SPECIAL FEATURES #3 – PART 1: Ranjit S. Ruprai talks Turbans Seen On Screen

In our continuing series of interviews with London’s independent curators, Ranjit S. Ruprai of SUPAKINO talks about his ongoing film series at The Institute Of Light, Turbans Seen On Screen.

Ranjit’s next film will be ROCKET SINGH: SALESMAN OF THE YEAR which screens at The Institute Of Light (11 JUN 18:00) with an INTRO by Ranjit, short film BUNNY by Megha Ramaswamy – “a surreal exploration of childhood fantasies” – and a free Rosie Toole art card for everyone who rocks up.

Links and more after the interview.

[RADIANT CIRCUS]:
Welcome. For anyone who doesn’t know, please introduce yourself and SUPAKINO.

[RANJIT S. RUPRAI]:
My name is Ranjit and I run a film events organisation called SUPAKINO. My entry into the film scene in London was as a punter and a supporter. I started out attending as many events as possible and just enjoying them, telling other film fans about what’s going on since they tended to come to me for tips about interesting films and screenings. I’ve been going out to cinemas across London quite a lot, providing moral and financial support to small independent venues, interesting festivals, film clubs and film programmers. But always in the back of my mind I felt I wouldn’t mind putting on some screenings of my own. Certain films that others hadn’t screened before or certain themes that I’d love to explore.

That led to a conversation with Graham [Ainsley] who runs Science Fiction Theatre at The Institute Of Light just at the point when he was shifting over to this relatively new venue. The cinema had asked him to talk to his connections and see what ideas people had. Ideas which maybe they didn’t think they could get off the ground elsewhere, that they might like to experiment with at this small and quirky new venue. I did have a particular idea knocking about the back of my head for some time. I didn’t think I’d ever put it into practice as I was working on launching other projects. But when Graham got in touch, I thought actually, this would be perfect… it’s a small venue and they’re open to experimenting. I can get away with quite a range of films and that’s how Turbans Seen On Screen was born.

To give you a little bit of background on that, I watch films voraciously…

[RC]:
Anyone who follows you on Twitter knows just how voraciously you watch films!

[RSR]:
Before actually going to the cinema regularly, I watched tons of films on TV and rented them on VHS back in the day. Certainly, in the last 10 to 20 years I’ve seen a lot more in the cinema, where they’re meant to be seen and where I enjoy them the most. I have quite eclectic tastes and although it’s really nice to go to a director retrospective or to a film festival focusing on a particular country or region or format, like a documentary film festival or whatever might be on, I prefer connecting films together in my mind through slightly unusual themes. One personal to me as a turban wearer, a British Sikh, is whenever I see a film in which there’s some sort of character – doesn’t have to be a major role – wearing a turban, then I add it to a mental list. It doesn’t have to be a Sikh character either. It could be a man or a woman…

[RC]:
…just stepping out of the shower?

[RSR]:
Exactly! It just sticks in there, in the back of the mind. I thought this would be a great way of stringing together quite a varied bunch of films and to have a personal connection to it as well because, for some of the Sikh-based films, I could slightly address themes about representation on screen etc. But largely it’s just a fun way of stringing together a wide range of films.

[RC]:
You started with OCTOPUSSY. Was that more of a personal choice?

[RSR]:
Yes. I think the first three – and we’ve had three screenings so far – have all been personal choices in terms of where I was in my life when I watched them and how they spoke to me. And they all feature Sikh male characters. OCTOPUSSY I remember seeing in the 80s and it would have been on TV rather than in the cinema. You have this very striking character of Gobinda played by the marvellously handsome Kabir Bedi who was quite a heartthrob outside of India. He’s still very popular in places like Italy and elsewhere around the world because he was in various TV series like SANDOKAN – which I think was a sort of swashbuckling pirate-type series in Italy – and he’s been in DYNASTY & THE BOLD AND THE BEAUTIFUL and a few other things…

[RC]:
I think almost everyone has been in THE BOLD AND THE BEAUTIFUL! Even we’ve been in THE BOLD AND THE BEAUTIFUL, we just don’t know it yet…

[RSR]:
[laughter…] He was, and still is, a strikingly handsome man. He didn’t get a lot of dialogue in the film, as many of the henchmen in Bond movies don’t usually. They just have some gimmick. And with him it was the staring eyes and a silent demeanour. I was prepared to overlook that he was a baddie. There’s no two ways about it, he arranges murder, and tries to set off a nuclear bomb and all sorts of stuff. But he is, out of all the Bond films, quite an adversary for Bond himself. Possibly the equal of him. Spoiler alert… although he lasts the whole film, at the end he is only done for because of his loyalty to his boss who makes him do something which he’d rather not.

