Thaindian News

By Joginder Tuteja
Mumbai, Sep 16 (IANS) In a song in recently released “Chintu Ji” the lyrics included 24 influential international film directors like Akira Kurosawa, Alfred Hitchcock, Quentin Tarantino, but it didn’t mention “Slumdog Millionaire” director Danny Boyle.

Composer Siddhartth (of Siddhartth-Suhas duo) explains the reason behind the elimination.

“Danny Boyle is a great director and we had all the right intentions to include him in the song. After all I have loved his movies like ‘Sunshine’ and ‘Trainspotting’ even though his popularity reached further heights only after ‘Slumdog Millionaire’. While discussing the entire song idea with the director of ‘Chintu Ji’, Ranjit Kapoor, we did bring in Danny’s name.”

But the song was composed a year back and at that time, Boyle was hardly a familiar name for most Indians and hence a call was taken to include someone else.

“After some contemplation, we decided to stick to more popular names when it came to filmmakers who have made a difference to world cinema. We already had Frank Capra, Fellini Federico, Brian DePalma and many more who had already been short listed and instead of Danny Boyle, we opted for Woody Allen who is much better known,” said Siddhartth.

“It’s a tribal song and thus the lyrics were supposed to be gibberish. However, Ranjit’s idea was to make the song with the help of international filmmakers rather than gibberish.

“This was quite a task for us since along with Ranjit, we had to do quite a lot of research and short listing. Moreover, we had to put together the names in a format that goes with the tune and yet sounds very tribal. We first got the composition in place and then plugged in the lyrics.”

Sung by Anushka Manchanda & Earl, “Akira Kurosawa” has other filmmakers like Vittorio De Sica, Kenji Mizoguchi, William Wyler, Billy Wilder, Bernardo Bertolucci, Sam Pekinpah, Luchino Visconti, Nagisa Oshima, Sidney Lumet, Segio Leone, Francois Truffaut, Cecil DeMille, Milos Forman, Jean Luc Godard, Yasujiro Ozu and Majid Majidi finding an honourable mention.

Once “Slumdog Millionaire” became a worldwide range, the composer duo did think of redoing the song with Boyle.

“Yes, in fact Sophie also suggested if we could re-dub the portion even though the number had already been picturised. However, logistically it wasn’t all fitting in so we let it go. May be in our next film, we will certainly pay tribute to Danny Boyle in some way or the other,” said Siddharth.