Kamal Sadanah

"Making Roar", "A discovery of the forgotten land", "My journey"; these words can make some interesting titles for a memoir/autobiography or "press kit" but the struggle and the perseverance it took to make this film cannot be represented in any words. Thankfully our vocation is a visual medium and you will get to see exhilarating images in the most spectacular locations through a narrative, which will remind you of great adventure stories you heard as a child.

It all began when I read a few lines in some digest about tigers leaping onto boats and taking people away. Adding visuals to my imagination comes as naturally to me as breathing. My father was a filmmaker of repute and success. Part of our education was seeing all kinds of films. By the time I was 16, I was an assistant director, by 21 I was launched into movies as an actor and stardom followed. There is no high more addictive than adulation, I enjoyed my success as an actor for a while but with exposure to more and newer cinema I quickly grew bored with the storytelling style the Indian cinema was evolving into. I quit my job and wandered, physically and mentally. By 2004 I was itching to be heard and restless to add visual to my thoughts. I experimented with an interesting self-financed indie film, which represented the way I see the new strong Indian woman. The inspiration to write something of this nature came from how I saw the male hypocrisy around me and the response from the protagonist played by the female lead was based on some extraordinary traits I saw in the woman I love. The film's exhibitory life was limited to a screening in a couple of festivals. Soon I put together a script, which was a remake of a very successful film my father made in the 70s. It was a robbery film with interesting characters. I decided to produce the film and in a short span of time put together a team of technicians and actors. Strategically planned and made in a time frame and under budget, the film left me small profit before release. What next?

Roar was only a 3-page draft when I first talked about it to Abis. Abis Rizvi and I have been childhood friends. An avid filmgoer, he has the uncanny ability to breakdown, differentiate and critically analyze the story, the screenplay and the execution of a film. From the first mention of this tiger based drama he was hooked and we spent the next few months discussing Roar. Soon we had the script in our hands but it was only a very basic version because the extent to our knowledge of the Sunderbans was limited to information available on the Internet. But what we never realized was that this seed in our head had taken root and Roar was already beginning to break into life.