For the latest in our series of interviews with the directors behind the short films accompanying each song on Dido's new album, we called up Siddharth Sikkand to find out more about his film for Let's Do The Things We Normally Do (which you can watch below).



Hello Siddharth. How did you come to be involved with the Safe Trip Home project?
The guys from Sony Music India called me. I had done a video for them a couple of years back, which was actually nothing like this. It was a spoof on Boney M featuring an Indian VJ called Lola Kutty. But they knew I liked a lot of British music, so they called me, along with a whole lot of other directors, to pitch for it. They gave me the song and the theme of "home" and asked me to come up with a concept.

Did you start off by just listening to the song?
Yeah, about 1,800 times! My first reaction was that I loved the pace of the song. It starts off really slow, then it picks up, then it goes very slow in the middle and then it ends on a great crescendo. I really wanted the song to dictate the video, rather than the other way round. At that time it was the monsoon season in Bombay, which is when the city looks its prettiest. So I thought I'd try and shoot something on the streets of Bombay. I've had a lot of arguments with friends about Bombay being an ugly city, so this was my chance to prove to the world that Bombay is actually very beautiful.

Do you still call it Bombay, rather than Mumbai?
Yes. I think most people here still call it Bombay, unless it's something official, like your mail. I thought it would be a great place to do the film and I just hit upon the idea of a female taxi driver. The only research I did was to find out if there actually are any female cab drivers in Bombay, to make sure it was plausible.

And are there?
There is one!

Did you meet her?
No, I just found out a little bit about her on the net. I didn't want to get into her life too much, because I wanted the story to come out from the song.

In the video, the cab driver sleeps in her taxi; is that something that happens in Bombay?
Yeah, that's very common. If you drive along certain roads early in the morning, you'll see them sleeping either on the bonnet or in the cab. So I decided to just make the cab her home.

How did you find Shanana Goswami, the actress who played the cab driver?
Well, while I was putting the idea together, there was a movie released called Rock On, which she's in. When I saw her in one of the promos for the movie, I had her in mind from that point. Then it was finalised that I'd be making the Dido film and I went to see the movie on the weekend it was released. She was brilliant - she's actually just won an award for Best Supporting Actress for it. By the time I walked out of the movie, I was like, "If she does not play my cab driver I don't know what the hell I'm going to do!" When I used to hear directors saying things like, "I picture Al Pacino in the role and if he hadn't agreed to it, I wouldn't have made the movie", I never really took it seriously. But I actually felt like that!

Was she quite famous?
No, that movie was her first big role. But luckily the casting director of Rock On is a distant cousin of mine, so I called Shanana and told her about the video I was making for Dido.

Did she agree to be in it quite quickly?
Oh yeah, everyone knows and loves Dido and it's such a powerful song. And by then my concept was really detailed, literally to the second. So I think she could picture it all quite easily. For instance, I knew that when the song slowed down it would be the sequence with the old woman and the cafe, and then towards the end it would climax with the part of the driver dancing. So she agreed, we set the dates and we prepared everything. Then, about a week before the shoot, we realised she couldn't drive.

What?!
I know! So we had a week to get her to drive in the cab. And these old Fiat cabs are not easy to drive; they don't have the stick-shift on the floor, it juts out from the steering wheel. I think they're based on a 1950-something model, and they haven't undergone much transformation since then.

What did you do?
Well, by then I was like, "I don't care, whatever it takes, we'll get you lessons, this is not going to stop me!" So we got the actual cab we were going to shoot with and had her practice in that same cab, because they all have a different feel. We hired it for a week before the shoot and she was given lessons in the morning and the evening. All credit to her, though. She was let loose on the busiest streets of Bombay and she totally managed.

There were no accidents?
No, not at all. We had a low-loader trailer on location, in case we needed to use that to make it look like she was driving. But we didn't even use it once. She just managed. It was awesome.

Are all the people in the video actors?
No, no. Many of them are friends, or people who would like to be actors.

The video has some quite clear themes; like loneliness and broodiness. How did you decide what you wanted to come across in it?
I wanted it to be a mix of everything, not all sad or all happy. I was concentrating on the blooming middle class of India right now. They are the ones who take cabs. The lower class will travel in buses or trains, while the upper class have their Mercs and BMWs. But the idea was to show lots of sections of the middle class in lots of different circumstances.

Did you want it to be realistic?
Absolutely. For example, it is very common for working wives to start their housework on the way home on the bus or in a cab, just to save time. They really do start peeling the peas or skinning the onions. And there are lots of stories of old single men and women who almost disappear out of society, with nobody to look after them. So I wanted to highlight that with the old woman. Then there are are a couple of funny, stupid things, like the man who lets go at the end of a hard day and starts dancing, or the guy who keeps drinking beer then wants to take a leak - which actually came from personal experience! Also, Bombay cabs are very common for young couples. In the rest of the country, couples are very unsure about even holding hands in public. But somehow in Bombay, maybe because it's a bit more cosmopolitan, you'll find couples holding hands in cabs, or kissing. So again, that's very realistic.

How much did you try to tie the video in with the lyrics of the song?
The only line I really paid a lot of attention to was, "Let's do the things we normally do". From there my idea was that it should be the day in the life of someone. Then I thought that someone has to be a woman, because Dido is such a strong female voice.

Did the filming go well?
Well, we actually shot about 80% of it without any permissions, which is pretty unheard of in Bombay. Basically if you want to shoot on the street, you have to take permissions from the police, the municipal and a whole lot of other places. And there are different permissions for different sections of the city. But we actually just got permission for one day for one part of the city and shot the rest guerrilla-style.

Did that work out OK?
Yeah. We were expecting the worse; the cops can stop you at any time, they can confiscate your camera, but we managed pretty well. There were no real production problems.

And are you happy with the film?
Oh yeah, very happy. I edit everything I do myself. I'm used to doing commercials where you have about 20-30 minutes of footage and make one minute out of it. With this film, I sat down to edit and I had 80 minutes of footage - I had no idea how I was going to get through it all! But I edited for three evenings and I was finally done. I've read some really nice comments about it from Dido's fans online. They totally humbled me. People from all over the world seem to have reacted to it. One comment, which I'll never forget, said, "I have watched this video today. I will have a very good day." That's awesome. And Shanana has been getting messages every day from friends or relatives who've seen it and really like it.

Did you get any feedback from Dido?
Yes, I got the most beautiful letter from her. It was awesome, because apart from saying she loved the little stories and the edit and the way it looked, she said that she'd written the song in a much sadder time, and after seeing the video, she now had a more uplifted feeling towards the song. To be able to change an artist's perception of their own song? I don't think you can get a much better compliment than that!

Click here to read our interview with Tinge Krishnan about her film for It Comes And It Goes

Click here to read our interview with Cristiana Miranda about her film for The Day Before The Day

Click here to see all the films at safetriphome.com