After the politically charged Buddha In A Traffic Jam, Vivek Agnihotri shifted gears with his latest film, Junooniyat, a breezy romance set in Kashmir. He shares his many filmi moods....
After the politically charged Buddha In A Traffic Jam, Vivek Agnihotri shifted gears with his latest film, Junooniyat, a breezy romance set in Kashmir. He shares his many filmi moods....
Barely a month after his last film Buddha In A Traffic Jam hit the theatres, director Vivek Agnihotri has already released another film Junooniyat. While Buddha , with its politically charged content, created quite a stir in some of the major colleges across the country, Junooniyat is a breezy romance, set in the Kashmir valley. The filmmaker dropped in at The Asian Age office on a rainy afternoon to talk about his latest film. What followed was nearly two engaging hours of conversation where he spoke of his journey as a filmmaker, the controversies he has gotten into, the politics of the country versus the politics of filmmaking and more. Excerpts:
On Junooniyat and romance films: We tried to make it as mushy as possible; why compromise on the genre We are an extremely diverse country. The reviews come from Delhi or Mumbai-based people but the audience of these films is never in Bombay. The audience is in small towns. Sooraj Barjatya’s film Vivah with Shahid Kapoor ran for 50 weeks and nobody in Mumbai knew about it. People who review these films never go out to watch Hindi films, but will watch films in festivals, which attract very dark, edgy films. Only Indian critics say stuff like this is a very clichéd love story — nobody abroad says that about their love stories. Because at the end of the day, every love story is the same. Look at Titanic — poor guy falling in love with a rich girl — which is nothing new. The telling of the story varies but the basic story remains the same.
Getting into films: I am a filmmaker by coincidence, not by design. During my first two films, I didn’t even know how the industry worked. Suppose you are a chartered accountant and somebody makes you finance minister — just because you know accounts, doesn’t mean you know how to handle that position. I was in advertising, then my ads won awards. I started making ad films and then I made an hour long tele-film called Chocolate which later got adapted into a feature film. That’s how I got started.
About Buddha In A Traffic Jam: When the JNU row happened, only then people got what Buddha is all about. In law universities and humanities colleges, there are a lot of extreme Left mentalities, both among the faculty members and the students. I have no problem with the Left — I have great respect for Leftist thinkers. But I have no respect for Naxalism and this is what Buddha shows. Yes, there are good things that they did, but you can’t do good for me and then go rape my wife. That’s exactly what’s been happening. Wherever there is a revolution, when the momentum breaks, corruption begins to seep in.
Not a lot of the intellectual class joined the Right wing. You had Raj Kapoor and big actors of that time joining IPTA, which was doing very Left wing plays, like Badal Sarkar plays. The film industry never got anything from Gandhi’s thinking, which I think is the most nationalist and Right wing thinking.
From JNU to Jadavpur University: If JNU was the beginning, Jadavpur was the climax. Jadavpur is like a country with its own constitution. When I went there, I was warned that there would be some jhamela. So I thought maybe there’d be students asking aggressive questions. So I went alone in my car. I saw students lined up on the streets with posters and upon seeing me, they surrounded my car. Some climbed onto the hood and began to bang on the windows. There were slogans of “Agnihotri go back” during the screening. At one point, even the registrar came and started a speech in Bengali which I was sure was against the film and me. I have never been attacked like that before. It was quite disturbing.
A lot of students are anti-system, so then who runs the system You say Hindus run the system, so you become anti-Hindu. When you become anti-Hindu, you become anti-RSS, then you have to be anti-Modi. Now unfortunately, Modi, in the last three or four years has started saying “India first, India first”, so if you disagree with that, you sound anti-India.
Politics of filmmaking: I don’t agree with Abhishek Chaubey that making an apolitical film is a political statement. India has a history of politically charged films; look at Raj Kapoor films, Guru Dutt films, Salim-Javed films. The most commercial directors have made political films. The film industry can be divided into pre-Salim Javed and post Salim-Javed. Shyam Benegal, Sudhir Mishra and Prakash Jha kept making them even after Shah Rukh Khan and more romantic films continued to come in. But when you want to play politics on your political film, then there is a problem. I think Udta Punjab made a politically wrong statement by accepting that one cut, I don’t think they should have accepted any cuts at all.
On the CBFC: I am absolutely against Pahlaj Nihlani, I would say it’s a bad appointment but at the same time, I think it is wrong how everybody attacks the CBFC. The board appoints a group of random people from different walks of life and hands them a list of directives on how to make cuts, like for instance “no gaalis”, “no nudity” and so on. Based on that, the appointed members make decisions and the cuts are made. Any random person can be called upon to take the decision. So to say that Pahlaj Nihlani is aware of every cut being made, is wrong.
What’s next: My next film is going to look into how it would be like if we had a jury system. It is inspired from the 1957 film Twelve Angry Men. Our judicial system is flawed. It takes forever to close even the simplest of cases. We also have a system that seeks to punish. We do not follow the principle that lets a thousand guilty people go free, so long as the innocent is acquitted. I think that maybe if we had a jury, the system could be speeded up and there would be more views and each judgement would be made more carefully. Nehru stopped the jury system in the 1950s, and we have not assessed whether or not we need something different. This film will look into all of that.
