Interview | Vikas Khanna on bringing 96-year-old school student’s story to life in Barefoot Empress and more

Chef-turned-filmmaker Vikas Khanna is back with yet another film. After making his debut with Neena Gupta-starrer The Last Color, he now brings Barefoot Empress, a documentary on the life of Kerala’s Karthyayani Amma, who went to school at the age of 96 and cleared her Class 4 exams with flying colors. She now dreams of studying up to grade 10. Ask him how he moved to cameras from cutlery, and he says in a cryptic tone, “Jab dil toot ta hai na to sab ho jata hai (anything can happen when you have a heartbreak).” The multiple Michelin-star winner opens his heart out in a conversation with Hindustan Times about what draws him to such inspirational stories of older women and why he doesn’t care any less about their commercial aspect. Also read: Vikas Khanna reveals demand of ₹4 lakh for four-star review of The Last Color

Vikas doesn’t have a formal training in filmmaking but has learnt his way “through practice and training” while shooting for his own cookbooks. “I believe the greatest power is dedication and not talent. I also write everything myself which is very important to me. Emotional things are inspired by reality. I don’t fictionalize it so it’s just reality on the plate. I want to tell my stories,” he says.

Vikas remembers his own grandmother from whom he picked up his love for cooking. On being asked about the similarity between the subjects of his films, the life of widows in The Last Color and the story of Karthyayani Amma in Barefoot Empress, he says, “Maybe because I have been raised by women. I understanding that how intelligent my grandmother was and how she was the wisest in the whole family. What if she was educated, how much that would have changed. I saw a 96-year-old woman go to school and get the education which she was denied earlier, I just loved that story.”

He elaborates about his new protagonist and why she deserves to be the subject of his film, “She is 100 now. We were able to connect though language barricades were very high. There were lot of stakes in this game, coming back to India, coming here (New York), it’s not easy. These are not commercial ventures that I have created. It’s to tell people human stories, stories of victories not pain. Pain is visible, only few see victories. Imagine a great grandmother telling her grandkids ‘I will also go to school’, how many times have we seen that. I want to normalise this.”

“Amma has totally shattered the glass ceiling. Tell me who broke a glass ceiling higher than this? To have her level of intelligence and wisdom in the movie, talk about religion, faith and giving and what women actually stand for in this world. Who is better than her to give that answer,” he adds.

Vikas also feels glad on being asked about the challenges he faced while working with a 100-year-old. The 50-year-old replies, “She is not an actor, you can’t tell her to walk back or come here. The biggest challenge is we can’t tell her what to do. She just did her thing and we had to capture it. There is a respect, you can’t break that quotient. My sensibility didn’t allow me to tell her to write something again. That’s why I am okay to camera setups sometimes. We never disturbed her at all, I don’t remember Amma saying in the camera at all.”

He calls storyline the biggest challenge. “Stories are all around you, you need to find a way to tell them. And here was an extraordinary life. If she was an American, the government would have put her on the posters. Not many stories have been written about her,” he says.

Vikas however, doesn’t care about how the film will perform commercially and is confident it will find its audience. The film is produced by Oscar-nominated Doug Roland. “The reason art gets corrupted is when you really think too much. You want people to watch it. This is a major misconception about art. Make good art, it will find the market, instead of thinking what should I make which can work in the market. I don’t need to prove myself by making movies. I can make them as honest as possible because I don’t have fear of failure. First make something decent, the commercial viability will come later,” he signs off.