He was chasing a long cherished dream of making a film which will launch a career in cinema. He had already written the script while still in the US and the story liberally borrowed from the experiences of an NRI friend who was going through the process of an arranged marriage, and his own feelings of alienation as he tried to figure out which was home--India or America?
Since no one was willing to back a novice, Nagesh decided to produce and direct the film himself. He invested his savings, Rs 1.7 million, in Hyderabad Blues, shot it over17 days and jump-started the indie film movement in India.
"I did not follow a single rule of commercial cinema. There were no songs and dances, the film was in three languages--Hindi, English and Telugu, and featured the cheapest actor I could find," laughs Nagesh, who was forced to play the protagonist, Varun Naidu, because the actors he auditioned were either amateurs from drama circles, or from the fringes of the Telugu film industry who did not speak a word of Hindi or English.
He recalls shooting the climax at a marriage hall swarming with his own relatives who filled the mandap leaving just around eight people in the audience.
"I managed to create the impression of crowds using creative angles, a trick I use even today," he admits, recalling how during the course of the day he changed the camera set-up over 50 times.
"And since my only assistant director Elahe Hiptoola was also acting in the film, I had to keep track of the shots. And I couldn't over-shoot because given my shoestring budget I would then be eating into another shot."
It was enough to give any filmmaker the blues but for Nagesh the Blues in the title came from his own sense of rootlessness.
However, the first reaction from the censors was, `Title badlo' because they thought it referred to pornography and he'd made a blue film.
"When I tried telling them that by blues I meant sad, they were even more convinced that I should change my title because you couldn't project Hyderabad as a city of depressed people," he laughs at the memory.
"Shyam Shroff even made me change my tagline from `Thirst for home' to "A man caught between two cultures' to ensure that people here connected with the rom-com. Fortunately, no one objected to the rickshaw in the poster which today has become a relic of the past but 16 years ago it was a way of integrating the past with the future."
The film finally opened on July 17, 1998 and went on to become a surprise hit. Says Nagesh, "And though I had never thought of it earlier, six years later I came up with Hyderabad Blues 2 which gave me the bragging right to say that I had kick started the trend of sequels using the word 2 in the title."