[RC]:
I think there’s a film statute of limitations, which means that after a certain amount of time we are allowed to discuss the entire plot of a film…

[RSR]:
He basically lasts the entire film apart from the last few moments. So, he has longevity within the film, which was quite unusual. I think the most striking thing about him was actually his fashion. In terms of the things that really stick in my mind, I do love the fashion and visual style of films: the outfits, the set design and things like that really attract my attention when I watch a film. His suits! – both the English suits and the Indian suits – he was just spectacular. I did hassle my mother for several years in the 80s – she’s a dressmaker – to have a suit made almost identical to the one he wears in the Monsoon Palace scenes.

[RC]:
Your thought was: “That’s how I want to look, like a Bond villain. I want to look like Gobinda. That’ll work well on the streets…”?

[RSR]:
You can tell how deeply that must’ve embedded itself? When I watched it recently, prior to the screening, it did strike me that actually, this guy is much more of a baddie than I remembered as a child. But, the fashion is forever in my mind as a positive thing. What was marvellous was that I reached out to Kabir Bedi himself and he agreed, very generously, to stay up until one in the morning in India and Skype in to say hello to the crowd. There were quite a few Bond aficionados who came in especially for the screening because it’s not one of the ones that gets screened that often out of the Bond canon. They were just grateful to see it on a big screen. And I did keep Kabir Bedi’s involvement as a surprise.

[RC]:
Wow. That was a wonderful Easter egg for everyone.

[RSR]:
It was. He told us some great stories, in terms of his memories of the Bond franchise. I know some people pooh pooh the Roger Moore era, but these were big budget, 70mm films. They were big blockbusters, like the Marvel franchise today. Watching it on a big screen for the first time, even myself, it holds up really well. It keeps you entertained and it keeps you on edge of your seat. There’s the odd bit of dubious Roger Moore humour in there, but I blame the script rather than Roger himself.

The other wonderful thing about that event was that as part of the research, I found an article written by Del Singh for his local paper about his time as a member of the crew for OCTOPUSSY. The film was shot around the Nene Valley Railway. They used that location for the scenes where you’ve got the carnival trains shunting between East and West Germany. That whole area was actually near Peterborough. At the time, Del was just out of school and I think about to start university, so it was a summer holiday. He had a summer job running a mobile disco with his brother, and he’d put up posters around town. Eon Studios had seen them and gave him a call, thinking that he could help them when it comes to tying the turban for Kabir Bedi’s character. He was called out of the blue and he thought it was a wind-up to begin with. I think the first question to him was, “do you wear a turban?” Which is an unusual opener for someone trying to book a mobile disco!

They had booked out a whole floor of a hotel somewhere in Peterborough for the entire crew. He turned up, with his brother, and they showed them the problems they were having. This wasn’t a last minute, “oh whoops, we haven’t got someone to tie the turban”. I think it just hadn’t been working for them. They’d shot quite a few scenes already and the turban kept coming off… it just didn’t work. Del got to look at it and realised it was far too short to be a real Sikh turban.

Not only had he got the gig for tying the turban every day, I think he got a sizeable amount of money for the time, something like 50 pounds a day for him and his brother each, which for the early 80s is a considerable sum. And he also sold them his schoolboy turbans!

[RC]:
That’s an entrepreneur, right there!

[RSR]:
Exactly. I think his mother was worried, “why are you selling all your turbans, are going to stop wearing them or something?” He’d just found a glorious opportunity.

He gave a wonderful talk beforehand and we showed photos taken behind the scenes of him hanging around with Roger Moore and the Bond girls. I think this was the icing on the cake for me: the behind the scenes photos and even some news footage with Del in the background as a young lad. It turned out to be a nice Bond-themed evening, with a turban flavour running through it.

