On the 6th floor rooftop terrace of the Cannes Film Festival’s famous Palais, it’s blowing a gale. “We almost flew off,” laughs Ishaan Khatter, 29, the Mumbai-born Bollywood star, who is managing to keep his cool on this particularly blustery day.
Famed for his role in Netflix Hindi-language TV series The Royals and The Perfect Couple, the actor is as dashing as you might expect. But today, he’s in Cannes to show very different side to him. Screening in the Un Certain Regard sidebar, Homebound is a nuanced tale of friendship.
Already gaining acclaim from its early reviews, Homebound is another impressive entry in the recent renaissance of Indian cinema. After last year’s Cannes Grand Jury prize-winner, Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light, the movie industry from the subcontinent is experiencing its own wind of change. “It’s a beautiful time,” Khatter tells The National. “I think this global spotlight on Indian cinema…it’s brighter than it’s ever been before. Because we’re seeing such diverse work.”
Neeraj Ghaywan, the writer-director of Homebound, concurs, paying full tribute to Kapadia. “She broke the glass ceiling for all of us. She’s the hero that we all need.”
Ghaywan is also no stranger to Cannes, his 2015 debut Masaan similarly playing in Un Certain Regard. “Honestly speaking, just returning to Cannes was the thing, where it all started for me. This was my homecoming journey, in a way.”
Set in a village in Northern India, Homebound follows best friends Shoaib (Khatter) and Chandan (Vishal Jethwa), who both apply to be police constables, with the hope that such an esteemed public role will render them immune to caste or religious discrimination. The statistics, however (very real, according to Ghaywan), count against them. There are 714 applicants for every position available. It’s a chase for work that will eventually come between them.
“I was really struck by the way that Neeraj was able to weave all these things into the story,” says Khatter. “It’s a very rare kind of film. I don’t think many actors get the opportunity to play something quite like this.
"As a character, I thought Shoaib was deeply complex, beautiful and human. I thought that there was a persistence to this character, despite all odds, that almost made him feel like an optimist in the beginning. When you start seeing the cracks, you start seeing him getting beaten down by those societal, systemic pressures, and your heart really breaks for him and for their friendship.”
Ghaywan says the film came loosely inspired by a real-life story in The New York Times. “When we speak about people of colour, like any ethnic and religious minorities, sexual minorities, even migrants, we’re always calling them as a statistic,” he explains. “We’re never asked to humanise them.
"What if we actually pick up these two migrants and see where they came from? What did they love? What was the friendship? What was the family? What were their homes like? What were their dreams? What did they leave behind? What did it take for them to reach this point? Maybe then we will have empathy and we’ll see humanity in the whole situation.”
Intriguingly, the film is produced by Karan Johar, the hugely successful Indian producer whose company Dharma Productions is behind some of the biggest Bollywood movies.
“Karan and I formed this bonhomie, because he also a person who has deep empathy, and he gets moved by things, and he loved Masaan,” says Ghaywan. “And he said, ‘I just want to do something with you. Can we collaborate on one film?’ I said, ‘Of course.’”
That Johar was also willing to give him artistic freedom (“no meddling”) was a dream. “Imagine you get studio money to make an independent film,” the director marvels.
Even better, Homebound is also executive produced by Martin Scorsese. Like Johar, the acclaimed director behind Goodfellas and Raging Bull was also a fan of Masaan. This time, after Ghawyan’s team approached him, he got more involved, giving feedback on the script and watching several cuts of the film. “I’m literally living the dream of every independent filmmaker,” Ghaywan tells me.
So how did Khatter feel, knowing that Scorsese was sitting in his screening room watching his work? “It was absolutely surreal,” he replies. “He’s the North Star in the world of cinema, and even from whatever I’m privy to of his notes and the kind of influence that he has had on this film, it’s just such a masterful gaze. Somebody that doesn’t come from a removed or outside perspective, but comes from deeply educated perspective. It’s a dream, and I don’t want this dream to end.”
For Khatter, he feels a film like Homebound also brings him back to his roots, when he made 2017’s Beyond the Clouds with the Iranian auteur Majid Majidi, playing a street hustler and drug dealer in Mumbai. “That was an extremely rooted, grounded film and I would say that socially, I was playing a character that was from a similar section of society. And I could find a lot of parallels in the process that I undertook with Neeraj.”
Shooting Homebound in Madhya Pradesh, in Bhopal, Khatter and his co-star Vishal Jethwa enjoyed what Ghaywan calls “a massive immersion exercise”, in which they met and mixed with locals. “Neeraj made it very clear that we can’t take for granted that we will understand these characters,” says Khatter. “So there was a lot of research. We would sit down with people and try and get a sense of the lives that they have, the struggles that they have, the daily obstacles that they have to deal with.”
The results are there for all to see, with Ghaywan suggesting he wanted to stay true to his cinema-verite roots. “You can’t wing it. That feels dishonest,” he states.
It’s why Khatter couldn’t even devote time, as much as he wanted to, to signing autographs for the crowds that would gather.
“I wanted to stay as immersed as I possibly could. So while I wasn’t rude…it was a smile and wave and then go to work,” he says.
Whatever the case, his fans are going to be astonished when they see him in Homebound.
