12 Oct 2006 - Don, The Chase Begins

OPM*

Presents - Don (‘t) do that!

Remakes are the order of the day. They are even remaking poems. William Blake’s wry observation on the meaning of life, which goes: “Little Fly, thy summers play, My thoughtless hand, has brushed away” has been remade into an observation of party hopping nightmares:

Your Little Fly
Is open hey!!
Is your thoughtless hand, on holiday?

Yes, so remakes are the order of the day (including this sentence). People are remaking everything from songs to Tarla Dalal’s cooking to movies. I even remade the coffee that I botched up this morning!

The thing with the business of remaking is that one has to start at the beginning. Sometimes even before the beginning, in the past.
This makes remaking a movie a very difficult thing to do involving several precursors to filming. Chief among these is that one has to first, watch the original. This can be pretty annoying especially if you are looking to remake movies like YHTKH, HKSKN or James (sitting through one entire showing of such movies usually ensures that the thought of remaking is quickly rethought and disinfected)
Even if a filmmaker zeroes in on a yesteryear-hit things can go severely wrong at the scripting stage. Today, we will look at some of the pitfalls that the makers of the new Don faced.

In the 28 years that have followed the release of the original Don the Average Indian Height has gone up by about 2 inches (according to statistics provided by Indian Trouser Manufacturers). The new Don though, is shorter by about 6 inches. This is rather unfortunate and makes it very difficult for the filmmaker to show him as a larger than life character (smaller than life heroes don’t work in regular Bollywood fare).
They decided, hence, to set the new movie in Malaysia, where height statistics make our protagonist suitably larger than life.
This done they set out making changes to the script, where necessary and otherwise.
For starters, all the female characters would wear shorter clothes than in the original since they were Indian women of average Indian height, who did their shopping in Malaysia. Also Roma was renamed Aroma, to give her character a unique oriental flavour resulting in metaphysical moments like:
Don: (as he looks for spare bullets, during a gunfight) I can’t find anything! What is this, Aroma?!!!?
Aroma: Oh, that is just the smell of gunpowder
and
Don: (appreciating the wine tasting class that Aroma has enrolled him in) : Oh, Aroma!
Aroma: No! You need to taste the wine, not smell it

The original character Jasjit, had to be rewritten too since there are no careers left for Circus high wire walkers in the absence of all circuses except Navjot Piddhu, in the present day. So the new Jas-jit is a JIT consultant (a Japanese management philosophy which gave the world the farcical face-saving technique of the Just-In-Time marriage) with fake degrees, who gets injured when a huge wedge falls on his foot. After this huge wedgie, he has a permanent limp (which is understandable if you went to the same school as I did).
Moving the story 28 years ahead while retaining its original appeal meant giving the characters a retro look and retaining some original songs.
A great deal of planning and detailing was done on the new version of ‘Khaike pan’ that essentially involved finding a blue shirt with floral prints.
Also, Don, since he is a Malaysia based underworld don, and not a regular white-collar office-goer wears his tie inside his shirt. Thankfully they decided not to do a superman with his innerwear.
All this was done at a huge cost to the makers (as well as the audience).
True to the contemporary setting, the new Don is very gadget-friendly and always carries an iPod and a cool new Blackberry, which make him painfully slow during fight sequences, as he is worried about damaging them. Gadgets also provide fodder for conversation and light moments especially when Malik continuously mistakes ‘pass me some black berries’ for ‘pass me the Blackberry’.
The biggest script challenge was to ensure that none of the present characters ever watched any Indian TV in case they saw reruns of the original Don and hence figured out what happened next. This was an additional reason to set the movie in Malaysia where there are only 3 porn channels (including a news channel called Hot News and a sports channel called Water)
The basic plot remains the same except that they decided not to bump off the actual Don, retaining him in captivity, much like his Versace ties. The masterstroke is the Promo, which shows Don with his face enveloped in smoke, in spite of the ban against depicting cigarette smoking onscreen. This was achieved by shooting in really cloudy conditions in Ooty.

It is easy to see that the biggest movie of 2006, DON is a high-methane, twisted roller-coaster ride, with just the right dose of clamour, action, suspense, romance and rerun quality.
Of course, they called it Don-The Chase Begins only because they were hurrying to catch the October 20th Diwali release.


* Objects in the Preview Mirror may appear sillier than they are.

Disclaimer: Characters in the above story are not based on any characters in the film. Any resemblance or humour is pure luck.
**OPM appears in the Thursday edition of Bangalore BIAS and previews a Friday release