Bollywood Dreams

23:34Like, it's such a vast industry, PJ. It has so many characters kind of going in and out, playing various different parts, that, like, being taken for a ride, getting fooled, is remarkably common. You know, just down the road where I live, I mean, I live in the part where like most of the production companies are. Like if I go and grab a coffee right now while I'm still on this podcast with you at a local cafe, I'll just see like some really shady guy trying to like meet another person and they wouldn't know who's trying to scam home. You know, they'll all talk like, oh yeah, we're gonna make like this big Hollywood film and oh, I know this one.

24:14Oh yeah, that one I worked with. I mean, they'll all be name dropping. They'll all be talking big. And it's very rare for something really serious to come out of it, right? You'll just end up spending a lot of time. I see. You'll waste a lot of money. And it's very, very, very likely that you won't see any return, let alone a profit or a reasonable film that you're proud of.

24:41When I told Ankur the full story of Raja's father, the amateur outsider who was now sending hundreds of thousands of dollars to India, that gave Ankur a real pause. He didn't want to comment specifically on Flower Volley or on its director. He'd never heard of Kamal Chandra. And though he was concerned, he did stop short of the word scam. It imputed motive. It accused people he hadn't met. I thought maybe he was just being polite or litigation averse. But when I'd repeat the story to my friends in the American film industry, they'd all have the same reaction. Didn't I see? The story of a movie producer pouring his money into a director's bank account and never getting that money back?

25:28How could you call that a scam? That was how, much of the time, the film industry worked. I thought they were being funny, but then my friend Zev pointed me to this then-ongoing legal battle. Netflix was tussling with a director named Carl Eric Rinch. Netflix had given Rinch$55 million for his project, which Rinch had then spent on luxury cars, luxury watches, and not one but two luxury mattresses. Rinch then tried to claim that these were all just very expensive movie props. They weren't. But this has gone on for years. Tens of millions of dollars squandered by a company as sophisticated as Netflix.

26:08Maybe in film, the line between an artist and a scam artist was a little blurrier than it was elsewhere. A scam or a movie. My question was wrong. So I kept the question in my pocket for weeks. I take it out, worry it in my palm, chew on it, just trying to work it into a more correct shape. And then one day it returned to me, finally right. The question, the one to answer here, was this. Was Raja's father being taken advantage of? That's what Raja really wanted to know. The word scam was loud. SEO, something simple to click on. The actual question here was quieter and, frankly, maybe a little more sad.

26:52Was Raja's father, a man in his mid-70s, being taken advantage of? Do you mind just starting by telling me your name? Oh, my name? Oh, Ranjit Kaleskar. And I know that you're retired, but I was wondering if you could tell me what your profession was before. Oh, yeah. I'm telling you about life history. Okay. No, it's not really. I graduated from the pharmacy and took off from there, from India. I'm here for more than 50 years. I worked for about 40 years in pharmacy section. Then I got retired. And I had nothing else to do. So I explored a lot of things. And one of that ended up with making a movie.

27:40This first conversation with Ranjith from his home in Florida happened this past spring. I've since spent much more time with this man. He has a way of speaking I really enjoy. He's funny. It feels sometimes like there's something larger than life in him that he contains behind a curtain of warm self-effacement. Like when he tells you, correctly, that he has a colorful life history, and then a beat later walks it back with a not really. Your son told me that in your years as a pharmacist, you were also a real entrepreneur. Yeah, but I'll tell you the score. If it is a successful business and my attempt, the score is 100 to 0.

28:22Wait, 100 to zero, more successful businesses or more attempts? No, unsuccessful.

28:30I'm a little clumsy businessman.

28:35Ranjith, the self-described clumsy businessman, told me how he'd been inspired to plunge into this latest expensive venture, Bollywood filmmaking. Ranjith, as his son already told us, not actually a huge Bollywood expert or even fan. but an enormous fan of long-shot entrepreneurship. And one fateful day, Ranjith found himself watching an Indian movie when a thought occurred. The movie was competently made, sure. But also, there were things about it that bothered him. Something like you expected, okay, this is going to happen. There'll be villains and there'll be dancers and there'll be a fight.

29:17Oh, I think the word you mean is It's formulaic. It's like you know everything's going to happen once you know the genre. Yes. I said, no, I think I can improve on it. So Ranjith cracked open his computer. At first, he just started writing down the ways he'd improved the movie, his tweaks. But before long, he found he was actually just designing his own Bollywood film from scratch, one he'd actually want to watch. Certainly weirder, certainly more tuned to his particular sense of humor. The resulting document was that so-called summary I'd seen, the story with the time-traveling kid and the talking donkey.

