Indian Cinema for a Global Audience?
Following Bobby Bedi’s Facebook post of “The kind of Indian film the world would like to see” three of us friends got into a late night discussion (over pakoras and some left-over wine) of just what kind of Indian movie will be accepted the world over. I thought our movies were being eagerly awaited and watched in a big part of the world anyways – some movies were seen in Russia, most of the movies are loved in the Middle East, Persian Gulf, South East Asia. That does leave Europe, Americas Australia, NZ – a big chunk. Not that they were not watched there but just that every decent movie from Bombay doesn’t become a rage here yet.
Neeti said there could be various reasons why our movies have not been lapped up in these continents so far. There are cultural reasons, the fact that the western audiences are used to a certain kind of film-making, another reason could be the way we depict our emotions on screen. Each reason however seemed to be contradicting itself. For each reason/situation had an equivalent in the West and so they really cancelled each other out. For example for the last one we argued that hey we do go overboard with emotions, but doesn’t Placido Domingo do the same on stage? We do break into a song and dance but so do Hollywood musicals. Then again forget clash of cultures, wasn’t Satya way better than so many many gangster movies that have come out of the West?
We did talk about Slumdog and why it became such a hit all over as opposed to so many of our very good films not being hits in the West. Slumdog was a bizarre movie even by Indian standards. So bizarre too could not be a reason for the West not accepting a film like Delhi 6 J Pallavi thought it was because the West sees India with blinkers on. Now they know there has been poverty and struggle and now some sort of success (with IT going strong) happening within the country. So in Slumdog they related to all three – poverty = slum, struggle = the kid’s survival, success = in love life and in the show. It helped that the movie was in English and the culture shown was not too Indian to go over their heads.
I thought the world has just started opening up culturally in the true sense of the term. So today a reasonably good film that meets the Western ‘perception’ of India, would probably succeed. The stories need not be sci-fi. Our human stories are beautiful. We need to keep it original and Indian. Emotions are universal by any standards but our humor and dialogues need to definitely internationalize and be more universal otherwise the Western audiences won’t get it. It may be truly great for us but they wont get it. They may get it perhaps 10-15 years from now when they know and understand India’s complexities better. And of course all this has to be supported by loads of suave and intelligent marketing.
The pakoras were over and our search for another bottle of wine in the kitchen ended with none. The talk drifted to how the Naomis and Will Smiths of this world want to work in Bombay films and about new-generation Directors like Zoya Akhtar and her plans.
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Indian films used to be really popular in Nigeria and in fact most of Africa, movies like ‘Yeh Vaada raha’ probably even more popular than Sholay in Nigeria, Dus Numbri,Disco Dancer, Ghazab, Nagin(1976) were hugely poular, in conversations with russian friends i find movies like Seeta aur Geeta and most Mithun films particularly Disco Dancer and Dance Dance were much loved.
I don’t think India needs the other western countries to like their movies, while it might not appeal to huge masses, little/niche segments of western/foreign fans exist and i’m not talking about NRI’s
@ Valli- While we know Raj Kapoor & Mithunda movies are popular in Russia & CIS , Big B is popular in the middle east,Turkey etc,Rajnikant has a fan following in Japan,SRK has fans in Europe even outside the Indian community, we need to admit that there is no univeral acceptance for Indian cinema, atleast not yet.But like Crouching Tiger,Hidden Dragon changed the outlook of Chinese cinema ,the day we have our own such product ( I’m not talking about a martial arts movie) I’m sure Indian cinema’s acceptance among mainstream U.S & European audiences will also happen.But I dont think we can really plan such an event, its just the question of time- we’ll be there too soon,very soon.
why not indian cinema first concern should be local audience?
Valli, what a beautifully written and thought-provoking post!! It was a wonderful way to start my Sunday! Ultimately, I have been studying this phenomenon on my ongoing column and have still to find the answer… Why SM over other beautiful films, like Mishra’s “Dharavi” for example? And why did “Luck by Chance” not become the crossover hit it deserved to be? I mean, people liked “The Player” about Hollywood insiders and their issues, and LBC was a million times better, more from the heart and with amazing photography… I think it’s about tapping into the masses and a well-respected director told me at IFFLA that the masses are the same in the whole world: they need sentimentality that is spoon fed to them and over the top stories they can relate to. I think he’s right. And I would add to that they need a language they can understand, or Indian cinema will continue to be a pleasure enjoyed by only an elite group of arthouse movie goers…
Ajay: I too thought very strongly about Indian films strictly catering to Indian audiences. But then I thought maybe we shouldn’t be so smug in thinking we don’t need the world to like the movies we love so much. Think about it – when we listen and like a JonBonJovi, it doesn’t mean he was looking for our ‘approval’. I think we as a nation/people/culture are past that approval phase. We must look at it as a cultural export. And an Indian movie is the simplest form of our complex culture. It is the tip of the iceberg. I think we should float around hit some ships out there ;) And c’mon of the 1600 or so movies that we make for ourselves every year, we can send a couple out to the rest of the world ;) that wouldn’t hurt, would it?
Sethumadhavan: I totally agree… its a matter of time. And our time has just begun.
Nina: I am glad the post made your Sunday
And yes the language, both verbal and non-verbal is the key. That leads me to think what would be next – scripts and screenplays going through focus groups of sample global audiences?
And thanks for inviting, we must catch up on FB sometime
We have the oldest film making culture in the world, nearly the same time-span as Hollywood. The Lumiere brothers came to India at the end of the 19th century and film making began here.