[RC]:
And that brings us to your second film?

[RSR]:
The second film was THE ENGLISH PATIENT. The reason I screened that was – now we’re going into the 90s and another really big film actually – you’ve got a prominent, not the lead character, but one of the prominent supporting characters played by Naveen Andrews. He plays Kip, the bomb disposal expert in the British Army, going around Italy, finding mines and defusing them with his sidekick Hardy, played by Kevin Whately. There’s a touching double act between those two. I remember my sisters, who are rather older than me, effusing about this film, saying how wonderful it was at the time. And me looking at a film still and just disregarding it, saying “I’m not watching this”, mainly because his turban is just so messy for an Army man.

[RC]:
This was a point of principle?

[RSR]:
One of those red flags, because if they can’t get his turban right, you know…? If you don’t have friends or family who wear turbans, a turban is just a turban. Whereas, for someone who is wearing one all the time, you can tell the difference between an authentic one and an inauthentic one. And that’s often a marker when you see a television program or a film as to what the quality of the rest of the production will be. If they can’t get that right, then there’s probably a lot of other howlers in there as well. If you look back – and these were probably before my time, but I certainly saw reruns in the 80s – to those old 70s sitcoms where either someone would brown up and put a turban on or they’d get any old brown person, and stick a turban on their head and say “now, deliver these racist lines…” and they’d have no choice because that’s the only work available… often in those sorts of programs you’d also have inauthentic character names and clothing that were dead giveaways.

[RC]:
Is there a reason for the sloppy turban in THE ENGLISH PATIENT? Is there a big revelation?

[RSR]:
There was at the screening. When I finally saw it, maybe four or five years after it was released, I was really impressed by the film and I was willing to overlook the turban despite still finding it annoying at the time. I went from not wanting to watch it at all like that Seinfeld episode where Elaine cannot understand why everyone keeps going on about it to really enjoying it. People can get snooty about a very successful film like THE ENGLISH PATIENT because it’s perceived to be soppy, when actually it’s very good when you can get past your prejudices and actually watch it. It’s actually an incredibly good film, I think. When I finally saw it, there were a lot of other things in it that resonated with me: the contrast between the doomed obsessional love story of the Almásy & Katherine with the more innocent love story between Kip and Hana, the wonderful locations, the themes of identity and geography… if you can let your guard down, you will get swept away by the epic nature of it all.

The first revelation for me was that I found that the character of Kip is a lot bigger in the original novel by Michael Ondaatje. There were quite a few reviews at the time, including Variety and number of others, which despite saying it was a great film, were critical that they didn’t see more of Kip, because of Kip’s role in the novel. It’s quite interesting that when I finally got to see it the first time without reading the novel, I thought that it was fantastic to have a key character who’s a British Sikh. As a British Sikh myself, I’ve had family who were in the army and who served in World War II so it’s nice to have a bit of recognition. So I was really happy at all the screen time Naveen Andrews was getting. Plus, compared to OCTOPUSSY here we have someone stopping bombs, not planting them!

At the time, to those people who maybe knew the book well and were expecting something similar in the film, they didn’t get as much as Kip as they wanted. They were expecting to see more of him. So revisiting and researching the film before the recent screening, I was intrigued to find out what I was missing. I found some really interesting writing about the film by the American academic Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh in which Kip’s complex character traits are shown to reflect his process of finding himself and becoming more independent from his colonial upbringing. He goes through this phase where he just won’t look in mirrors. There’re a few lines in the book where Ondaatje describes him tying his turban in the garden and deliberately not looking in mirrors, and suddenly the unusually sloppy turban makes sense.

The film never explained that. You do see little snippets of his character’s complexity: he sleeps in a tent outside when he could easily go inside and he forces himself into this very minimalist, vanity-free existence. That was quite a nice revelation for me. I touched on that in my introduction to the film and we paired it with a documentary about World War II flying Sikhs in the RAF by Navdeep Kandola who had assembled archive footage from the Greenwich War Museum with talking head interviews of some of the last surviving Sikh pilots from World War II. They had some amazing hair-raising stories about their heroic exploits flying all over the world in their turbans.