29:53Fortuitously for Ranjith, this idea also happened to strike at about the same time he'd come into some easy money. I had a little luck on the stock market. I was watching stock for Meta or what is it, Facebook then. Yes. And it dipped to below$100. So what I did, I borrowed some money from a stockbroker and bought a thousand of them. Fortunately, it shot up, I think it's something$600 and a plus. Oh, wow. I sold some of them to finance this movie. So out of nowhere, I could raise about$300 plus thousand. Okay, so you've made your money in the stock market. You have an idea for a Bollywood movie.

30:40You know what you want it to be, but you've never made a film before. So, like, how did you find people who are going to help you? Like, how did you meet the director, Kamal Chandra? Just a cold call. Cold call. How did you find his number to cold call him? There was this movie studio. My brother called and said, do you have any movie director who has experience in movie making? So, this guy answered. Wait, so how did you, but sorry, how did you find the number for his studio? How did you pick that studio? Oh, if you go online and look for the movie studios in Mumbai, and you get a bunch of them.

31:21Okay, so you went online, you found listings for movie studios in Mumbai. So you get his phone number, you cold call him, he picks up, and you say, you're a director, I have an idea for a movie, I have money for the movie, will you make it?

31:46A week later, Ranjith said the director told him it could be done. For an initial budget of$200 ,000. He told Ranjith to expect a 10 % overage on that, but not more. Okay. The director, Kamal Chandra, also had notes about the actual story. Like a critique. The movie couldn't just be jokes about cauliflowers and the talking donkey. It would need more than that. It would need mystery, action. They agreed to add an attempted murder plot. And with that, a deal was struck. Run just believed now that through a series of cold calls, he found himself a bona fide director thousands of miles away. So he started to wire money.

32:29And we didn't even have formal agreement, just a handshake. Just a handshake, not a contract. Yeah. And who is he? Tell me about him. Tell me what he's done before this. Who is Kamal Chandra? He's actually, by profession, an engineer. But like me, he didn't go work as an engineer. He got into the movie industry. And after a few rough years, he became a director. He made five, six movies. Okay, I'm actually looking him up right now. He has an IMDB page. He's done a bunch of music videos and he's done some shorts and he's done some features. Like the last film he directed, Arya Batka Zero, is 2026.

33:16Mm-hmm. Have you gotten to watch some of the movies that he made before this? Uh, no. Why didn't you watch them? I had no idea.

33:33Something about Ranjit you should know is that, like every artist and some madmen, he is guided by a second sight. He sees the real world, but he also sees visions, things that don't yet exist but could. Those visions guide him sometimes. Also, Ranjit possesses a great deal of trust. Trust that the world will want the things he imagines, and trust that the people he's chosen to help him are who they say they are. Ranjit didn't need to see all of Kamal Chandra's past work, because he felt connected to this man who said that he too could see Ranjith's vision, this film that existed for now only in Ranjith's mind.

34:11As for the large amounts of money Ranjith would soon be sending, he felt like he had a sense of where it would all go. The director's production company had sent him, after all, a line-by-line budget. They've given full detail, how much will be used for actors, how much for the food, for camera. The main part that I was a little worried about, for actors, they were only assigned about$20 ,000. I said, how can you get an actor for$20 ,000? So I raised it to$40 ,000. I see, because it felt like they were under-budgeting for actors, and obviously part of the quality of the movie is the actors. Yeah, because you know what happened?

34:55Actors are really hungry for their job. and I don't like to exploit them just because they want it. So my attitude was different. I said, you know, they are human beings and I have to respect their skill. So you're looking at the budget and instead of thinking like, they better not be spending my money too much, you're thinking, these poor guys, like they're not paying the actors enough. Like they're, you're like, you're just thinking about the workers. Yes. Ranjit, concerned about money, but not in the direction his son had worried. The audition tapes began to roll in. Tape after tape of would-be stars reading lines for these characters Ranjith had imagined.

35:38300 people came in for casting different roles. Was it strange seeing this idea that had been in your head and then you have these actors who are... Oh yeah, I was flabbergasted. Actually, I never thought it will be this giant. Were you having fun? Oh, yeah. More fun than working at a pharmacy. Yeah, I'm addicted to it. Not really. A little bit addicted to it. Yeah. Ranjit, a little bit addicted, told me he had already traveled to India three times in the last year for the project. Things were moving quickly. That cold call to director Kamal Chandra happened last November. They'd also met in person in Mumbai.

