It takes a village to raise a child and sometimes, a family to make a film. Mahesh Bhatt’s 1989 drama Daddy, like many of his movies, is a deeply personal film born out of his wounds. The origins of Daddy, about a teenage daughter trying to wean off her father from alcohol, finds roots in a tender moment when he held his daughter Shaheen Bhatt in his arms, but the toddler turned her head when he went to kiss her. The baby wouldn’t have known, but the father did: Mahesh Bhatt was drunk.
As Daddy clocked 35 years since it first premiered on Doordarshan in 1989, Indian Express met the filmmaker at his residence. Seated in his quiet study–designed by actor wife Soni Razdan–Mahesh Bhatt was on a video call, lauding a gentleman for his courage to persevere in the film industry, which has rusted even the shiniest of people. Once the call got over, Bhatt quipped he was giving ‘guru mantra’.
Before the interview could start–with a cut-off time of around 40 minutes–the filmmaker whipped out his phone again to make another video call, this time to someone who could help jog his memory of the film: Pooja Bhatt, his daughter, who made her acting debut with Daddy.
Daddy was directed by Mahesh Bhatt and starred Pooja Bhatt and Anupam Kher. (Photo: IMDb)
The video call
In the film, she played a 17-year-old girl who reunites with her estranged father (played by Anupam Kher), a once-upon-a-time singing sensation, now a forgotten alcoholic. She realises that the only thing between her and her father is the bottle, so she takes it upon herself to reclaim his glory, make him sing again and become clean. It was a film about self-love three decades before Instagram made it cool.
“I still have the original script of Daddy, the only script I have ever received from you!” Pooja’s laughter echoed in the room dotted with books, a large LCD, film memorabilia and rare pictures from his shoots. Mahesh Bhatt was sheepish, but he let her carry on.
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“My memory of Daddy is how you approached me for it. You told me, ‘I am not interested in launching you, but there is a role of a 17-year-old and you might fit the bill. So are you open?’ I didn’t get back after the deadline of 24 hours and then you said, ‘Ok fine, I will take Dimple Kapadia’s daughter!’ I said no no, let’s wait. You told me, ‘You don’t want me to act in movies but you don’t want anyone else to do that role!'” Pooja said.
Tucked away in the room of a house few meters away from the Juhu beach, the father-daughter duo revisited Daddy over a video call that lasted around 20 minutes, where the father had become a journalist, and the daughter his subject.
“A day before we shot,” Pooja continued, talking to her filmmaker father, “You made me read the script when we were in the house. You told me, ‘I am not going to give anyone else the privilege of telling you that you are not good. If you can’t act, I will throw you out because I’d be doing disservice to you if I lied to you that you can act when you can’t.’
“On day one, in my first shot, I had to walk into a police station and say, ‘Ye badkismati se mera baap hai.’ Anupam saw the shot and suggested we remove the words ‘badkismati se’. I was a little thrown, because I had memorised it like that, which you also said to Anupam, but he replied, ‘So what Bhatt saab? She has to get used to it on the set last moment, that’s what she has to learn to do.’ That was a key takeaway.”
Few days before the interview, Pooja had dined at a Turkish restaurant in Jakarta, where a few Indians had spotted her. The lady approached the actor and, out of all the films, started talking about Daddy. It was a moment that made Pooja happy.
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“It is a paradox, because the girl in the story who weaned her father off from drinking alcohol found herself at 44 with an alcohol problem,” Pooja said talking about her battle with the bottle. “Who would have thought that my first movie, where I rescue a man from this, would become something that I had to deal with? I had to be that person to myself. My father never told me not to drink, but he told me something that completely changed me. He will tell you what it was.”
Drunk Daddy
For many years, till 1988, Bhatt dealt with “a severe problem of alcohol.” That was a phase when a lot was happening. Professionally, he was on a high with breakout films like Arth and Saaransh, personally, he was coming off from a crumbling marriage, a highly public affair and his second marriage, to actor Soni Razdan, who also stars in Daddy.
