If you want to be famous, you have to come to America. Once you reach our shores, people will throw movie scripts at you left and right and hand you the keys to a new Mercedes. Ramu Gupti, the lead character in the new movie, The Guru, heard all of these tales during his childhood in India.
But once Ramu arrives in America, his expectations are deflated. His supposedly affluent cousin lives in an apartment with three other Indian men, and his first audition is for a porn movie. But he finally finds work in a restaurant with his cousin.
One night the entertainment falls through at a birthday party where Ramu is helping out with the catering. He spontaneously dons a makeshift turban and convincingly spouts off a couple of lines he heard on the set of the porno, and the birthday girl, Lexi [played by Marisa Tomei], mistakes his enthusiasm for authenticity. She turns him into an overnight sensation. While he is touted by legions of fans as a sexual Deepak Chopra, Ramu is genuinely at a loss for any deep spiritual knowledge. So he turns to Sharonna for help.
"The whole idea of sexual healing is really interesting to me," says Heather Graham, who plays Sharonna, in a recent interview alongside co-star Jimi Mistry at the Sanctuary Resort in Scottsdale. "I think we need it. In some ways I think people view sex as dark and forbidden.
"I think in the movie my character tries to connect it with spirituality, which is a way of saying, 'Look, can't we look at it as a spiritual thing and not just a sort of scary, dark, mysterious thing?"
Graham and Mistry, a British actor of Irish and Indian descent, delve into the themes of love, fame, and relationships. Graham says that because she and Mistry had such a close relationship, it made it easier to address such unconventional subjects.
"We're different in some ways, but we both love singing and dancing," she says. "When we first saw the script we saw that it had some dance numbers and we campaigned for more."
Thanks to their efforts, the movie is chock-full of them. In one of the film's more memorable scenes, Ramu innocently shows up at an audition for a porn movie. Armed only with his knowledge of American cinema, he drops his pants and proceeds to do his thang--a la Tom Cruise in Risky Business. Graham says that Mistry has been falsely crediting himself with the creativity behind the performance.
"He likes to claim that it was all improvised," she says affectionately. "But I was there that day and there was a choreographer on set!"
There were other opportunities for improvisation throughout the film. After Ramu falls into the sex guru persona, he lies to Sharonna and tells her that he needs sex therapy so that he can be more confident in porn movies. Graham says that she was reading a lot of "New Agey" books at the time so the director asked her to fill in some of her own thoughts. However, some of them didn't actually make the final cut.
"There's only a certain amount of stuff that they can actually put in the movie," Graham says. "Like at one point I said something like, 'It's good to masturbate, right?' And I guess they had some test screenings and some older people walked out because they were so horrified. But I thought that was actually sexist, because if a guy were saying it, would people walk out horrified?"
Another potentially horrifying scene was saved by the Piano Man. In one of the therapy sessions Ramu asks Sharonna how she is able to mentally survive the sex scenes in her films. She tells him that she just concentrates on a song and they proceed to climb on top of each other--fully clothed--and try out her method using Billy Joel's "Just the Way You Are" as the song of choice.
"That scene was very tough to do on paper," Mistry says. "When the director [Daisy von Scherler Mayer] described how she wanted it, I was like, 'Shit!' The great thing was that we had Billy Joel to think about. Try it at home it really works.
"It was just, it, uh...I just really didn't know what to make of it," he says, stammering. "I'm lying there and Marisa's doing some sort of Tibetan dance in her knickers for me and the reactions that I have in the film are the reactions I was having in real life."
While many of the Bollywood films that The Guru is based upon are quite modest in comparison, Mistry says that the film has so far had great success in India despite its strong sexual content.
"It's great because the young generation in India don't necessarily hold all of the same ideals as the older ones," he says. "It's great for them because they can see modern culture on their part being celebrated in American movies and it deals with something like sex.
"It's like 'Hooray!' at last, but you know India invented sex. They're the ones who wrote books about sex and put an art to it."
Reach the reporter at joy.hepp@asu.edu.
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'The Guru' Starring Heather Graham, Jimi Mistry and Marisa Tomei. Directed by Daisy von Scherler Mayer. Opens Friday. |