36:21And within just months, Kamal Chandra had organized a shoot, a production with about 50 people. Well, 51. Ranjith had been there too, traveling with the crew from Mumbai over to Madhya Pradesh, a pretty rural state in India, where their numbers had swelled to around 100. There were lots of extras. They'd apparently shot this entire film in three weeks. Ranjith sent me a handful of iPhone photos he'd taken on set, but it was a little hard to tell what I was seeing. His son, whose question he'd sent us here, had worried that the film shoot itself wasn't real. I could tell something was really being shot, but what?

36:58What would exist at the end of all of this, when Ranjit's money was finally spent? Ranjit did not have this concern. He was sure there'd be a film at the end of this. And not just that, he was convinced that he would even make his money back. He said the director had guaranteed it. How soon are you going to be able to see a cut-together version of the movie? I think they said in the beginning of June, they said they'll string it together, yeah. And is it in person? Are they going to send it? How does it... No, no, no. I'll be going there. You're going to go in June? Yeah. I'm actually going to be in India in July, I think.

37:42July, I think, yeah. I think you'll be welcome. It will be more than a pleasure to host you. Only thing is it'll be a little rainy and hot. I don't mind rain and I don't mind heat. The only thing I mind is cold. I booked a ticket.

38:09After the break, Search Engine goes Bollywood.

38:40This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Xero. Okay, you're a great small business owner, but math was never your thing. Totally get it. But if you run a small business, you know how important it is to run your numbers. Enter Xero. That's X-E-R-O, as in X marks the spot for the perfect platform that puts accounting, payments, payroll, and analytics in one place. So you always have one clear picture of your business. Xero is more detailed than spreadsheets and just as powerful as other leading software, but it's simpler and easier to use. With visual dashboards, Xero makes it easy to understand your cash flow.

39:14You know exactly what's coming in and what's going out. so you can make smarter decisions that can help grow your business without feeling overwhelmed by the numbers. Join 5 million customers worldwide who use Xero to manage their finances. Learn more at Xero.com. That's X-E-R-O.

39:33This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Mercury Bank. When you're starting a business, you don't need a complex suite of financial tools. You just need a reliable way to get paid and keep the lights on. But then, as you scale, your needs shift. And many founders get stuck because their banking setup can't keep up. Banking on Mercury is different because it's built to flex with you. You can start with exactly what you need today, like free same-day ACH and USD wires, and grow into more advanced capabilities like automated spend management, invoicing, and granular team permissions as you hire your first 10 or even 50 employees.

40:07You don't have to deal with the pain of switching systems later because everything is integrated into one powerful platform. It's free to get started, requires zero in-person visits to get your accounts running, and ensures that your financial stack is never the thing holding your growth back. Visit mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes. Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column N.A., members FDIC.

40:38This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Bilt. You may have heard about BILT as the loyalty program that lets you earn points on rent wherever you live. Well, they just leveled up even more. As of 2026, homeowners can also earn up to 1.25x points on their mortgage payments. This is thanks to BILT's three new credit cards, the Palladium Card, Obsidian Card, and Blue Card. All three turn your housing payments, rent or mortgage, into flexible rewards. So you can choose the card that fits your lifestyle without missing out on points and exclusive benefits. Build points can be redeemed at top airlines and hotels, Amazon.com purchases, future rent payments, and more.

41:15Build points have also been ranked by top publications as the industry's most valuable point currency. If your housing payment is already your biggest expense, make it your most rewarding. Find the card that fits your lifestyle and apply today at joinbuild.com slash search. That's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T dot com slash search. Make sure to use our URL so you know we sent you. Terms and limitations apply, subject to approval and eligibility. Built cards are issued by Column N.A., member FDIC, pursuant to license from MasterCard International Incorporated.

42:01Welcome back to the show.

42:14This July, I found myself in India, on a plane to Mumbai with my editor, Shruti. She'd been coordinating over the months with Ranjith. The original plan had been for us to come to watch and edit of the completed film, Flower Valley. But there'd been delays. The crew was still shooting, which had created an opportunity for us. We could actually go inspect the set, witness the shooting in person, watched this director at work. Ankar, the Bollywood journalist turned screenwriter, had told us that to know for sure whether Ranjit's money had been spent well or not, you'd really have to hire a film auditor to review the film's budget.

42:51But when we asked Ranjit for a copy of the budget, he politely declined.