“Giving up alcohol was a battle,” Mahesh Bhatt said about the time, before everything changed. For a man who would finish a bottle of whiskey a day, the birth of his daughter Shaheen was a significant moment which changed the Bhatt household.
“It was Shaheen who made me give up drinking. She was the first child born through Soni. I remember Soni had told me to stop drinking for a few days as the baby was coming. I would drink too much. After Soni came back home with Shaheen, I drank the whole night. I must have been celebrating with my friends, using the birth of my daughter as a reason. Alcoholics use any and every reason.
“I carried her in my arms, this frail little child. I leaned to kiss her but she turned away from me. Now, she could not have turned away from me because she was so small but I felt she did and I was filled with revulsion. I felt I couldn’t have my newborn baby turn away from me. Life was telling me something through this child. That was grace. I gave up drinking. I never touched a drop of alcohol after that. People would wonder, ‘Oh it is impossible, Mahesh Bhatt can’t stop drinking.’ But I did. I didn’t go to any doctor, took some pill, went to AA. I just gave it up. Daddy was born there — the daughter who becomes the trigger for the father.”
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In a poetic tribute, Daddy also marks the screen debut of Shaheen, who plays the younger version of Pooja in the film. But the path to sobriety wasn’t without temptations and the biggest of which actually shaped up Daddy to be one of the best works of the filmmaker.
One night, Mahesh Bhatt, Anupam Kher, Pooja and other members of the film were at the filmmaker’s residence, the same place where he now sat recalling the life-altering moment. He poured everyone whiskey, while he himself was off alcohol by then. They were supposed to film Daddy’s moving climax, which includes Anupam Kher successfully fighting the temptation to drink, the next day.
“Pooja had retired to bed, as she had an early morning shoot and others left. As I was picking up the bottles, I thought of how tired I was, because I was shooting back-to-back and how wonderful it would be if I could have a drink or two. No one would know. My wife was away, the child was sleeping. But then a voice came to my head: ‘You can con the world, your daughter, your wife, but how can you con yourself Mahesh?’ That just burnt the thirst which was rising within me.
“The next day, I re-wrote the climax. Earlier, when Anupam’s character is tempted to drink a glass just before his performance, Pooja would come, snatch it and push it away, asking him to just focus on singing. But I realised that was wrong, because coercing a person to do anything is not the right thing. It has to be an inner flowering, it should come from within. That was pulled right off my life. Not only was the movie autobiographical but also its vulnerability was exactly taken from life.”
Daughter’s battle
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Mahesh Bhatt had successfully kicked the bottle, unaware that it would later spill on his daughter, Pooja. The filmmaker recalled how people would ask him to put a stop to Pooja’s alarmingly growing drinking problem.
“‘Pooja is drinking too much, you must tell her.’ But I would tell them she carries my genes, whatever we do, we do in excess. I told them I would never intervene and tell her what to do, what not to. I have broken every law in the book, so I have no business to sit on a high horse and take a holier than thou position.”
But he did say something to Pooja years ago when the family was taking off for a vacation to Maldives, which finally made her to turn to sobriety.
“Once, Soni, Shaheen, Alia and I were going to the Maldives for a holiday. Pooja and I were exchanging messages, she was going through a phase of gloom and doom and kept saying how much she loves me. Our flight was about to take off, when I texted her: If you love me, then love yourself, because I live in you.
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“That message did something to her. I knew she wasn’t loving herself enough. You abuse yourself through alcohol when there’s something you don’t like about yourself. My text just worked.”
Daddy’s film, family’s pain
“Daddy is based on living, throbbing wounds of mine,” Mahesh Bhatt said about its autobiographical nature, before quoting a line of filmmaker Jane Campion that he swears by. “‘She had said, ‘Whenever I direct a film, I make it as if it is a gift for a very dear friend of mine. I approach it with all the love, of making a great gift.’ In that sense, Daddy was a gift that I gave to Pooja.”
