On the sets of Wes Anderson, Martin Scorsese and more.

GQ. APRIL 2020. Nidhi Gupta.

Ordinarily, Sami shrugs, he hopes people would go away when he tells them what he does for a living, since he’d really rather do the job than talk about it. But when I persist, he artfully begins to peel back the layers. “We are in charge of all non-electrical lighting on a film set, ie, the shaping of light and all camera movements,” he says. “The camera is the eyes of the viewer. We move the camera, we move the story, we move the viewer.”

In technical terms, Sami heads the department of engineers that are responsible for rigging and pushing cameras on film sets, to get that just-right camera angle. Being grip means a lot of heavy lifting, but “it’s a lot of problem-solving: creative application of physics and mathematics to solve very unique types of problems. I really like the pressure of finding great solutions in a short space of time.”

Clearly, Sami’s very good at it; he’s been at it for 27 years, handling grip in advertising, TV and films. He has over 80 Indian and international feature film projects under his belt and -- this is the bit that gets people not working in film really interested -- Sami is the go-to grip guy for everyone from Martin Scorsese to Christopher Nolan, Tarsem Singh to the Akhtar siblings, Mira Nair to David Fincher.

“We must understand the character of the movie and the character of the person whose vision you’re bringing to life. Film is essentially the director’s medium,” Sami observes. “And the director has to stamp their identity on it. You can’t direct by consensus. That’s the beauty and challenge of it.”

Sami, in his 50s and of hefty build, has arrived for a coffee rendezvous this particular February afternoon dressed in olive cargoes and tee -- something of a uniform. COVID-19 is yet to be deemed a pandemic, bringing all normal life and industry to a shuddering halt, but Sami was on a rare break from work anyway. Technically, he’s key grip on Shantaram, the Apple TV+ project led by Charlie Hunnam, but production had been put on hold. It’s been a troubled project for years, but Sami isn’t worried. Instead, he talks of the “staggering talent” of Anthony Dod Mantle, the Shantaram DoP who’d won an Academy Award for Slumdog Millionaire.

A Mumbai native himself, Sami’s an alumnus of the Bombay International School and St Xavier’s. He says he came into cinema “by mistake” after wandering on to a film set because a friend was working on one and he had time to kill. “And, I’m still here.” Initially, he took up all sorts of jobs around sets, in production, construction, operating the camera. “It was very unspecialised at that time,” he says. “I was very good mechanically, I could weld well.”

The first feature film he worked on was Farhan Akhtar’s directorial debut Dil Chahta Hai in 2001. “I love working with Farhan,” he says, “he’s really sorted. He operates very much like a Hollywood director does.” In 2004, he worked on his first Hollywood project, with Paul Greengrass on the Matt Damon-led The Bourne Supremacy, a significant chunk of which was shot in Goa.

“Working on different genres calls for only a slight shift of gears.” He’s done a ton of action films – The Dark Knight Rises, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol and Nolan’s upcoming Tenet – but “they don’t necessarily have a heck of a lot more for us to do in the grip department.”

You’d imagine that running up to the edge of a skyscraper with a camera as Tom Cruise gets ready to leap off, would be a lot trickier than the symmetrical flat compositions typical of Wes Anderson’s movies, but Sami calls working with Anderson the “grip Olympics”. “The big challenge in working with Wes – which is also why I love to work with him – is that he’s unique,” he says. “He sees things in a way that is not obvious. His movies have a specific look to them, and his work is very layered, subtle, nuanced. The movement of the camera is very much a character in his movies. You need to understand the crux of what he’s trying to do, and your role in that storytelling, very quickly.”

Sami boarded the Wes Anderson juggernaut in 2005 as part of the crew on The Darjeeling Limited -- and became a mainstay, working closely with DoP Robert Yeoman. At the time, Anderson was four films old – Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. By the turn of the millenium, he’d been anointed the “next Scorsese”. By Martin Scorsese himself.

The Darjeeling Limited stars Adrien Brody, Owen Wilson and Jason Schwartzman as estranged brothers meeting in India a year after their father’s funeral; has a guest appearance by a young Irrfan Khan; and features a lot of Louis Vuitton luggage boxes and droll dialogue. It is also set almost entirely on a moving train. “To interpret what had been written,” says Sami, “to physically realise those shots was tough. We didn’t have a lot of space, shooting inside a moving vehicle is complicated; and there wasn’t much room to manoeuvre equipment through the corridors of that train.”