42:58So we were arriving in person, hoping to use our own eyes and common sense to answer our question. was Ranjith, Raj's father, being taken advantage of. Our flight to Mumbai arrived exactly on time. Shruti and I walked out of the terminal. Okay, so we're looking for Ranjith, who is wearing a light blue shirt. We scanned the crowded outdoor arrivals area, searching for our man. So he said that he's right next to the gate. Ah, there they are. Oh, cool. Hi, Ranjith. I feel like we've been... Ranjith. Do you ever meet someone in person and only then realize that you'd been picturing them completely wrong?

43:39I don't know why, but I'd expect him to be flamboyant. Like, my imagination had cast him as a person in a Bollywood movie, but he was normal, nondescript. On screen, he would have been an extra, a pleasant man with a line of dialogue. Our Hindi interpreter, Charna Khanshindani, was there too. Very windy. It was monsoon season, so lots of rain, but also humidity like I've just never experienced. The air in front of my face felt like a hot, wet towel left on the floor of a steam room for a century or two.

44:22We hop in a car together, all four of us. We're driving from the airport towards an area called Mud. Ranjith tells us it's where some people rent small, cheap lots to shoot in. There, we would meet the director, Kamal Chandra. See him at work. So what time does the shooting start today? It starts at 9 o 'clock. What is the scene that is being shot today? Okay, this is a parody of the character from 250 years back. He shows up in a director's office, movie director's office, and he dictates, I want this movie. This is how I want it. And he has outrageous demand for it. As Ranjith described the scene, I realized this was from that two-page script that his son had sent us in that email so many months ago.

45:12The scene where a movie producer with an idea for a film called Flower Valley throws money on the desk of a director and then starts telling him his increasingly strange ideas for the movie. I'd found the scene to be a bit meta, And I wondered if Ranjith, who loved to make jokes at his own expense, was doing that again here. Is he like a parody of you? Because it's like the person saying what they want them to do? It would be me. I don't know. I wrote it. I'm pretty sure he means yes. But like all artists, he's cagey when you ask him what things mean. He's happy enough to talk about his life, though.

45:46A life which had begun in the very city we were driving through, Mumbai. Ranjith explains he was born here. born the son of a police officer, a family of modest means, the son whose life had followed an unusual path. As we make our way through the city's sluggish traffic, Ranjith retraces that path through various buildings where moments in his life had happened. Old U.S. consulate was close to that. 52 years back, I had an interview over there. When you were leaving? Right. His journey to America had begun in that U.S. consulate, but it had been a wandering kind of journey. It actually started this one day at the movies.

46:26Ranjit ended up a pharmacist, he says, all because of a plan to catch a film at a nearby theater. And the funny part is the way I got into this pharmacy college was there was a movie theater called Aurora. Me and my friend went there, and we went there a little too early. So my friend said, you know, there's a pharmacy college out there. Why don't we go and see if we can apply? And I just put my application, then I forgot about it. I get a call. Okay, you got admission for pharmacy. Come on in. And then there was an opportunity to come to USA. I jumped on the board. Got there.

47:11I was starting to recognize the logic by which Ranjith sometimes adventured through his life. There was a dreaminess to it. Like here, the way killing time before a movie had led to impulsively applying for pharmacy college, which had led him ultimately to this career in America, a career more lucrative than anybody at home would have imagined. So what were you going to say, Ranjit? No, I don't have anything. I'm a quiet guy, actually. You made me talk a lot.

47:46Just the honking.

47:53So much honking. It's like a full audiovisual immersion experience. Very maximalist.

48:11Bombay is a city so overwhelming that when I try to reduce it to words, I can feel it slipping through them. But here's how it felt as an American. Take the hustle and honking cacophony of New York City. Mix it with the feeling L.A. offers. The anxiety of being in a city that's socially organized like the world's tallest pyramid. Golden success beyond your wildest dreams for the people who fight to the narrow top. supported by an infinitely wide base at the bottom, packed with hustlers, strivers, people dreaming of a fantasy that all of them can see and most will never touch. That's the baseline feeling, but what amplifies it so strongly is the city's density.

48:51Some of the densest neighborhoods you can find anywhere on earth, millions more residents than New York City, crammed onto a much smaller plot of land. One neighborhood, Daravi, 12 times denser than Manhattan. There are so many dreams here. You almost can't breathe. And now we've arrived. At the gated entrance of a place called Bular Gardens. There's a few little sets here. A fake temple, a fake police station. But it's pretty bare bones. I see lots of extras. Many chowing down hungrily at a little table where food's been set up. I think some doll. and running between the legs of these extras, fighting over scraps, many stray dogs.

