How Bollywood influenced James Gunn’s filmography: “The boundaries are much broader”
From writing scripts for B-movies to bringing the Guardians of the Galaxy to the big screen to leading DC into a brave new era, James Gunn has had one hell of a career trajectory already.
Slowly but surely, he has achieved the dream that so many budding filmmakers never even come close to, and now, with his latest film, Superman, capturing imagination the world over with its fresh lens on an overdone superhero, who knows how much further he could go.
Like all creatively-minded people, Gunn likes to do things his own way. His films, particularly his most popular ones, have a very distinctive style. They are big, full of lots of characters with unique traits, and buckets of colour serving as a backdrop to every scene. He is very much a spectacle director, sometimes at the expense of the plot, and he loves to use music—both diegetic and not—to underscore his action.
His smash-mouth style of filmmaking can be attributed to a number of things, such as his love of punk rock music and horror. However, as he explained in an interview with the Hindustan Times, it turns out that an entire country’s style of cinema is also responsible for how he makes his art.
“Indian films, in particular, have been a big influence on me, which reflects in the ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ franchise,” he said, adding, “I have always been attracted to Indian films and towards Asian cinema more than the ways that I am attracted to European or American cinema…”
He highlighted what serves as the source of this fascination, which explains Gunn’s filmmaking proclivities, saying, “The boundaries are much broader than an American project, which are more confined. A lot of time you are only allowed to have one genre, like this movie must be a comedy only, or it must be only an action film, or a drama, or only a science fiction movie. That’s not true for Indian films.”
In previous interviews, Gunn has said that his favourite Indian movie is Lagaan. Sometimes given the subtitle Once Upon a Time in India, Laagan is a sports drama epic released in 2001. Set during colonial rule, Aamir Khan plays the captain of a cricket team challenged by a group of British Army officers to offset a backlog of taxes accrued as a result of a drought, leading to a sparse production of crops.
If the Indians win, then the incredibly high taxes they have been forced to pay—‘Lagaan’ roughly translates to ‘Land Tax’—will be written off. It’s widely regarded as one of the greatest films to ever come from the country.
The impact of Lagaan and Bollywood as a whole can indeed be felt in Gunn’s work for Marvel Studios. The plot of the Indian movie revolves around a ragtag group of people joining forces to battle a seemingly unbeatable force at their own game. That trope isn’t unique to Lagaan by any stretch, but you can clearly see those characters represented in Star-Lord and the gang.
The superhero romp also features a scene where Peter Quill, played by Chris Pratt, challenges the villain to a dance-off. It’s presented as a joke in the film, but characters randomly breaking into song and dance to resolve a plot point is about as Bollywood as it gets.
While Bollywood is by no means the representation of the entirety of Indian cinema and its various facets, it’s an easy introduction to the country’s exploits. Moreover, Indian cinema is shamefully underrepresented in Western culture, so it’s nice to see someone as prominent as Gunn flying its flag. Although, ironically, India was one country that censored a key scene in Superman; so much for watching each other’s backs.