[RC]:
It’s a wonderful image. And another marginalised story that doesn’t fit within a mainstream narrative of the Second World War?

[RSR]:
To some extent. I think people of the older generation, who may still remember the war or who had parents in the war, they still remember Sikhs’ contribution very fondly. I still get that on the tube or in other unexpected places. I’ll bump into some old lady and she’ll start talking about the war and her memories and I’m grateful… I want to hear the stories!

It was nice to see in a film like THE ENGLISH PATIENT, a major character as an officer wearing a turban and reflecting the Sikh contribution, which was disproportionately large given, even in India, we are only a tiny minority, only one to two percent of the population.

So the mystery of the messy turban was solved and any remaining reservations I had about the character of Kip were removed.

[RC]:
That brings us to another marginal character with a turban in THE LIFE AQUATIC, your third film.

[RSR]:
Yes. Now we’re jumping another decade. I’m an acolyte, I suppose, of Wes Anderson. When RUSHMORE came out, they rereleased BOTTLE ROCKET. I saw both of them at the cinema at around the same time. And they blew me away. I really, really loved RUSHMORE. So I have since stuck with Anderson through thick and thin. I give him the benefit of the doubt. No matter what he has out, I will go and see it at the cinema, pay my money, ignore the critics and take my own view as it were. I remember when THE LIFE AQUATIC came out, there was already a bit of a backlash against him. I made the mistake of reading some reviews and lowering my expectations. Maybe that was a good thing because I came out of it feeling elated. It was just such a perfect film for me in terms of pressing the right buttons and making me feel happy. Again – spoiler alert! – at the end, Bill Murray puts the young character of Werner, the nephew of one of his crew, on his shoulders triumphantly and parades down the street. I felt like I was the little boy, held aloft in a cloud of happiness.

This film has got such good rapport between the different actors. And I think that’s mainly because Wes Anderson and Noel Baumbach actually wrote the roles for specific actors. They had them in mind and so many of the actors are pretty much just their mates basically. I think the guy who holds the boom in all of the shots is the real sound mixer on the film. The intern in the film was Anderson’s real intern on a previous film. So, you have all these connections and a real family feel to it. The character of Vikram – who’s the cameraman in THE LIFE AQUATIC – is played by the model/actor/conservationist Waris Ahluwalia who was just a mate of Wes Anderson. They met each other at a peace march outside the United Nations building. A very New York story.

What I really liked about his contribution was that it was authentic in the sense that it’s not a costume for him. He wears a turban in real life, and so hey, here’s his turban. Basically he’s just wearing what he would normally wear except in LIFE AQUATIC red. So that was one aspect which set it apart from the previous screenings. The second aspect was the fact that it’s not really commented upon… it’s not a plot point. There’s no reason necessarily for him to be Sikh. He just is who he is. That felt very fresh for an American movie at the time, to have cast it in that way.

With these film screenings, what I like to do, and what I enjoy myself when I go to indie film screenings, is add something extra. For LIFE AQUATIC, we had the singer-songwriter Florence Glen come and perform songs from the soundtrack, the David Bowie songs in Portuguese. Florence herself grew up in Portugal, so she knows the language. She’d already recorded one of the songs and put it on YouTube. That’s how I discovered that there’s someone in London who could sing these songs. I got in touch and said, do you think you could teach yourself three or four more and come and play for us? And she did a fantastic job and the audience lapped it up. That’s probably my most enjoyable one so far, because of the music element.

I’ve put the footage from the concert up on YouTube, by the way… just search for “SUPAKINO Florence Glen”.

[RC]:
Another standout feature of your screenings is the wonderful postcards with these beautiful portraits of turban-wearing characters. How did that come about?

[RSR]:
I’m glad you like them. The main motivation for starting SUPAKINO for me was to help encourage people to go to the cinema. Instead of watching stuff at home, you can get out there into the cinema, watch films with other people, watch them in a darkened room without distraction and watch stuff that you might not normally watch. That’s my primary motivation. But one of my secondary motivations is that I get to support new artists, illustrators, animators, filmmakers, musicians… it’s good for them and I get a bit of fun out of it as well because I get to collaborate with and meet new people and form new friendships and relationships.

