Kaizad Gustad
Kaizad Gustad is an Indian film director and author based in Mumbai, India. He is best known for his 1998 comedy Bombay Boys. In his career as an author, he has written three books, Of No Fixed Address published in 1998 by HarperCollins, The Road to Mandalay and 7 Storeys.
Early life
Gustad was born in Bombay into a Parsi family. He has an older brother and a younger sister. He grew up on a farm in the outskirts of Wadi, a town in the Kalaburagi district of Karnataka, where his father and grandfather owned cinema theaters and a stone quarrying business. He first attended the Cathedral and John Connon School in Bombay and then studied at St. Paul's School, Darjeeling. At the age of sixteen, he moved along with his family to Sydney, Australia. He later attended New York University's Tisch School of the Arts to study film.At the age of 18, Gustad left home and started traveling to different parts of the world. He kept a diary on his travels and called it "Of No Fixed Address," in reference to the fact that he had no fixed address for three years. He used this diary as the basis for his book of short stories entitled Of No Fixed Address, which was published in 1998.
Career
1997 onwards
At 28, Gustad wrote and directed his debut feature, Bombay Boys. It starred Rahul Bose, Tara Deshpande, Naseeruddin Shah and Naveen Andrews amongst others. It was a break out commercial and critical success, paving the way for independent cinema in India. It also travelled to several film festivals worldwide and premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 1998, followed by the Vancouver and London Film Festivals. The film was nominated for best film at Verzaubert, Berlin.Gustad's next film was the black-comedy thriller, Boom, which had an ensemble cast of Amitabh Bachchan, Zeenat Aman, Jackie Shroff, Gulshan Grover, Javed Jaffrey along with the debut of the supermodels Padma Lakshmi, Madhu Sapre and Katrina Kaif, who were the female leads of the film. It opened to highly negative reviews and was criticized for its profanity and misogyny.