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Thirteen years after making her debut feature, Kiran Rao marked her directorial return with Laapataa Ladies (Lost Ladies), which has been selected as India‘s Oscar entry for the Best International Feature Film race.
“It felt a bit like cycling, after not having cycled for a while,” Rao tells Deadline about helming her second feature film after more than a decade. “It takes a little while to find your balance, but soon you’re on your way. I had a crew that was not just young and enthusiastic, but also really driven by the film and deeply believed in what we were trying to do.”
Lost Ladies follows two brides whose lives become entangled after a late night mix-up on a train, which leads to a series of misadventures where the two brides encounter oddball characters with unexpected
consequences.
“On the surface, it is a story of mistaken identity, but it is also a story that deeply questions patriarchy, and all the constructs that women have to navigate in their everyday lives,” says Rao. “There was great potential in this script not just to entertain, but to spark many conversations that I am deeply invested in, through the lens of comedic satire, about women’s freedoms, gender roles and the importance of education.”
Making films with fresh faces
Lost Ladies first started out as a story titled 2 Brides, written by Biplab Goswami. Aamir Khan, one of Lost Ladies‘ producers, had come across the screenplay while judging entries for a screenwriters’ lab. Khan felt that the story would be a good fit for Rao to direct.
“He really liked the story and when he gave it to me to develop, he allowed me to do with it what I wanted,” says Rao. “When we rewrote it and came back to him, I said that I wanted to do it with no [major] actors. It was a kind of a risk for Aamir as well, to make this film with completely unknown faces.”
Sneha Desai came onboard to write the screenplay, alongside Divyanidhi Sharma, who collaborated on writing the film’s dialogues and then the production ultimately cast Nitanshi Goel, Sparsh Shrivastava, Pratibha Ranta and Abhay Dubey for the film. Rao says that working with a “raw cast” was a great experience as they “were willing to be shaped into these roles.”
“There was a lot of workshopping and sharing between the younger cast who had never done a film before and actors like Chhaya Kadam, who plays the lady at the tea stall, and Ravi Kishan, who was the cop, who were much more experienced,” says Rao.
“I was lucky that I had that opportunity to make the film the way I wanted. But in general, one of the struggles of most filmmakers is — how do we make the films we want with no stars? Because the only way almost to get your film made is if you ally yourself with some big name, whether it’s a very big producer or big star,” added Rao.
“Kiran was coming back after a very long hiatus and hungry to prove herself,” says producer Jyoti Deshpande, who is President of the Media & Content Business at Reliance Industries. “As a woman studio head, I am always looking to back women storytellers and let me tell you there are still not that many around.
She adds: “The story involves two women protagonists, and while it’s a story of women empowerment, it is simple and warm and funny and inclusive of men in the narrative rather than being derisive of men. I was sold at the thought of striking this delicate balance and the rest was up to the execution.”
The romance of the journey
Comparing her experience of making Lost Ladies to her debut feature Dhobi Ghat, Rao said that the availability of VFX played a major difference.
“Not that we had to use it all that much, but we were a period film, so there were things we had to clean up, like there weren’t so many mobile towers [then],” says Rao of using VFX. “It’s great to have the ability to visually make our films exactly the way we want.”
However, Rao tried to stick to real locations, dialogue and sound as much as possible.
“In terms of sound, we were shooting in very different and difficult circumstances,” she says. “We were shooting on running trains with a lot of characters speaking in that compartment, but we didn’t have to dub a single word. We managed to get all of it in live sound.”
“Because we were shooting on a live location where there were other trains that would pass by, we would have to stop filming when there was all this activity on the station,” says Rao. “I feel that added a lot of real texture to the scenes.”
Trains are transformed into their own character in Lost Ladies — transporting the women not just across cities but launching them into an unexpected exploration of different life paths.
“It’s the journey film that’s always very interesting for me,” says Rao. “It’s the archetype of the voyage, a story where a character can go on a journey of discovery about the world, but end up learning so much about themselves.”
“My favorite part of making the film was the romance of the journey,” she says. “On some level, I’ve always dreamed of what would happen if I just got up at any station and figured out what was going on there. I’ve grown up traveling on Indian trains right through my childhood. We would take these long distance trains from where I lived to my grandparents’ house.
“The smell and the sights that you see through the window and just the feeling of being in that enclosed space for sometimes 36 to 48 hours is something that you just can’t replicate unless you actually shoot in that train and on the platform. There are sets that do it, but there’s the change of light, there’s the sound, the color on the platform that I wanted very much, even just nostalgically, to capture.”
Rao repeatedly draws upon the historical connection between the technological marvel of trains and the medium of cinema in the film. “With trains, you’re moving and you’re looking at this incredible, changing landscape, but you’re also very inward. It’s a kind of a meditative experience.”
Additionally, the film includes a lot of world folk music to color the story, something the director was keen to do to create an original sound for the film. “We tried to use sort world folk music rather than just Indian folk music, and we had sonic or musical sort of themes for each of these characters,” she says..
“Both Ram Sampath — the composer — and I are deeply interested in music, and both of us are very influenced by world music and by Indian classical music. We did want a more unique sound for the film, something more authentic than a very typical rural Indian folk sound. We thought that each of these characters could have an instrument or a sound that would go with them.”
Race to the Oscars
While Lost Ladies is a “journey film,” Rao is treating the project’s journey in the run up to the Oscars in a similar fashion: As India’s official selection for the International Oscar race, Rao is keen to enjoy and grow through each step of the campaign.
“It was really exciting to know that we’ve been chosen,” she says. “It was unexpected, but an absolute delight. We got a message from the Film Federation of India and the whole crew was ecstatic. We began to plan and put together our thoughts on how we could actually bring the film to the Academy and audiences outside those who had seen it already.”
Deshpande adds: “Our endeavour is to encourage as many jury members to watch it and get the word out. [The] rest is on the merits of the film and each film will have its own destiny. We are enjoying the journey as we make our way to the destination and savouring every moment of the experience. We are making so many friends and getting so much love along the way.”
Next Steps
Rao says that she is bursting with stories and that she has built up over the 13 years between her first and second films. One project that she is currently developing is a “scary fairy tale” — a climate horror set in the Himalayas. Another project that Rao is working on is a “comedy drama, similar, in that sense, to Lost Ladies.”
“I have a whole lot of things that I’ve been writing in the 10 years that I didn’t make a film, and those are slowly now coming to fruition and I’m finding the right writers, the right team.”