Also thrown in the mix are a gang that seeks to open a liquor shop and two bumbling youngsters, aspiring to be young ‘dons’.
How the film got promoted and released also owes a debt to the strain of happenstance that often accompanies the lives of resourceful indie filmmakers like Basumatary. After all, merely making the film isn’t enough — it needs to be released. And to be released, it needs to be promoted, which costs a certain minimum amount of money. In the case of ‘Local Kung Fu’, this minimum was Rs 7 lakh — nearly 14 times what the film cost to make — that was financed by a Mumbai-based investment banker, Durlov Baruah, who is also from Assam. “He saw the trailer on YouTube and invited me to dinner at his home, where we watched the movie,” recalls Basumatary.
The first film released in September 2013 to tepid response. After two days of near-empty shows, word reached Basumatary that a show in a Guwahati multiplex was house-full: a stupendous feat for a no-frills Assamese indie. Before the word-of-mouth wave could truly break, it was pushed out of theatres by a big-budget Bollywood film - Abhinav Kashyap’s ‘Besharam’, starring Ranbir Kapoor. The so-called mass entertainer, although panned by critics (including this writer) and rejected by audiences, swallowed up enough screens to end Basumatary’s maiden theatrical run. However, the film had already been leaked by then, thanks to someone at a local TV channel, who watched it, liked it, and circulated it on a pen drive. It was slowly but surely spreading all across the state. “Even though the film hadn’t worked [in theatres], the entire cast had become celebrities,” he says. “People were recognising us wherever we went. Today, it’s hard to meet a young person in Assam who hasn’t seen the film.”
Strike that kung fu pose!
© Kenny Basumatary
The second instalment is a sequel only in spirit, with a more sprawling cast and, with many of the original members playing entirely different roles, and a serpentine plot inspired by Shakespeare’s 'A Comedy Of Errors'. Thanks to the cult success of the first, it was made on a considerably more generous budget of approximately Rs 30 lakh. This included Rs 9 lakh that was raised through the crowdfunding platform Wishberry; another Rs 8-10 lakh from Basumatary and his parents’ pockets; and Rs 7 lakh from two-wheeler manufacturers Hero and mobile phone makers Vivo for product placements (courtesy Baruah’s contacts and business acumen). ‘Local Kung Fu 2’ did a touch better theatrically: it spent one entire week in cinema halls and grossed nearly Rs 22 lakh.
Going by traditional moviemaking economics, the ‘Local Kung Fu’ films are, essentially, box-office failures, even though their combined cost is decidedly less than what mainstream films usually spend on, say, a glitzy item number or an elaborate action sequence. However, for its fans, many of whom were born in the ‘80s, they represent a part of their youth in which, especially in the northeast, training in martial arts was almost a rite of passage. Basumatary, who grew up in Guwahati, Tezpur, and Lakhimpur remembers nearly everyone he knew learning karate, taekwondo, and various forms of kung fu, particularly Wing Chun (which specialises in close-range combat). His uncle, who appears in both films as a formidable older fighter, runs a popular training school in Guwahati, where Basumatary also trained. “There were no cellphones back then,” he says with a laugh, by way of explanation. “Also, I think people in the Northeast are just more inclined towards martial arts. I don’t know, maybe it’s hardwired into our genes?”
Later, when he moved to Bombay, a friend put him on to Brazilian jiu-jitsu; for the sequel, he also trained in freestyle wrestling, which is what he exhibits in the film. “Martial arts films require both knowledge of martial arts as well as filmmaking,” he says. He already had the former; the latter was acquired by making one-minute short films for contests run by the now-defunct cinema blog Passion For Cinema, a few music videos, and a number of practice ‘fight’ videos as preparation for shooting ‘Local Kung Fu’.
Kenny (second from the left) and crew on set
© Kenny Basumatary
These exercises turned out to be invaluable. Through trial and error, Basumatary figured out the best camera angles, the best way to cut fight scenes, and how to ensure that fight scenes looked kinetic enough in the absence of a multi-cam setup. “For example, in some shots, I’d feel that I’ve performed the punch very powerfully, but on screen, it doesn’t look powerful at all,” he says. “So you realise that you need to show energy that translates and is visible.” He had to widen his Wing Chun fighting stance, usually around two feet, so that it looked more powerful. With the help of his cast members, he figured out the best safety measures that could be implemented cheaply (a cricket chest guard worked quite well at absorbing the impact of blows that couldn’t be faked) and the best kind of ‘dust’ that needs to be applied to the point-of-contact of a punch or kick in order to make it look more cinematic (multani mitti, they found, after experimenting with chalk and talcum powder).
In June, a screening of ‘Local Kung Fu 2’ was organised by the Mumbai-based film club 1018 MB at a suburban multiplex. The audience, comprising many Assamese speakers, rolled with laughter at the film’s tongue-in-cheek, slapstick humour. “I’d say 90% of the people said that we’ve done a better job this time than the last, that this movie was a lot more polished,” he says. “That’s the best kind of feedback a filmmaker could get.”