Kites remixer eyes Dubai as film location

Hollywood director Brett Ratner believes Dubai could be the perfect location for a cross-continental film project uniting Hollywood, Bollywood and Chinese cinema, he told Emirates Business yesterday.

“It’s an incredible location, I’d love to shoot there,” he said down the phone from New York. “A Rush Hour-style film would work very well [in the UAE]. I could come up with an idea that fits the region’s sensibilities and pitch it to the authorities.”

Kites – the Remix, Ratner’s re-edited version of the Reliance Big Pictures’ Hindi film Kites, opens across the UAE today.

Among the most anticipated Bollywood films of the year, it stars Bollywood icon Hrithik Roshan and Mexican actress Barbara Mori. The Hindi version, which opened last week, is Bollywood’s biggest-ever overseas release, grossing more than Rs650 million (Dh50.6m) in its opening weekend.

Starring heart-throb actor Hrithik Roshan and Mexican actress Barbara Mori, opening-day collections in India on Friday of Rs104m were second only to Aamir Khan's hit 3 Idiots, the company said.

Box office tracker hollywood.com said the romantic drama, set in Mexico and the United States, made the top 10 in North America in its opening weekend – a first for a Bollywood film – with takings of $1m (Dh3.67m).

Ratner says his involvement in the film, reportedly made for $32m, came as a surprise. Reliance Big Pictures Chairman Amit Khanna and producer Rakesh Roshan screened an edited version of the film for him in Los Angeles, at the end of which they asked what he’d do differently if the film were aimed at an American audience. “I said I’d shorten the film, take out the dance sequences, change the music – so they turned around and said, ‘Will you do that for us?’,” he tells Emirates Business.

And Ratner has the pedigree to do that: the 41-year-old director similarly engineered a crossover success for Hong Kong films with his Rush Hour series.
Kites – The Remix, then, zooms in on the romance and cuts away a lot of what Indian audiences call the “masala” or spicy elements. “A Bollywood film can straddle several different genres, but an American film is really only one or two genres,” Ratner says. “So I stuck to the romance, because it translates well internationally. It doesn’t matter if you speak the language or not, romance is universal.”

Ratner calls the new version an experiment. “It’s not your father’s Bollywood movie. It will go down well with people who grew up outside India, second or third generation Indian immigrants, or people who are familiar with western-style films.”

He’s surprised that audiences in India don’t like the original version, turned off it by extensive subtitling and an adventurous plotline. “If Indians don’t like the original, they’re not going to like the remix,” he says. “But the Roshans are innovators and sometimes films that step out of the box are resented.”

"The film had a fantastic opening weekend. It made Rs 30.5 crores (305 million rupees) net and business at multiplexes was strong, but single screens saw large drops," said Bollywood trade analyst Taran Adarsh.   "The film has cost its distributors an exorbitant amount and at the rate the business has started sliding downwards, they would incur heavy losses on this one," he wrote on bollywoodhungama.com.

One thing that he would have changed if he was involved from the start, he says, would have been to cast an international star. “I’d have made the villain a guy like Mickey Rourke, you know, put a name on it for international audiences. As it is, we’re releasing to about 250 screens in the United States, but with a recognisable name, we could have had a much wider release.”

And he’s realistic enough not to hope for the sort of awards success that Slumdog Millionaire had last year. “It’s a pop film, not a culturally important movie. An entertaining piece of business that’s well executed and well made.”

So what about Bollywood? He’s reportedly making a cop movie with Hrithik Roshan? “I think the genre works internationally. Every country has cops, and while a comedy may not translate, a buddy cop film where the central characters are two fish out of water, translates well. There’s a great opportunity for that sort of film,” he says.

So who does he want to work with, then? “Hrithik, of course, or Shah Rukh Khan. And maybe Jackie Chan. I could bring them all together.” In Dubai, of course.