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'Zeher' to 'Woh Lamhe' and 'Saiyaara': Director Mohit Suri On Why His Films Are Always Tied To Music
The filmmaker talks about 'Saiyaara', his upcoming film starring debutantes Ahaan Panday and Aneet Padda, and why music often outlives its films.
“There’s a joke in the city—that if you call me for a party, I won’t show up, but if you tell me there is a struggling singer with a tune somewhere across the city, I will drive down in the middle of the night to listen,” director Mohit Suri tells The Hollywood Reporter India.
His reputation as a director with a bull's-eye ear for melodious, popular, and taste-making music precedes his movies, which traffic in intense heartbreak and rhythmic outbursts of musical angst. “I use songs as a screenplay, not as something that needs to be added as garnish,” he notes.
Suri is promoting his latest film, Saiyaara, starring Ahaan Panday and Aneet Padda, two debutantes in the crosshairs of a romance, a genre that Hindi cinema has been trying desperately to resuscitate. Three years back, when Suri was workshopping this film’s seed—falling in love for the first time—“a senior well-meaning producer” told him that he was wasting both his time and money with a love story, especially one with newcomers. Suri stuck with his intuitions.
Saiyaara marks his twentieth year in the filmmaking business since his debut Zeher (2005), a journey dotted by similar apprehensions from senior producers and composers, ones that Suri’s intuition sailed past.
At a time when Hindi cinema is paralysed by a systemic failure to incite interest in the movies it is secreting, Saiyaara, produced by Yash Raj Films, has undertaken a unique promotional strategy, showcasing the film solely through its music, keeping the fresh faces behind wraps. Who better than Suri to present a film music-first?
He is, after all, a director who only begins shooting once he has cracked the entire album. Saiyaara’s took three years. “I love this process. It detaches me from the competition of making films. Besides, what three scenes can’t do, one song can do.”
Saiyaara’s album, like most of Suri’s, has multiple composers, with songs ranging from six to two minutes, all centred around love, its cresting joys and pulping aches. His regular collaborators mark attendance—the composer Mithoon. And as with every Mohit Suri album, there are new voices here, too—Faheem Abdullah, The Rish.
Suri’s films congealed on the multi-composer album at a time when most filmmakers built the film’s musical landscape around single composers. He lassoed in various voices—even from across the border, pooling in Atif Aslam’s voice and the sounds of Aslam’s rock band Jal—to confect an album that would become cultural pole stars for collective, foot-tapped yearning.
While now the multi-composer album is a popular solution due to its economic efficiency in the industrial process of filmmaking and general indifference to artistic vision, for Suri, the multi-composer album was a survival mechanism, “With Zeher, I was just a debutante excited to make a film with my brother [Emraan Hashmi], who was only one or two films old acting in it. The commitment was to find good music, but senior composers were not treating me too well. Then [Mahesh] Bhatt sahab reminded me that I am the director and no one should treat me like I am small. He told me to go find the music, instead.” Suri found his music in various studios. Throughout, the guiding light was a musical power “to compensate for not having big stars in my film. If the big stars had five promos, we had one song to compete with that, a promo that had to make a mark,” Suri notes.
Suri was no musical purist. At a time when DJs would remix Hindi film songs for the dance floor, Suri got DJ Suketu to remix ‘Woh Lamhe’, which could then be parcelled out and performed in clubs without further embellishment. “Everyone, even the music companies, thought it was a bad idea to remix your own songs. But I was 22 and confidently told them to wait and watch it be played in every disco.” He wasn’t entirely wrong.
Suri’s cinema has often been tied to his music—even if their destinies often diverged, with the music casting a longer shadow than the films. Take Awarapan (2007), which did not do well when it released, only to get a fresh lease of afterlife as a cult classic that is now getting a sequel; or even films like Hamari Adhuri Kahani (2015) or Crook (2010) “which is not such a good film” —Suri isn’t fazed by these diverging paths, “I don’t think too many people know about Zeher, but they know about ‘Woh Lamhe Woh Baatein’. Music generally outlives films.”
For someone known to have a musical ear, he does not possess any knowledge of the intricate labours that go behind it, “I don’t even know major and minor chords. I can’t play any musical instrument.” He describes good music the way people describe good dates: “I should not want it to end.”
This basic intuition tided him over one of the most complicated choices in his career—to remake the cult film Aashiqui (1990), without re-using any of its songs. “All the big composers were scared to touch the album because they thought it would be compared to the original Aashiqui’s album,” Suri notes. Per usual, he went back “out there” to meet these “new guys who just did not care about the pressure,” —all of whom would go on to produce the defining soundtrack of the decade. This would also be the breakthrough for the playback singer Arijit Singh, whose ‘Tum Hi Ho’ shot him into the stratosphere of male playback singing.
‘Tum Hi Ho’ was composed by Mithoon, who drops into almost every Mohit Suri album for a quick song before jetting off. “He is the Dravid of my cricket team—he won’t let us shake from our foundations. He gives so much to one song that we run out of time. So he gave me ‘Tum Hi Ho’ and went to Jerusalem—because he knew he had made the song. I have always done well doing just one song with him.”
Over these two decades and 14 films, Suri never once told his composers to give him a "hit song”. That pressure never falls on them, nor does the pressure of the algorithm. For example, from the 1990s to now, the average length of a pop song has fallen by a minute. This does not faze Suri.
When asked how his music has changed with the technology, he is armed with a clear, ready reply, “No matter how technologically advanced you get, your heart breaks and heals in the same way. Music should also be the same. In the end, it is just the voice and lyrics.”