12 years of Ship of Theseus: Anand Gandhi opens up on memories of shooting the film, how he looks at his past work

Ship of Theseus completed 12 years of release. In an exclusive interaction, filmmaker Anand Gandhi talked about the responses to the film over the years.

Anand Gandhi's Ship of Theseus is a thing of beauty. It is built on the titular paradox- if a ship is gradually repaired by replacing each of its wooden planks, is the resulting ship still the same ship as the original, even though none of the original wood is present? Contemplative and entirely original, the film has lost none of its power and perspective in the course of a decade since its release. (Also read: Watch Ship of Theseus: A complex portrayal of disability and creative confidence)

Filmmaker Anand Gandhi's Ship of Theseus won immense critical acclaim during its release.

The film was released in India on July 19, 2013. It won the award for Best Feature Film of the Year at the 61st National Film Awards. As the film completes 12 years of release, HT sat down with the filmmaker to discuss the film's abiding memories, questions, and vision of the world in which it has taken a life of its own.

'It's like looking at your old pictures'

Upon asking whether the filmmaker has seen the film recently and whether he has had a different reaction to it, Anand says that he watched the film only last year at a screening in Goa. He adds, “I keep looking at my past work. It's like light emanating from a distance. Very often the stars that you see in the night sky, we know that they don't exist at all. And that light is finally reaching us after having traversed millions of light years. And when I look at my past work, it's at a consciousness, a cognitive event that was flowing, that was ever changing. So it's like looking at your old pictures. It's not very different from looking at the pictures of your childhood or youth.”

He continues, “One can see this person is the foundation. This person is your primary source. It's your past, but you, at the same time, can look at this person from a certain distance. And you remember the flaws of this person. You remember how wrong this person was in so many ways. How unique some of their insights were or some of their thoughts and feelings were when I look at the film, it's very similar. It's strange and alien to me sometimes. I can look at it from that distance.”

A still from Ship of Theseus, which starred Aida El-Kashef, Neeraj Kabi and Sohum Shah.

“I appreciate that I have that snapshot of the mind. By the time it reaches people, I mean, even in the making itself, a film takes, especially I take so long. I take four, five years to make a film. So, by the time it reaches people, it is already a star that has mutated or changed. So, it's kind of a snapshot of my mind from that time. And a lot of my ideas and questions have updated ever since. I basically see the building blocks of my current ideas and frameworks,” he says.

On the response to the film over the years

Is there a particular aspect of the film that stands out when people ask about it now? Anand replies, “Over the years, I've seen so many people react to so many of my films in such different ways. For this film, more so because there are three stories and three characters. There are people who resonate more with one and less with the other. There are people who resonate more with the end. There are people who feel that the end is too neatly tied together. There are people who love the philosophical exposition, and there are people who feel that it's too didactic. I've had a wonderful experience with such a wide variety of responses over the years. And that, in my head, somewhere has become a pigeon-holing technique of people. It's my shorthand to understand what kind of person I'm talking to, depending on how they're going to react to the film or how they react to any part of the film.”

He explains, “So, there are people who, for example, do use logic and reason as a means to frame the self and the world and the relationships between themselves and their environment. And they invariably resonate with the second story. And in that, again, there are two kinds. There are speakers who move freely between poetry and reason, and they resonate with Maitreya [played by Neeraj Kabi]. And those people don't necessarily resonate with Charvaka's character, because they feel that that character is too loud in his rationalism and not gentle in his approach to seeking. So, there are all kinds of wonderful responses that have accumulated over the decade that have really informed my own understanding of people more than the film.”

Aida El-Kashef won a National Award for her performance in the film.

One of the standout sequences from the film is where Aida El-Kashef's Aaliya, who has newly been able to see with her eyes, is trying to capture pictures in the middle of a busy Mumbai street. It is a breathtaking cacophony of images and sounds and blurred vision, evoking a sense of hyperactivity and restlessness.

Anand recalls that particular day of the shoot and adds, “My cinematographer Pankaj Kumar and I had decided that we'll be extremely thoughtful about every shot that we take at the time. This particular sequence, we had tried rehearsing it, and the more I thought about it, the more I realised it's got nothing to do with performance. It's not going to be produced by a sheer rendition or interpretation of the actor. We'll have to get in the subjective, which is something that I had only set the rule of never doing. I'd never done POV shots. There was a rigorous discipline that I'd set to the film.”

‘I chose to be objective’

He continues, “Even when Aida's character Aaliyah opens her eyes for the first time, we'd not done a POV shot, which is a classic blur-coming-to-focus kind of thing. There are a lot of decisions that we had made of what not to do. Subjective POVs were one of those. For example, when Maitreyan is sick, we never experience the world through his POV, his direct POV, the subjective POV. We don't see the world going into a dreamy cut-out, a cut-scene or a montage of incoherent moments when he's delirious. We don't see delirium happening in front of us. We don't see delirium on screen. There were a lot of opportunities where it could have been subjective, but I did not make it subjective. I chose to be objective. I chose to be outside the character and just observe them. In this scene, I realised that I have to be on the cusp of that discipline.”

But what changed in this scene? Anand adds, “I still do not cut to POV as such, but I do see things from her lens. Not her eyes, but her camera lens, to create the confusion. There was so much cognitive neurobiology addressed at the time about filtering of information and how the loss of one sense would make the other sense hyperactive. Once the lost sense returns, it will completely dissolve the process of filtering and bringing information together cohesively in the person. That's what I wanted to create. I wanted to create that sense of an astounding amount of information in flux that she could not filter out. I remember Pankaj was so pissed at me for not briefing him on every shot. There were so many shots that I knew there was no way to prepare for. We had to just go into it and allow for something to happen.”

Anand concludes, “That's really the only sequence in the film that I shot largely. We were shooting another scene right after that. It was a very hectic day for Pankaj. Pankaj really wanted to prepare well for that next scene. It was supposed to be Aida's father's house. There was an entire track about Aida's father, which was put in there to justify why somebody of semi-Egyptian origin is in Bombay. Because her father is in Bombay. That entire track was removed from the film. This scene was shot in the middle of traffic. It was really the least rehearsed scene of the whole film. Everything that we were rehearsing for that scene was not working. We had to be hit by the spontaneity of the moment, just like Aida was. That was the only way to make it work. The other only way to make it work was to allow ourselves to be on the cusp of that objective and subjective. We actually stormed past her, the way information was storming past her. To highlight her incapability of holding it, capturing it, filtering it and synthesising it.”