My thought for this theme was to get a single illustrator across the whole series and Rosie Olivia Toole who’s based in Brighton does these lovely fine art illustrations. You can look up her website, RosieToole.co.uk. She picks these characters from iconic or cult films and does these amazingly intricate and detailed pencil drawings or photorealistic acrylic paintings. She’s been doing the turban character for each screening so far. I’m really pleased with the result. If you come to one of my screenings, you get to take one of those away for free. Usually there are some badges and other stuff as well because I know everyone likes freebies and I’m there to make people happy.

[RC]:
What the artwork does, beautifully, in relation to your eclectic mantra for Turbans Seen On Screen, it isolates out characters who might be marginal and invites us to pay attention.

[RSR]:
The turban thing was always quirky and fun, but as I’ve done them and thought about what I’m going to say before each film as you have to, it has brought out some interesting points about representation and authenticity. That’s not the main focus, but it is quite an interesting lens through which to look at these films. And, for people who don’t really know much about these characters, it does give me a chance to talk about the actors and their work and hopefully people will look at their other work as well. I know Waris has been in a few films since then: he’s been in Spike Lee’s INSIDE MAN and Luca Guadagnino’s I AM LOVE.

[RC]:
I think one of the things that it does, even in a warm, appreciative way, is it focuses on the agency of the actors and the characters that they were creating. Even if one might argue that casting a Sikh as the villain in a Bond movie uses the actor’s ethnicity to suggest something unspoken about the darkness and danger of the character…. actually what you’re doing is drawing attention to the fact that this actor created a vivid, vibrant character on screen. And that there’s an incredibly loved actor behind that role.

[RSR]:
Kabir himself, as part of his intro, did say that playing a turbaned Sikh was a special experience and he was mindful of how he was going to be viewed by other Sikhs. He doesn’t wear a turban in real life, which is why he needed someone to tie it for him. I think he played the role very respectfully, you know, within the confines of having to do what he has to do as part of the script…

[RC]:
Murder, mayhem and nuclear devastation….

[RSR]:
You could say that’s quite a feat, to take such a villainous character on paper and perform it relatively nobly. In a strange, perverse way… he does play it nobly and honourably. Um, yeah… Maybe I’ve gone too far with “honourably”…

I think it’s very easy to get offended on other people’s behalf, but sometimes you have to look at it from their point of view and say, actually, you know, we’re just grateful to have a Sikh character in a major, major franchise movie. He was handsome and you can look at it and say, I’d like to dress in that suit…

[RC]:
Did you get the suit?

[RSR]:
I did, but my mother asked a friend do it because maybe she felt under pressure from my nagging. So she thought, okay then, let’s just get it done properly and it didn’t come out how I wanted it. I wore it a few times.

[RC]:
You still have it?

[RSR]:
I do but I probably don’t fit in it… If I’d have commissioned it as an adult, rather than as a teenager, I might well have worn it have to the screening…

[RC]:
We can all hold out for that moment, but we ought to turn ourselves to the future because you’ve got another screening coming up, which is ROCKET SINGH.

[RSR]:
I’m hoping, if we continue with the series that it’s not gonna all be Singhs and Sikhs… I have some films that I’d love to screen featuring Rajasthani turbans, Middle Eastern turbans, hopefully Greta Garbo in a Hollywood diva turban at some point… If we can continue – and if people come along and enjoy them – we will get around to those.

ROCKET SINGH is an interesting one that I only came to fairly recently. There is an Indian director, Shimit Amin, who had a big hit with his first film CHAK DE! INDIA, which was a sports film starring the Bollywood superstar, well, world superstar really, Shah Rukh Khan…

[RC]:
Who I always say to you, whenever you mention his name, that I’ve been in a lift with…

[RSR]:
Oh yes, that’s right! Shimit Amin’s follow-up movie – with the same writer, Jaideep Sahni – is a film called ROCKET SINGH: SALESMAN OF THE YEAR. That’s the full title. It came out in 2009 and stars another currently big superstar, Ranbir Kapoor. He’s actually Bollywood royalty. His grandfather was the legendary Raj Kapoor, actor, director, producer and who himself was a son of silent era actor Prithviraj Kapoor and the brother of Shammi Kapoor and Shashi Kapoor… all big, big iconic stars of Indian cinema. And many of them really well known outside of India as well. Maybe less so in the US and UK outside of the Indian diaspora, but they’re still big in places like Russia and the Middle East and North Africa as well. Whenever I visit or meet people from these places, they will know the films and will sing the songs.