Since then, Sami’s been part of every Anderson project, be it feature films, shorts or commercial projects. Including The Grand Budapest Hotel, Moonrise Kingdom, even the short Castello Cavalcanti. He chuckles as he describes the calls he gets from executives at Prada – the Italian luxury brand “for whom Wes does a lot of commercial work” – bemusedly asking “this Indian guy” to come to Prague for a three-day shoot because “Wes insists”.

But familiarity with a director’s language and style doesn’t mean the challenges go away. While filming The French Dispatch in Angoulême, a French town in the border region of Cognac, Sami recalls tripping and breaking his ribs on set. “But I was back on set in half an hour, pumped with painkillers,” he shrugs.

He also remembers having to orchestrate and execute a very complicated set of movements to move the camera through multiple rooms in a single shot. It involved “tons of choreography, set pieces having to be moved”; not to mention complex dialogue delivery required of Anderson’s actors, a lot of precise positioning of people and props. “Everyone,” on a Wes Anderson set, “has a lot of pressure on them, but I think the actors have the most of it. Sometimes, when you’re on the 25th take, because the actors have been struggling with it and you’ve got it right every single time, you start sweating because on take 26, when the actors do get it right, you don’t want to be the one who got it wrong!”

More recently, Sami’s team at The Grip Works was part of the crew of Netflix’s upcoming action-drama Extraction, starring Chris Hemsworth and directed by Sam Hargrave. They worked with the team for a few weeks of shooting in Ahmedabad, but Sami observes that foreign companies who come to India do so because “they have to, not because they want to. The authorities have never made it easy.”

Meanwhile, the Indian film industries have “definitely made a move towards more technical proficiency. We have numbers and that breeds inefficiency. What we desperately need to make headway in is safety on film sets. On an American film set, there’s a dedicated department, but here, a lot of shortcuts are taken.” He brings up the tragedy on the sets of Kamal Haasan’s Indian 2. “There’s no reason for people to die on a film set.”

Sami says he tries to take the lead on these matters, and while there is resistance, it hasn’t turned him off working locally. His latest project is an exciting one: Brahmastra. “My team’s finishing it, I just got to work on the first section of it due to dates. But Ayan Mukerji is a really talented director. He has vision – and the guts to back it up.”  

What of his own ambitions: How would he level up his own game? Sami shrugs. He’s doing steadicams now, he owns a lot of his own equipment, he’s happy being “an avid machinist and carpenter” in his free time, and he’s already working with the best. “You reach a point in your career when you feel you’ve earned the right to work only with nice people,” he grins.  

He unlocks his iPhone and begins to flip through old pictures. “I did [Scorsese’s] Silence in Taiwan. It’s incredible how wild the Eastern coast is,” he says, swiping enthusiastically. For Tarsem Singh’s elegiac The Fall, he shot on the breathtaking sand dunes of the Namib Desert and amazing Ladakh. “I went to Turkey, one of my favourite countries on the planet, and got to run on the roof of the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, carrying 70 pounds of camera gear!”

There’s pictures of him next to Bill Murray on Darjeeling; Bruce Willis on Moonrise Kingdom, a windswept Matthew McConaughey on a boat while shooting Serenity.

“You know, I get that I’m lucky to be in this position,” Sami says, after a moment’s pause. “But at the end of the day, we’re in entertainment. It’s not like we’re solving problems of world peace or anything.” Once in a while, a film like Sam Mendes’ excellent 1917 comes along, and Sami wishes he’d been involved, simply because work as challenging as that is rare, from a key grip’s POV.

But he can’t remember ever being starry-eyed about the film business, instead approaching it with a dry sense of humour. When he began, he found that a film set was “full of people like me, who didn’t quite fit into normal roles. I guess I was born to do this,” he chuckles to himself.

Does he wish, though, that people paid more attention to what goes on behind the scenes? “That would rob a film of it’s charm! Hopefully, no one’s sitting in a theatre and wondering how someone moved a camera or got that shot. That’s when we’ve succeeded.”