Drawing inspiration!

You might have seen umpteen examples of movies, which are totally inspired by some other classics. ‘Deewar’, the 1970s superhit drew heavily from ‘Mother India’ and the brother’s conflict in ‘Ganga Jamuna’. ‘Sholay’ was inspired by ‘The Magnificent Seven’.

However, there are many classic examples of how one idea inspired a storyteller director into giving us a rocking superhit which becomes a part of our movie-watching psyche for years. Maybe it is the conspiracy of the gods to have these ideas spoken when these directors were around else how would we get such massive goosebumps driving entertainers.

Here are some examples, two of them belong to SS Rajamouli who in my very personal opinion is the true successor to the chair of Manmohan Desai, it does not matter if his stories have come in a south Indian language.
SS Rajamouli once chanced on a newspaper clipping, which said that how a housefly ended up killing a man somewhere in India.

There was a great coincidence here that around the same time he was also trying to prove a point to those who doubted his talent as a director. Luckily for us he developed proper content and found investors who were willing to invest in his animation intensive project. The result was ‘Eega’ in Telugu and ‘Makkhi’ in Hindi. The movie remains one of my favourite TV watch. The concept of retribution by a lover who is reborn as a housefly was so brilliantly delivered by Rajamouli that you would want to hug the guy who put the clip of the newspaper in front of him.

‘Baahubali’s strongest character is Kattappa and there is a reason behind it. Kattappa was modelled purely on Bheeshma from Mahabharata.

Vijyendra Prasad, the writer of the movie, first just told Rajamouli that he has an idea of a character in his mind, a man who is sworn to unflinching loyalty to the king he is protecting. This character probably triggered the gigantic canvas of ‘Baahubali’.

Yes, ‘Baahubali’ started with the idea of Kattappa that also triggered Rajamouli’s long-nurtured ambition of one day bringing an Amar Chithra Katha style story to the screen. It is only a matter of time before ‘Baahubali’ will find its place amongst our biggest movie classics.

What if I told you ‘Baasha’, the movie which or more or less defines Rajinikant’s aura to a lot of his fans finds its origin in the 1991 Amitabh superhit called ‘Hum’? Apparently, the movie had a scene where Amitabh helps Govinda, who played his brother a seat in the police academy.

The director Mukul S Anand felt the scene disturbed the narrative and edited the scene on the editing table. Rajinikant who also played one of the three brothers found the scene very interesting and felt the idea could be developed into a full movie.

The result was ‘Baasha’. In fact, many people found shades of ‘Hum’ in the movie but the fact of the matter is that it was that one edited scene, which no one ever saw that inspired one of the biggest superhits of Rajinikant. You can call it a twist of destiny that Rajinikant was a part of ‘Hum’.

Rakesh Roshan’s ‘Kishen Kanhaiya’ was actually inspired from a story that he read about two twins who were telepathically connected.

The two claimed to have same thoughts at the same time. They would feel pain, hunger, etc at the same time. It was this that inspired Rakesh to attempt a story of separated at birth brothers. While critics have always maintained that the movie is based on ‘Ram Aur Shyam’ and ‘Seeta Aur Geeta’, Rakesh Roshan has always maintained his version that it is a coincidence that the story has turned out to be similar to the other classics.

The basic motivation came from the story of the twins feeling the same thing at a same point of time. Not all newspaper clipping or ideas contribute to great stuff on the screen though, the latest Varun Dhawan - starrer called ‘October’ was based on a newspaper clipping too and you would want to stop the director from reading any kind of newspaper once you watch ‘October’.