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In my previous post here, I shared some reasons for making Khoya Khoya Chand. I’ve also been interacting on email with some of the commentators to my blog. With the film releasing tomorrow, here are some more thoughts about this film.

With Khoya Khoya Chand, I have taken a story which any of the film makers of the fifties could have made except I have not let my self be governed by the morality or the technique of that time. So every time I have gone further into a scene where they might have cut before.

In my opinion, the only way you can make a film truthfully is, that what is happening to them, supposing it happened to you, how would you be. Because the only people you know truthfully are yourselves.

The way Hazaaron.. deals a lot with objective reality, this deals a lot with interior reality. …

Why am i making Khoya Khoya Chand? Because the story comes to you. You can’t rationalize everything. You think that making a film about two individuals caught in the mad world of movies, where there are contradictory aspirations, where there are all these lures of popularity and people grappling with that and also their personal situation is interesting. And we try and put it in another time. But, you are also talking about yourself and your contemporaries.

All films are in the present, because you are shooting now. So, all this bit about historical and all that is nonsense. There is no such thing as a historical film. You are not history writers. Every film is in …

I’ve been trying to analyse how different sort of people like Hazaaron. Some people fall in love with it and develop a sort of relationship with it. A lot of young people, students like it. The generation that lived through that period is grateful that someone made a film of that time and caught them as they were. The IAS wives association likes it!

I really get quite astounded. I have corporate heads say they love it. Sometimes, I imagine why would corporate heads like a film like this. Some people see it as a dark political film, some see it as a relationship film. I think it has doors through which you can walk in.

I showed it in Patna, Bihar. There was a young minister sitting there, someone in the chief minister’s cabinet and 6-7 …

I have been reading comments to the previous posts and some of you asked me to write more about Yeh Woh Manzil to Nahin and the idea behind it.

I must say at the outset that I am no longer the boy who made Yeh Woh Manzil to Nahin. I sort of see, the kind of idealistic boy. I kind of know him. Sometimes I find him very naive, sometimes very didactic. I seem to find him, a bit too cocky, some times doing things for effect.

Somewhere you also like some things there which you may have lost. A young boy, not corroded so much by the world. It’s a different person. It’s a film that’s going back in time. And people, who had seen this film and mostly they had all seen the film on television, told me, they thought it was some 80 year old man who had made …

Popular Cinema

I personally think that most film makers in India are children and most films in India are childrens’ film and rather bad childrens’ films. Their notion of love is that of a fourteen year old. In all popular entertainment the notion of life is going retarded.

It’s an illusion which you make people buy into and you get rather hurt when they realize life is not like that. There’s very little difference between selling a fake notion of life and selling a fake product. It’s like advertising. You fall in love and you live happily ever after, is as stupid a notion as you use a fairness cream and you become fair. All are very idiotic notions, sold to the naive and people make a lot of money out of that.

If everything is about profit in its most crass sense and if the world is to be like that – …

GENERATION NOW

A few months back there was a screenwriting conference at the FTII, where there was a lot of bullshitting going on. Even some of the people there had no idea about writing and had written some terrible scripts. Today, the problem is that people theorize too much. They think they have become events, before they have actually become events. Before you know it, people are masters and actually when they talk they are writing Oscar speeches and they seemed not confused at all and they seemed to know everything.

And I find that stunning about some of the younger people. There is more conversation than an attempt to hone talent. Of course, there are exceptions too, like Anurag Kashyap, for example.

Often, I find a lot of the young film makers of today and the young people of today, like the intellectual bull-shitters of the 1960s …

Sudhir Mishra… the name needs no introduction. When after spending weeks we could atlast find the right channels to get in touch with Sudhir… I was elated… more so when he mentioned that he loved what we were doing on PFC… “It’s good thing you are doing”… excited we waited till he could find some time from his extremely busy schedule… since us movie fanatics are an impatient lot, Smriti took the initiative and packed her video camera and voice recorder and pursued Sudhir to atleast start recording the initial contents of his diary… seeing her pure passion for cinema, Sudhir graciously complied.

This is Sudhir Mishra’s diary… albiet we took a different track due to our (over) enthusiasm to see him talk to us. The first few chapters of his diary are recorded by Smriti who then passed the draft for all of us, that we are now …