Standing tall in Hollywood
Malhotra, whose special-effects house has 5 Oscars to its credit and is behind the latest Bond movie, tells Pavan Lall how it all started
NHe enjoys well-made Bollywood action-packed, fast-paced films. On the Hollywood side, he’s a fan of Christopher Nolan
amit Malhotra, chief executive officer of DNEG, the Oscarwinning special-effects house behind sci-fi hits like Blade Runner 2049, Ex Machina and Inception, is, at six-footthree, much taller than I’d expected. But then his height isn’t all that makes him stand tall, I soon find out.
Starting from practically a garage, he’s built what is today among the go-to studios for special effects for Hollywood blockbusters.
Malhotra, 45, is down from London for a short trip, and we’ve decided to meet at his home in Bandra, Mumbai. While it’s coffee time, Malhotra says he’s going to get lunch since he’s on an intermittent diet. A chef appears, almost magically, in a white coat and all. I opt for coffee and a grilled chicken-and-cheese sandwich, while Malhotra asks for grilled sea-bass and Brussels sprouts. He went vegan for many months, stopped drinking milk and has stuck to black coffee.
“I was a fat kid,” he says. “I can run more today than I could 25 years ago. The same goes for playing tennis and riding a bike 50 kilometres.”
His business DNEG (owned by Prime Focus Ltd, or PFL) employs thousands of people in India and across the world, so he travels a lot, mostly shuttling between Los Angeles, London and Mumbai.
So what is his latest project, I ask. “It’s the latest Bond movie (Notimetodie, Daniel Craig’s fifth and final outing as the MI6 agent),” he says with a smile. “If I can be so bold to say so, we put India on the map for special effects and postproduction,” he adds, alluding to DNEG’S track record — five VFX Oscars, including for First Man and Interstellar.
Malhotra is an out-and-out Bandra boy. He attended the Jasudben M L School, where he met his wife who is now an eye surgeon in London. Always interested in films, he enrolled for a computer graphics course but dumped it when he realised he wasn’t very good at drawing.
Instead, he got together with the three guys — Merzin Tavaria, Huzefa Lokhandwala and Prakash Kurup — who taught him about graphics. “I figured if they could make Mickey Mouse walk, they must be good. I only knew them for five weeks when we decided to start a company.”
That was in 1995. They called the company Video Workshop, and it was soon growing. In due course, they were having a chat about corporate ideology. “Ronnie Screwvala had just launched a new stateof-the-art studio, United Studios Ltd (USL), and we were just a silly upstart,” he recalls. “We decided that our ‘prime focus’ was people, so that’s what we called the firm.”
Their business took off so fast that the joke was: If you had no experience, go to Prime Focus; they would hire you. “Of course, I knew I had my father’s mentorship and support, so I took the plunge,” he says. He came from a family already in films, with his father, Naresh Malhotra, having produced a run of flicks, among which was the Amitabh Bachchan-starrer Shahenshah.
His father, he says, had a knack for making movies but had seen highs and lows, which taught him to first build something stable and then make movies. “That’s where we are right now. I’m making Brahmastra (the first part of a superhero trilogy starring Bachchan, Alia Bhatt, Ranbir Kapoor and Dimple Kapadia) and producing movies from scratch. Brahmastra is a co-production between Dharma and Fox Star Studios/disney.” These are the “largestthan-life and the biggest movies” that could hit the Indian screens, he says.
Malhotra has had a deluge of exciting times lately. Icelandic billionaire Thor Bjorgolfsson reportedly helped him buy back stock that was owned by Anil Ambani. “All that legacy stuff has been cleared up, and we bought his (Ambani’s) stake out from Credit Suisse in order to move ahead seamlessly,” Malhotra says. Credit Suisse had signed an agreement with the Malhotra family to sell a 33.12 per cent stake previously owned by Ambani’s Reliance Mediaworks Financial Services Pvt Ltd. The shares were pledged to Credit Suisse. The debt-ridden Reliance Capital Ltd had then, in a statement issued in December 2020, alleged that Credit Suisse’s attempt to sell the stake to Prime Focus promoters was “a blatant abuse of the purported rights by CS under certain lending agreements with Rcap group”.
Our refreshments arrive. My sandwich is accompanied with a beetroot aioli, and looks artistic. Malhotra’s lounge is surrounded by red leather couches. I turn around and for the first time notice on my left a life-size painting in bright colours showing Popeye in a boxing match with Muhammad Ali. On another coffee table is a Porsche Design sound system sculpted in a rendition of exhaust pipes from a real car. Malhotra is an auto enthusiast with a penchant for fast cars, he says. He’s owned and driven Ferraris and Porsches, and even named one of his three sons after Formula 1 champion Ayrton Senna.
He speaks about the progression of the film industry. In the seventies, Malhotra says, Sholay was made and soon after was made Star Wars. From Sholay, we went to a certain kind of movie, while Hollywood went onto Jaws, Terminator, ET and Back to the Future. “Hollywood pushed the envelope using technology but, by contrast, India got stuck in a mould where it made romantic movies that were perhaps even more outdated than the seventies in some ways,” he says. Why was that? “They were lower risk,” he replies.
What films does he watch? He says he grew up on a steady diet of Bollywood flicks, and an enduring favourite is Agneepath. He’s watched it dozens of times. He enjoys well-made Bollywood action-packed, fast-paced films. On the Hollywood side, he’s a fan of Christopher Nolan who has directed Inception, Interstellar, Tenet and Dunkirk — all movies which DNEG has worked on, too.
My sandwich is done and so is Malhotra’s fare. “You don’t come across as a filmi kind of guy, at least not to me,” I tell him. “I grew up in the film business, but am not very social despite knowing everyone in the business,” he says. “Our job is to create the glamour, and not be consumed by it or be a victim of it.”