Ranbir Kapoor is a fourth generation filmstar, and by star I mean superstar. This is one of the first films I’d seen of his. What struck me is that unlike a lot of the current generation of superstars where their charisma and their persona can overpower the roles – you only see them as the actor’s name rather than necessarily the character’s name – Ranbir is quite different in that he really does subsume himself into the character.

They wrote the story where the lead character is a Sikh. And although Ranbir isn’t a Sikh himself, and doesn’t wear a turban in real life, it’s done incredibly authentically. You only have to look at him and see his mannerisms to believe that this was actually very, very well performed. Whoever did his costume and whoever did the set design, has just got it spot on. I must check out his latest film, which is called SANJU, which is coming out soon, where he plays the controversial actor Sanjay Dutt. The trailer for that looks amazing because it’s one famous actor playing another older, famous actor, the trials and tribulations of its life… “trials” I mean literally! He really looks like him and changes his whole demeanour. There are prosthetics involved too but I think you have to give Ranbir credit for the way he just takes on the persona of a character. He does seem to have that ability.

ROCKET SINGH was not a hit when it came out. I don’t know if you can consider it a flop either, but it certainly didn’t take as much as it as it should have for some reason. Ranbir himself, in one interview I’ve seen, says that its reception on release was one of the more disappointing things in his career. But it is still admired and critically acclaimed. Whenever I find someone who loves Indian movies, I mention this film and they say, oh yeah, fantastic film. People who did see it thought it was great and I think it’s had some longevity. People still talk about it.

How can I describe it…? It may be a corporate heist movie? It’s a strange beast. It’s offbeat… There isn’t really a stereotypical Bollywood movie in my view. Bollywood is not really a genre, it has very many genres within it. But even if you feel that whole studio system is of a certain type, this feels very different. It’s very contemporary. It’s very fresh. It’s sort of set in the world of the modern day office, a sales office. Most of the scenes in the movie are set within an open plan office environment and they feel very realistic. Even the home and street locations feel very authentic because they seem to be real homes and real street locations rather than obviously studio based.

His character is just out of college. He hasn’t got particularly good grades and he is happy-go-lucky about it. He can’t afford to take an MBA like his rich friends, so he takes a job as a salesman, but he goes in quite naively because ultimately he’s an honest guy and he wants to do things by the book and he’s surrounded by sharks and charlatans. Without spoiling it, he comes up with an idea and that’s the heist element of it. It does, at one stage, feel like an escape movie, except they’re not escaping from prison. They’re escaping from horrible corporate environments into a more progressive style of doing business.

[RC]:
The film screens on the 11th of June at The Institute of Light? I dare say people will get a wonderful Rosie Toole portrait card?

[RSR]:
They will and it’s come through the post and it’s absolutely stunning. My favourite one so far, and I always say that when they come through…

[RC]:
Are you planning any other special features for this screening or are those surprises to come?

[RSR]:
Possibly. I need to confirm with the venue first, but I’m hoping to sneak in quite a nice little surprise. Maybe not a massive thing. A little thing, but I’m having discussions at the moment and we’re hoping it’ll go through… in which case, I may announce it before the screening.

[RC]:
We’ll just have to see what happens on the 11th of June at The Institute of Light.

… and that’s the meat of it.

HUNGRY FOR MORE?

• Discover SUPAKINO, Turbans Seen On Screen & other delights here.
• Follow SUPAKINO on Twitter, Instagram, Vimeo & YouTube.
• Ranjit’s next film will be ROCKET SINGH: SALESMAN OF THE YEAR which screens at The Institute Of Light (11 JUN 18:00) with an INTRO by Ranjit, short film BUNNY by Megha Ramaswamy – “a surreal exploration of childhood fantasies” – and a free Rosie Toole art card for everyone who rocks up.
• Discover the art of Rosie Toole here.
• Visit The Institute Of Light and follow them on Twitter and facebook for news about other screenings by independent curators.