Currently, the discussion on the hot topic of corporatization has unveiled in Bollywood. This has emerged after Shekhar Kapur’s tweet on 22 years of Dil Se. The tweet has led to controversies about who control Bollywood. The tweet read, “25 yrs ago Mani Ratnam, Ram Gopal Verma and I predicted that soon our creativity will be controlled by big corporations, if directors ourselves don’t get together to counter that corporate power. Dil Se was the first of that collaboration. Unfortunately, the last..”
25 yrs ago Mani Ratnam, Ram Gopal Verma and I predicted that soon our creativity will be controlled by big corporations, if directors ourselves don’t get together to counter that corporate power. Dil Se was the first of that collaboration. Unfortunately, the last #22YearsOfDilSe
— Shekhar Kapur (@shekharkapur) August 22, 2020
Talking about what this means to other filmmakers, Hindustan Times approached them.
Onir:
Director of films My Brother Nikhil and I am, Onir talked about his point of view, “Earlier, it was an organic process between a director and a producer. Now a whole lot of people, not filmmakers, are supposed to understand. For example, when you go to a restaurant, and decide you want to eat Punjabi food, but when you go to someone’s house, the cook feeds you, not what you order, with love. Filmmakers earlier made films with love and told the story they wanted to tell. Right now, the platform figures if this is a story it wants to tell. Their creative teams will say ‘this is not what we are looking for.”
Madhur Bhandarkar:
Filmmaker Madhur Bhandarkar believes this strategy was there before also. However, it was existing in bits and pieces.
He also said, “Since the corporate culture came in, a lot of people have this focus group which assesses the film, gauges the script, shows the film to a test audience, which is not necessarily 100% right. There is no doctrine of making hit or great cinema.”
Anurag Basu:
Anurag said that nowadays studios decide the script of the film. A director may have a script, but the studio need not go with the same. Studios also check the past record of the directors and the box office track. He also added, “new filmmakers and directors do face interference as studios always see the return on investment” but “it’s a business. It has made things more organised, everything is in white, no black money. Almost all the business is controlled by corporates.”
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