In his first television interview, a 15-year-old Sachin Tendulkar told actor Tom Alter, “I only want to play cricket.” That, and winning the World Cup for India were his only childhood dreams. He reiterated the same at the trailer launch of Sachin: A Billion Dreams, which will be released on May 26. “This movie is not just about my cricket, but also other factors and other chapters in my life that I want to show everyone,” he told the media. The anticipation for the movie is so huge that its trailer has garnered more than 22 million views on YouTube.
And even if films on sports stars seem to have become a norm in the last few years—Paan Singh Tomar (2012), Bhaag Milkha Bhaag (2013), Mary Kom (2014), Azhar (2016), M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story (2016) and Dangal (2016)—the treatment here has been different. Tendulkar is seen narrating his story as people close to him join in. Though a child actor recreates the cricketer’s childhood, real footage has been procured to stay true to the story. The film was touted as a docu-feature. But when we use the term while talking to director James Erskine, a film promotions manager corrects us saying it is a feature film. Format aside, the film does have all the ingredients of a feature film: a star—Sachin, music by maestro A.R. Rahman and foot-tapping numbers including a Sachin anthem by Sukhwinder Singh.
Ravi Bhagchandka, the producer, did not want to follow the conventional path of a biopic. “I didn’t want to get an actor because more than half the country is connected closely to Sachin. It would have been difficult for Indians to connect to an actor as Sachin Tendulkar,” he explains. “The second reason is that he has been a really closed person. We wanted him to open up about his story, instead of an actor portraying that part.” The movie, he adds, is “absolutely real-life”, unlike other biopics on sportspersons where they add some action or story to make the film dramatic.
The biopics made till now have often been termed hagiographies. “Most of these films are too positive,” says senior sports writer Ayaz Memon. He also points out that there have been no films on sports personalities in the early history of Indian cinema. “There have been a few fictional films like Awwal Number or Chak De India but the trend of biopics is very new. Not even documentaries were a norm.” The documentaries, if any, were footage clubbed together, like the one made after India won the series against England in 1972-73. “Those were primitive days; audiovisual medium was still evolving,” says Memon.
The poster of Sachin: A Billion Dreams.
But even around five years ago, former tennis player and actor Bikram Saluja had trouble finding a sponsor for his seven-part docu-series, Travelling With The Pros, featuring tennis star Saina Nehwal, wrestler Sushil Kumar, cueist Pankaj Advani, racer Narain Karthikeyan, tennis legend Mahesh Bhupathi, shooter Abhinav Bindra and golfer Jeev Milkha Singh. It was finally funded by the Aditya Birla Group. India, he says, hasn’t been very open to sports “like maybe a sporting nation like the US. There is a wide gap. Strictly talking about non-cricketing sports, we have hardly had achievers except for a few like Prakash Padukone [badminton], Milkha Singh [athletics], Vijay Amritraj [tennis] and P.T. Usha [athletics].”
Making a film on a sportsperson is akin to running a steeplechase. Take, for instance, Tigmanshu Dhulia, who took years to make Paan Singh Tomar even though the idea struck him during the making of Bandit Queen (1994)—all because of lack of funds. When Rakeysh Om Prakash Mehra conceptualised the idea of Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, there was no precedent of a story on a sports star. “I couldn’t finance the whole film solely. And, there were no buyers. It was very difficult to convince people to do a biopic which was inspired by the era of partition of India, which was on a sportsman, and the sports being athletic and not cricket or hockey,” he says, recalling how he had mortgaged a small bungalow in Mumbai to raise funds.
But times have changed. There is a greater sense of pride in what our sportspersons are achieving, “which was not reflected even in the media 25 years ago”, says Memon. “Sports hardly appeared on page 1 of the newspapers, he says. “Now you see sports being frequently on the front pages. Sports stars have now become celebrities and role models. There is a high news value to their achievements.”
But, Indian filmmakers should make films that are far more real-life, says Saluja, like it has happened in the west. Memon gives the example of the Robert De Niro-starrer Raging Bull, which shows American boxer Jake LaMotta in various dimensions and not just as an achiever. Also, a sports film needs proper research, according to Shoojit Sircar, who is planning a film on Mohun Bagan’s historic win against an English football club.
When Bhagchandka was narrowing down on the director for Sachin: A Billion Dreams, he wanted someone who hadn’t grown up experiencing Sachin’s aura in the country. “I felt any Indian, even if not his fan, would have experienced the magnificence of Sachin Tendulkar, and probably the objective of making the film would have been lost,” he says. He watched about 300 sports biopics and documentaries and various types of sports films by filmmakers from across the globe. He even considered a director from America who didn’t understand cricket at all. “But eventually, we felt that we have to zero down on someone who understands cricket because at the end it is a complicated sport to understand,” he says. “James [Erskine] has done a lot of sports films—he has done a film on a cyclist, a footballer. He has done a docu-feature film on football, too, and having a background of cricket, he became the right choice.”
Erskine, on the other hand, says the true story of a well-known person only comes out with a mix of highs and lows in the story. “The crafting of the journey is very important,” he says. “I don’t want to make a film that is full of lows, especially when it is about someone like Sachin. Again, I don’t want to make a film that is just all highs because then it just doesn’t mean anything.”
Memon says with more films being made on sports stars like Bindra and Nehwal, the next stage could be Indian TV series. “We have not had anything like Bodyline [an Australian 1984 television miniseries that dramatised the events of the 1932-1933 English Ashes cricket tour of Australia],” he says, “but we have many such stories waiting to be told. And, this just seems like a start.”
SCREEN SHOTS
Sports biopics in recent years
* Paan Singh Tomar 2012
* Bhaag Milkha Bhaag 2013
* Mary Kom 2014
* Azhar 2016
* M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story 2016
* Dangal 2016