49:38I think about Ankar, our Bollywood expert, who said that there were ways to make a film for$300K or less. A studio lot like this, I think, could save you some money. I asked Ranjith, are you paying for that catering? I'm supposed to arrange for it. We get out of the car and stride towards the set that the Flower Valley crew is using today. And we're walking into the shooting place. Do they know who you are, Ranjith, when you walk in. Of course they know who I am, Ranjith says. And he's right, they do. As we walk into the small building where his scene is being shot, here's what I notice. This big crew, maybe 50 people, running around with props and lights with this hurried focus that only pauses for Ranjith.

50:20When Ranjith passes, people step back respectfully. Ranjith is not nondescript here. How would you describe the building? Where in the interior? But there's a bunch of like film lights, whatever. And then there's a door on which says, director. Just to be clear, this is not director Kamal Chandra's office. This is a fake office of a fake director for the movie scene they're shooting. A big wooden desk behind it, fake-looking posters that show diagrams for filming specific shots. There's even, hung on the wall, one of those boards that claps shut when they yell action. I feel a moment of vertigo.

50:56We've come here to record a podcast about whether a movie's actually being filmed. And now we're on a set for a fake movie with a fake director inside of a possibly real movie. I wonder for a second if I myself am fiction. And then Ranjit points and says, here's the real director. Hi, PJ. So nice to meet you.

51:20At last, Kamal Chandra, the director. He looks the part, baseball hat, headphones wrapped around his neck. And I recognized his face from the IMDb page. Meaning, right away, we can rule out the theory that this has all been an elaborate catfishing scam. How is shooting been today? We have shot one scene over here. This is the second scene. We'll start now. You don't have Hindi? No Hindi? No. Kamal asks if I speak any Hindi at all. I say no. But fortunately, Jarna, the Hindi interpreter, was here to help. If it's okay, we'll just follow you around and kind of record. We are taking first shot of this scene.

51:55We can do it at lunchtime. He says we can talk at lunchtime, although lunchtime would prove to be a horizon. Always in sight, never in reach. Across from the fake director's desk, a love seat where the real director, Kamal Chandrabil, said, his monitor in front of him. He invites me to squeeze in beside. We're further crowded in by the three cameras. Prep for the scene begins. Crew members spraying down the whole set with something that has this real chemical smell. What's that spray that they're spraying everything down with? Four flies. Because of the rain, lots of flies. There's a lot of flies.

52:32The idea is to spray, kill a big cloud of flies, and then shoot quickly before the next cloud inevitably arrives. Kamal Chandra begins directing. Standby. Sound. Silence. Camera. Silence, please, silence, silence. Do the other on.

53:03The actor playing the Bollywood director sits alone in his office, his thick black glasses. As he closes his laptop, the door swings open. And we see this comic actor bounce in. Heavyset man with a big mustache, a dollop of Chris Farley to him. Dressed in pink, wearing the clothes of a rich guy from another time. the aristocrat from 200 years past.

53:27The aristocrat announces that he is a producer and tells this director that he not only has an idea for a movie, but also money to fund it. The director sees the cash, and his attention sharpens on this strange man in front of him. What kind of movie does the producer want to make? The producer unspools a series of increasingly outrageous ideas. He wants his 14-year-old nephew to be the star of the film. He wants the movie to have a talking donkey.

54:00He wants the title to be Flower Valley. The director asks, what kind of flower? A cauliflower?

54:15It is so strange to watch this idea, which has gone from Ranjit's imagination through the internet, from Florida to India. And now to watch these actors dutifully recreate it. It's like listening to a foreign orchestra play a tune that someone mindlessly hummed to themselves while folding clothes. Extraordinarily strange. The director, Kamal Chandra, calls cut, gives his notes. And they take it again.

54:49Over and over. Minutes to hours.

54:59So we've been here for about three hours now. They're definitely filming. A lot of takes. Close-ups. They're still in the same scene. They're in the scene that they were in when we walked in, which is like not a very long scene, but there's like the wide shot, the medium shot, the close-ups, the reset things.

55:24I think the sort of like funniest, surprising thing is like they are not even remotely half-assing it. They are like absolutely whole-assing the thing they're doing. It's totally crazy. Action! The actors are locking in, finding new laughs in the dialogue. The scene's getting noticeably sharper. At one point, Ranjith stands up to whisper a note to Kamal Chandra, to his director, to make sure the scene plays exactly as he intended it. At another point, during a quick chai break, Ranjith walks over and asks us. I was commanding the respect from everybody here. Does it feel good? To be like the producer on set?

