Love craft: A Wknd interview with intimacy director Dar Gai
Mythology, philosophy and Obama’s list of favourite songs of 2019 all came together to point Ukrainian filmmaker towards her role on Shakun Batra’s Gehraiyaan. See how the 32-year-old became one of mainstream Bollywood’s first intimacy directors.
A decade ago, Dar Gai was at a crossroads. The Ukrainian had a Master’s degree in Philosophy and was planning to move to Germany for a PhD. But something was drawing her to the East. “I hardly knew anything about Eastern philosophy and history,” Gai says. She wanted to learn more.
In her early 20s at this time, Gai already had a decade of experience in theatre, as a child actor, then an actor and director. She began to apply for positions in Japan, China, Korea and India, “for anything in theatre”.
An acceptance letter arrived from the Scindia boarding school for boys in Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh. For a year, Gai taught philosophy and German there, and oversaw the theatre programme. And it was there that a chance meeting with industrialist Anand Mahindra pointed her in a new direction — one that would see her make headlines a few years later as one of mainstream Bollywood’s first intimacy directors, on the Shakun Batra film Gehraiyaan, starring Deepika Padukone.
“Mahindra was the school’s chief guest on Founder’s Day. I had written and directed a play that he really liked, based on tales from Indian mythology. He told me that if I was interested in directing, I should move to Mumbai,” says Gai, 32.
She was so motivated by his encouragement that she quit her job at the Gwalior school. Before she moved to Mumbai, she decided to experience the country in greater depth, learn more about it, and so she spent three months criss-crossing India by train. “From Punjab to Manipur, I went everywhere, just making notes and jumping from train to train. It really helped me understand India, its culture and people,” Gai says.
In Mumbai, Gai found a job teaching film appreciation, cinema history and creative writing at the film school Whistling Woods. But, for about five years, no Bollywood breaks materialised. “There was a lot of toxicity and I didn’t just want to make films, I wanted to enjoy the process,” she says. Eventually, she got a few friends together and made a 45-minute short film set in a brothel, shot in one take, featuring actors Zoya Hussain and Jim Sarbh.
“Anurag Kashyap loved it and said he’d support the film. So we expanded the initial idea and made Three and A Half (2018), the story of one house that was a school, a home and a brothel in different eras.” It was while making Three and A Half that Gai had her first brush with directing intimacy, in sex scenes between Hussain’s character of a sex worker and Sarbh’s, of a client. She devised physical and mental exercises, drawing on her experience in theatre. “This helped create a very strong connection between them, one where they were comfortable and understood the reasoning behind every movement and every line,” she says. Gai would draw on this process again for Gehraiyaan, three years later.
Being an intimacy director is a bit like being an alchemist, Gai says. “You rely on body language and chemistry. You understand the outcome you want and experiment with different formulas for how to get there. Small details are important and less is definitely more difficult when you are trying to express complicated emotions.”
Her next film was Namdev Bhau: In Search of Silence (2018), the tale of a chauffeur in Mumbai who packs up his life and leaves the city, hoping to find peace elsewhere. Here, Gai says, the main character was played by a non-actor and she needed him to express vulnerability through his body language. “Both films really helped me find my tools for later projects like the music video for Prateek Kuhad’s cold/mess.”
The breakup anthem made it to former US President Barack Obama’s list of favourite songs of 2019, and it’s one of the reasons Batra reached out to Gai for Gehraiyaan. The haunting video she created for the song featured Hussain and Sarbh as a couple so in love they can’t stay away from each other, but so toxic that they’re suffocating, stifling one another.
Batra recalls reaching out to Gai while he was writing the script for Gehraiyaan. “Very early on, I realised that intimacy was going to be a huge part of the film. I wanted it to look very different from how we had seen it on screen in the past and I was really, really scared about shooting the scenes,” he says.
Streaming shows in India have had intimacy directors on board in the recent past; they needed them before Bollywood did, because intimacy scenes have the potential to be a lot more explicit on the relatively uncensored streaming platforms. Gehraiyaan is one of the first mainstream Bollywood projects to have an intimacy department.
The film follows the chaos caused when a young woman (Padukone) begins to fall in love with her cousin’s fiancé (Siddhant Chaturvedi). “Once I had read the script, I understood how complicated the story was. I took the actors through every single shot so they understood what angles we’d be using and what the choreography of these scenes would be. Also, how we could cheat. There are tricks to showing intimacy with the right angles, lighting and magnification,” Gai says.
On Gai’s intimacy team were intimacy coach Neha Vyas and intimacy coordinator (and assistant director on the film) Aastha Khanna. The trio took the cast through a week of workshops that included physical and mental exercises and conversations about consent and boundaries. The primary aim, Gai says, was to get Padukone and Chaturvedi to feel safe with each other. “Once you trust each other, that is when you can push to experiment. That also happened because the actors trusted the process and the science behind it. That is very commendable,” Gai says.
Batra adds that it made him “so happy and proud” to be modernising the way things were done, in this manner.
Gai, incidentally, got a break of another kind in the film too. She has directed two song sequences, for the title track and the song Doobey.
While she feels her work on Gehraiyaan was important, she plans to focus, for now, on her own films and shows. Her production company Jugaad Motion Pictures has a young-adult series in production for a leading OTT platform; her husband Dheer Momaya is directing a documentary series too.
“Having an intimacy director or coordinator is a practice that more filmmakers need to adopt and nurture in the industry but I’d like to move on to telling stories, which is my first love,” she says.
DAR GAI, ON HER ROLE
“The idea is to look at intimate scenes just the way we look at fight or dance sequences,” says Gai. “And by intimate scenes, I do not necessarily mean physical scenes. It can be a strong emotional and passionate scene. Intimacy directors create safety zones for the actors to work and feel comfortable with each other.”
“As creators, our task is to create chemistry. No matter whether it is a shot of a hand touching the shoulder or forehead touching the forehead, the audience must feel the same vulnerability they’d experience when they see any other, much more explicit scene for example.”
“[The questions we seek to help actors tackle are] What if I feel vulnerable? What if I have anxiety? What if I do not know how to create that chemistry with my partner? These questions will be answered and taken care of by the intimacy director.”