Daddy begins with a dedication to his sister Heena (mother of filmmaker Mohit Suri), who passed away during the making of the film, and also to his first wife Kiran Bhatt, because it was her daughter’s first film. “She is my childhood romance. I was a 16-year-old boy when I met this 13-year-old girl in Bombay Scottish School, reference of which you find in Aashiqui,” Bhatt said.
Alia Bhatt and Mahesh Bhatt. (Photo: IMDb)
Unlike the 1990 blockbuster musical, or Arth and Saaransh, Daddy doesn’t enjoy the same stature on the cinematic shelf, something which Bhatt said he knows why. “Because alcoholism is a demon you privately live with. Often when people tell me they love Daddy, there is an intimate tone, a confessional quality.”
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After his debut film Manzilein Aur Bhi Hain in 1974, Mahesh Bhatt was an excited 22-year-old filmmaker, who was the talk of the town with his stylish, Hollywood-inspired debut. It was in those days, when he went to a party and met filmmaker Asit Sen, who, by Bhatt’s own description, would later “hit the bottle and spiral into the abyss of anonymity.”
Mahesh Bhatt would go to parties, because he wanted to be seen to get work and also, to enjoy free booze. One of his friends made him meet Asit Sen, who was “this tall, beautiful man.” Bhatt was in awe, for he was the maker of acclaimed films like Safar and Khamoshi. Bhatt recalled how when he met the filmmaker, Sen inquired about him and within seconds called his film “bulls**t.”
“He said, ‘You don’t know anything.’ I was shocked. He said, ‘You take these shots, steal from here and there, put them together and call it a film? You don’t know pain. The day you will know pain, you will become a filmmaker.’ Then he asked me to get out. Years later, in 1999, I am in Kolkata where I am getting the best director award for Zakhm. Guess who gave me the award? Asit da, who was now frail and worn out.
“He said the award goes to my ‘favourite’ director Mahesh Bhatt, he doesn’t have any memory of our first meeting. I just hugged him tightly. I could see my entire life in that moment. That same evening, Asit da called me to a party. His son was there and was making his father a drink. Asit Da told me that his favourite film was Daddy! I just stood still. I understood that movies are our wishful dream. What you cannot do in life, you do it in movies. A filmmaker is a fairer God. What life doesn’t deliver; filmmakers do.”
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It has been 35 years of Daddy. Seven years of sobriety for Pooja, and 36 years without alcohol for Bhatt. “I don’t regret a single moment of the journey.”
https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMixgFodHRwczovL2luZGlhbmV4cHJlc3MuY29tL2FydGljbGUvZW50ZXJ0YWlubWVudC9ib2xseXdvb2QvbWFoZXNoLWJoYXR0LXBvb2phLWJoYXR0LXJlY2FsbC10aGVpci1iYXR0bGVzLXdpdGgtYWxjb2hvbC1ob3ctYS1tb21lbnQtd2l0aC1kYXVnaHRlci1zaGFoZWVuLWdhdmUtYmlydGgtdG8tZGFkZHktMzUteWVhcnMtb2YtZGFkZHktOTE0NjY2NC_SAcsBaHR0cHM6Ly9pbmRpYW5leHByZXNzLmNvbS9hcnRpY2xlL2VudGVydGFpbm1lbnQvYm9sbHl3b29kL21haGVzaC1iaGF0dC1wb29qYS1iaGF0dC1yZWNhbGwtdGhlaXItYmF0dGxlcy13aXRoLWFsY29ob2wtaG93LWEtbW9tZW50LXdpdGgtZGF1Z2h0ZXItc2hhaGVlbi1nYXZlLWJpcnRoLXRvLWRhZGR5LTM1LXllYXJzLW9mLWRhZGR5LTkxNDY2NjQvbGl0ZS8?oc=5
2024-02-08 02:36:46Z
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