56:05Mm-hmm. Yeah. Our interpreter, Jarna, adds that she has also noticed this dynamic. You know, everybody knew him. Everybody was kind of deferring to him. Yes. Because he's the guy with the money. Yeah. That's what it is. When they have a little hint and I'm running out of money, they will dump me like a hot potato. Are you worried about that at all? No. I have enough money.

56:37Jarna jokes about Ranjit's power here, about how, not that he would, but if he wanted to, he could make anyone on set disappear. You see, you, that one, out. And you know, that person will be out. That's some command. At least one should have it in one lifetime, right? And this is my 15 minutes. Back home, does your family understand what's happening here? Does anybody understand? No. Absolutely no. My wife has no idea that I'm feeding 50 people here today. She doesn't know that you're walking in a room where 50 people are answering to you.

57:19That's the way it is.

57:25I'd come here wondering if Ranjith was being taken advantage of. I had been thinking narrowly, just about money. but I hadn't had much of an understanding of what else could drive him. He commanded respect here. And more than that, Ranjith told me about how, in his decades as a pharmacist, the weeks that turned into years, counting pills for people over and over again, the most interesting thing that had ever happened to him was an armed robbery. But that life was over now, and Ranjith found himself, at an age when many people rest, instead on a great adventure. I was starting to better understand what had brought Ranjith here.

58:02But what about Kamal Chandra? He was clearly an actual director. Why was he working on this particular project?

58:16When would we get to talk? We're smushed together, thigh to thigh on a love seat. But it wasn't like I could sneak in a whispered question to Chandra while his scenes ran, as much as I wanted to. Somebody finally calls for a lunch break. I get excited, but only some of the crew filters out. Action. Kamal Chandra and his actors, they keep shooting. I genuinely cannot tell if he's busy avoiding a conversation with me, or perhaps both. It's now been over four hours. We're still waiting for our Bollywood exclusive interview with the film's director, Ranjith. He seems to have gotten tired because he went to go nap in the car.

59:01I think he consumed his daily allotment of glamour today. So we're just hanging out, swatting at flies, waiting to see if we get to ask some hard-hitting questions. While we waited, Jarna, the Hindi interpreter, had been on her own mini-quest to try to learn more about the director. And she told us she'd picked up something intriguing. He was saying that the director is an IIT from Kanpur, IITian. They are the most educated and the most respected people over here. I have to explain. In America, an engineering school graduate like Kamal Chandra becoming a film director is not that remarkable. But in India, to get into IIT specifically is so difficult, like Harvard or Yale.

59:48Dropping that opportunity for Bollywood is considered very weird. It just didn't map onto anybody's understanding of normal motivation or ambition. Also, we'd learned in India that the trailer for Chandra's new movie was out, and it looked good. Decent budget, like a normal indie movie. Something you'd watch on Netflix. Both facts just made our question more stark. Why was Kamal Chandra working on this particular project?

1:00:19It's 5 p.m. now. The crew resets for a new scene. Lights are moving, cameras are moving, fly just flew into my eye. The next shot is outside. It features, finally, the famous cauliflower. Really? There's a man whose job it is to hold the cauliflower. Do you see him? He's a cauliflower grip. They have one on every set. We stand outside in the drizzle. The grip hands the cauliflower to the actor playing the director in the film, and the new scene begins. All right, roll, action. The actor looks at the cauliflower, first a little scared. He sees a movie poster, the movie poster for the film, for Flower Volley.

1:01:00In the poster, the woman, the dancer, holds the cauliflower towards the sky beatifically. The actor playing the director now somehow understands this is the movie he's going to make. He triumphantly casts his cauliflower towards the sky and says in English to no one in particular, lights, camera. Action. Cut, says the real director, Kamal Chandra. They now have the first take. Of course, they want more. They shoot this scene now over and over. Reality, for me, has just become a CD that skips. With each take, I lose hope. I keep thinking I have no hope, but I keep finding little marginal additional percentages of hope to lose.

1:01:44I now understand that I have flown 15 hours and watched 1 ,000 takes of two scenes and that I will never interview Kamal Chandra. He is either a serious man who takes his work seriously or a tactical man who has figured out how to box me out.

1:02:07I petitioned Shruti, let's just get him on the phone when we're back in America. Like that'll happen. And then, a miracle. He calls for a break. After 10 straight hours of working, Kamal Chandra says, now we can talk. We go back inside, back into the fake director's office, and settle down on the couch. Ranjith, whose son's concern has sent me 8 ,000 miles from my home, has nowhere to be found. Kamal Chandra begins by apologizing. No, very busy. He's sorry we've had to wait this long. And then we dive in. Jarna, our interpreter, sitting next to us. I begin with the obvious question. I'm trying to understand, like, this film, Flower Valley, like, how did this happen?

