Blocked out in Bollywood

Saturday, December 09, 2006 22:16 IST


Anurag Kashyap

Very few people in Bollywood have a vision or an imagination. Seeing a film from the point of view of a script is beyond them. They always need a reference point, and an original script is all about not having a reference point. The vast majority in this film industry are able to see the big picture only after a script has been made into a movie.
In any other business, getting into a new area is like gambling; it is your conviction that sees you through. Here, conviction comes in the form of surety or bonds. The thinking is: “OK, we have two stars. Their value is X, so the film must be made for under X.” The idea is to play it completely safe.

Another reason why Bollywood is struggling to fulfill its potential is that we seem to be making films just for non-resident Indians. Incidentally, these are the kind of films that do well at multiplexes, which would be open to a different sort of cinema if only they were made, and made well.

Unfortunately, the writer does not wield any power in Bollywood; he is way down the food chain. The decision-makers are the producers and the stars. They know exactly what they want and rarely are they willing to listen to a fresh idea or a new theme.

Then there is the herd mentality: one sequel becomes a hit and everyone wants to make sequels. They quite forget that before that hit, sequels were anathema. Whatever is successful — it is presumed — will continue to be successful; what hasn’t been attempted yet will be a failure.

A film like Lage Raho Munnabhai would never have been written or made if the first Munnabhai film had not been a success. Do you know the trauma the Rang De Basanti team went through till Aamir Khan came on board? Till then no one wanted to touch the movie. An original idea, by itself, does not count for anything.

I’ve completed two films, Black Friday and Panch, and there’s Gulal, which is 80 per cent done. The film I’m currently working on, No Smoking, would not have taken off if I didn’t have John Abraham in it. I have had this script for eight years and have been to every producer in town with it. I have also taken it to a bunch of stars. None of them — not the producers and not the stars — were convinced. John was the first person to respond favourably to it. After that, predictably, the first producer I went to agreed to back it.

What we really lack in Bollywood is conviction. When there is conviction, a film can be defined by its creator: a David Dhawan or a Ram Gopal Varma, for instance. You can agree or disagree with these people, but they have stayed true to their beliefs.

The ideal situation would be when, every once in a while, there is an experiment. In recent times, the only Bollywood films I can think of that did that were Omkara and Khosla Ka Ghosla. Surely this industry can do better than that.

We live in a town where everything is about the box office. Take, for example, a production house like Yash Raj Films. The same Yash Chopra who gave us Trishul, Kaala Patthar, Silsila and Lamhe — an experiment in mainstream cinema that did not quite work — has now descended to the level of Dhoom 2, a show pony in which everything has become an item: the songs, the action, the scenes, everything.

I look at cinema as a multi-layered enterprise. There’s art and there’s commerce, there are patrons and there are businessmen. The sad part is that for 99 per cent of Bollywood people, films are commerce. There are no patrons here, and no art can survive without patrons.

Anurag Kashyap spoke to Indu Mirani