1:02:58How did you end up shooting this movie?

1:03:06Here, finally, Kamal Chandra's recollection of events, which differed a bit from Ranjith's. Kamal says the way he remembers it, when Ranjith first reached out, Kamal's assistant had taken the initial call. Only after had Kamal taken a meeting. And he'd left that first meeting feeling uncommitted. The project, he said, didn't feel at all concrete. But then they met again. And Kamal found himself beginning to just work it out in his mind. How would you make this movie? Over the next months, he took Ranjit's nub of an idea and converted it into a proper screenplay. Why? I think the money, the idea that this story came with a paid-for budget must have helped.

1:03:52But Kamal Chandra insisted, for him it was the story. He liked it. The time travel. The fact that it was told from a kid's perspective. And the dreaminess. The way it combined, as Chandra put it, the logical and illogical. Somehow the director related. He said that despite the five decades Ranjith had spent in America, the story's surrealness felt to him fundamentally Indian. When I met with Ranjit ji, I felt that this film is his dream. I don't know when they work out from childhood. Kamal is saying here, when I met with Ranjit, I felt that this film was his dream. Like, an actual dream. Maybe he'd had it since childhood?

1:04:44I don't know how long he's been holding on to this, Kamal says, musing about the unknowable mind of his collaborator. I also can't know the inside of Kamal Chandra's mind. But I will say, when I remember how skeptical Ranjit's son was of the notion that a real director would take his dad's movie idea seriously, here, it did seem like Kamal Chandra was taking the project seriously.

1:05:11Is this strange to, like, you know, movies, they're like dreams, you know? Like, you sit in the dark and you see these images, and the feeling of sitting in a movie theater. It's like you're having a dream with other people. Is it strange, like, you're making this man's dream from far away, but that you also relate to? He pauses for a second and says, actually, I can see this. He says, you know, this is how I think about it. He says he studied mechanical engineering at a reputable college. He had an MBA. He'd been waiting on his end-of-school results. and in his downtime, he'd signed up for a months-long film workshop.

1:05:52He said that one workshop changed his entire life. He decided to drop it all, the prestigious degrees, and he began studying film instead. He'd been on a course for one life and gotten knocked off of it by this gust of a dream. Kamal says when he met Ranjitji, he realized this person was really another version of himself. but one who discovered his dream late instead of early. Kamal says, I fulfilled my dream, so I felt that it was my duty to help him fulfill his.

1:06:33You saw yourself in him. You saw a different version of your life where you had not found what you loved as early. Yes, yes, we can say. We can say. One important thing... Here, Kamal adds, One thing you should know is that Ranjit and I argue constantly. He reminds me Ranjit is not a professional screenwriter, and that he's quite emotionally attached to his story. Every change provokes real sadness. Kamal says he tells Ranjit what he tells every new producer. You have to give your director some creative leeway, or else the film won't work out. He says that he tells Ranjit Ji, if I'm going to make this dream real, I need to be able to speak to you honestly.

1:07:15It's my duty to tell you the reality. That, brother, this is wrong. This is true. That's right. None of this is the relationship I'd pictured between Kamal and the person he respectfully calls Ranjitji. I try to explain to him how this story might look from the other side, from America. So, like, for someone in America, the story goes like this. It's like you have this, like, retired man. he's made a little bit of money. He's decided he's going to make a movie. And he starts sending emails to like people he doesn't know in another country to be like, take my money and make the movie. And I think most people would be very worried for him that somebody would be like, yes, yes, and whatever.

1:07:59And I think it's hard to imagine that you're a person with a career and a job. You got this email and you were like, I'm going to help this person because I think it's the right thing to do. Actually, we also get a lot of producers. Kamal said that from his point of view, he meets with a lot of producers. And he also has to worry about who's real. Most producers just waste his time. But Ranjit, he said, after meeting him twice, Kamal Chandra could tell at least that he was unusually serious about making his movie. And that while the budget was much less than the movies Kamal normally makes, he tried to do his best.

1:08:42and that he hopes when I see it, I'll be impressed, despite the low budget.

1:08:49It's a nice sentiment, but Shruti has a final question for Kamal. What is for you the goal for this film? Like, what do you, realistically, what do you think is going to happen when it's finished?

1:09:06He tells us in Hindi, in my industry, every film has a future, a fortune, luck. It's not a given that a great film will succeed or that a bad film will fail. But just like every person has a destiny, he says every film does too. Kamal says that for his part, the team has worked very hard on the movie. And then very soon, they'll have to leave it to its fate.

1:09:36We've talked for about 30 minutes, and his break is now over.

1:09:43It's 7 p.m., which means he has to get back to work. There's still some daylight. They're going to shoot a little more. We go to the car to wake up Renjith, but it turns out he's no longer there. What do we do? We've lost. Now it turns into a different kind of story. We finally find him. We lost you. Where did you head? No, I didn't have it. You had to pay everyone. You had to pay everybody over the end of the day. Every spot. Okay, so we should go. Turned out, while we'd been recording, Ranjith had been settling the account with the executive producer. He needed to take out$10 ,000, the cost for that entire day of work.

1:10:24The 50-person crew, the location, the food. We get in the car and we leave. Ranjith is clearly tired after the long day. But if anything, he feels even more confident about the movie he's making. And would you make another movie if this worked? Oh no, this is it. Why not another one? I'm too old. How did you decide that? Oh, I knew it.

1:10:52Time to go and play with grandkids. That's a great history.

1:11:09I fly home. I think about what I'll say to Renj's son, to Raja, who'd wondered if his dad was spending all his money on a movie that didn't exist or wouldn't be made. I tried to make sense of what I'd seen. I really do believe that Raja's worst fears, thankfully, were in the end unfounded. His dad was not being taken advantage of. He understood what he was buying and why he was buying it.

1:11:38The promise that Ranjit said Kamal Chandra made to him, that he'll make all of his money back, that feels Bollywood to me. A dream that could come true, but which I myself would not personally bet on. Here, in the end, is what I do feel confident about. About 50 years ago, a trip to the movie theater sent Ranjith on a path that led him to a successful life as an American pharmacist. A dream for so many people in the place he grew up, but not his dream. And so when he'd made his money and his kids had grown up, he went home one more time to be somebody else. A Bollywood producer. And he took a very strange dream he'd had, with a talking donkey, a time-traveling teenager, and a symbolically important cauliflower, and he spent a lot of money so that it could be projected on a wall for strangers.

1:12:32And at some point, it will be. What happens after that is anybody's guess. Movies have their own fates. People do too. The life you're given, the life you dream about, and the rooms you can enter where they blend together. Until even you can't tell them apart.

1:13:19Thank you.

1:14:06That's our story for you this week. Stories like the one you just heard, which take months of research, international travel, original music, obviously cost much more time and money, but we're able to do them thanks to the financial support we receive from our Incognito Mode subscribers the people who pay for an ad-free version of this show with extra episodes next week on the Incognito Mode feed we have an interview with Ankur Patak our Bollywood expert I learned a ton from him but he also kept cracking me up it was a good conversation if you're not already a member and would like to support our show please head over to searchengine.show or just sign up in Apple Podcasts I will say if you get the annual subscription on our website you can support us for less than$5 a month.

1:14:48Thanks to everybody who has signed up and anybody who's considering it.

1:14:58Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was graded by me, PJ Vogt, and Shruti Pinamini, who is also our show's editor. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. Emily Malterra is our associate producer. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Every week, the man does magic, but this week in particular, Armin, this music. And for the special version of our theme this week, we had vocals from Armin Bazarian and from Phoebe Bridgers. Fact-checking this week by Natsumi Ajisaka. Hindi interpretation and translation by Jarna Kanchandani. Our production intern is Piper Dumont. Special thanks this week to Supriya Dravid.

1:15:34Our executive producer is Leah Reese-Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Mirandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kirk Courtney, Vanessa Tincotti, and Hilary Schaaf. If you have a question for the show, please send it to us via email, pjvote85 at gmail.com. If you have a business and would like to advertise on our show, send requests to that email address as well, subject line advertising. Also, if you're looking for a cheaper way to support us, please consider rating and reviewing us on Apple Podcasts or following us on Spotify. Those are the behaviors those platforms algorithms seem to enjoy.

1:16:11Thank you, as always, for listening. We'll see you next week.

1:16:41our office. When your physical branding looks this sharp and professional, it immediately communicates credibility and shows your audience that you mean business. Vistaprint truly helps every dollar go further, delivering premium quality and design support that make your company look established without breaking the bank. Whether you need your design tweaked or a total rebrand, Vistaprint has you covered with the expert service small businesses deserve. That's why over 17 million businesses trust them every day to bring their ideas to life. Vistaprint, print your possible. Right now, new customers get 20 % off with code NEW20 at vistaprint.com.

1:17:15That's 20 % off at vistaprint.com using code NEW20.