How is it then, that films from Iran, China, Thailand, Korea, Mexico, Argentina, Turkey – each with its own aesthetic and its own culture and production values, as robust and as different from Hollywood and European cinema as, arguably, ours, yet without the robust industry that we’ve had or the history of film making – how come, these films and their film makers find global audiences and ours don’t?
Having been witness to the way in which films get financed and distributed in India, I think the answer lies in a couple of things and I am putting them down as a to-do list, a list that I am writing both for myself and anyone who’s interested.
1. Stop second guessing the audience, start making your own film. If its honest – chances are that an audience (some audience , somewhere in the world) will connect to it and come.
2. Find a producer who can protect the director’s vision – a prerequisite to that is a producer who understands original vision to start with, and who has a point of view of his/her own, and following onwards – someone who understands what constitutes an original screenplay. And knows how to develop it properly with the screenwriter and director. And someone who’s as convinced about the movie as his/her screenwriter. Someone who has an answer to the question – why its important that the film should be made (other than financial gain)?
3. Be sincere and honest as film makers. Which means be honest with yourself first.
4. Decide the budget after the screenplay is written, don’t write a screenplay to a budget. Its OK to do that for a first film or a short to break into the industry, but to continue that over a career is crazy. Make the producer do his/her job – producer’s skill is to make sure that the project is viable. Whether he/she chooses to exploit his/her film internationally or domestically as an art-house film or however. Each market has its own logic and budget levels, let the producer make a business plan around the screenplay, and pull it off.
We lack good films from India. I think its because we simply do not have visionary producers. They give a best picture academy award to the producer of the film in Hollywood. Why? Because the producer is the one who brings the whole film together. His / her’s is a creative and a business vision.
On average (and there are exceptions of course) our films lack honestly and sincerity. We make way too many compromises and think too hard about what the audience might want.
Our films don’t plunge deep enough. They don’t bother to go into the detail enough (the characters seem superficial, the drama tenuous, the set design tacky, the costumes bright and new etc etc) ALl of these elements detract from the illusion – they test the suspension of disbelief. For one reason or the other our film makers stop short too afraid that they may bore the audience. Or they don’t pay enough attention to things that they feel will be ‘chalta hai’ for the audience. Because who notices a badly pained wall in a film. Or a badly recorded dialogue track. Again, too much focus on what the audience wants, will notice or not – too much second guessing.
Lastly, our audiences are tuned into watching very mediocre films. So even a slightly better than mediocre film is hailed as a masterpiece – the blame for that rests on the broad shoulders of our inane media and the poor quality of film criticism that exists in the country. But in that system, the quest for excellence is surrendered. It is a quest for making a better than average film. And better than average films don’t really travel. Unfortunately. It is the remarkable films that do.
And that is my diagnosis as to why our films don’t work abroad. Its got little to do with aesthetics or film making cultures and so on.
@Ashwin Kumar
Salute!
Eye opener write up.
@Ashvin Kumar…#9 oops sorry wrote your name wrongly…:-)
Wonderful, Ashvin. Thank you for this…
Ashvin- you’ve detailed the scenario quite well!!!
Nina brings up some interesting points about what the director at IFFLA said the mass movie-going audience wants. It makes me think that a movie that will travel to other countries well should delight audiences on several levels so that the odds are increased that they will be able to connect to it. For example, Amelie was like a Rorschach inkblot test in that different viewers came away enchanted by utterly varying and even opposing aspects of the movie.
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Not to minimize Valli’s point, which is an excellent one, but I feel quite a few Indian movies could gain Western audiences without remaking themselves, particularly films that have a modicum of English so that they don’t feel so foreign. What’s more lacking is the local distribution and promotion machinery to get them in front of Western viewers’ consciousnesses.
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Luck By Chance and some other recent movies could have had a decent chance with American audiences, but there was basically no promotion outside South Asian media. LBC only screened in the usual theaters, not international art-cinema houses or regular multiplexes, where other viewers might stumple upon them. (I’m not counting the great theaters in central New Jersey, as they are special cases.)
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The scattershot approach should be considered, too, as you never know what will catch on and when. Quick Gun Murugan could become a cult hit here, especially since word-of-mouth spreads so easily over the Web. I told a table-full of work friends about QGM the other day, and they seemed totally tickled by the idea.
Ashvin Kumar…perfect…
Nina – I am not entirely sure that LBC would work for an international audience. It didn’t even do that well in India, did it? It’s certainly one of my favorite films this year, however, I think it had a fairly limited audience from the get go. It appealed mainly to fans of the Hindi film industry, particularly those who are aware of its inner workings. In the West, where most people have little to no concept of what “Bollywood” is, a clever film about the workings of the industry isn’t going to connect with them. It also had far too many in-jokes and cameos for a viewer who is unfamiliar with Bollywood to understand – lots of the charm would be lost.
Having said that, the story at it’s core was quite relatable… I just think the cleverness of the script would be missed.
Unfortunately, it seems the films that get major releases in the West are the ones that are weaker in terms of story. For example, where I live, the last 3 Indian films to release to theatres were CC2C, Drona, and Singh is Kinng. While each of those films had their merits, none of them really had any foreign appeal or even relatable story.
I also want to point out one HUGE problem with reaching international audiences – language! No matter how good a film is, subtitles will severely limit your general viewing audience in the West. There will always be film-lovers and a core audience that will watch your films, but to be honest, most people in the West go to the movies for the same reason as most Indians do – time pass. And escapism. And they are too lazy to want to read subtitles.
I wonder if Slumdog had stuck to subtitled Hindi all the way through, and not switched over to improbable English 1/3 of the way through, would it still have found the same success? Just a thought!
@Nina.
“masses are the same in the whole world: they need sentimentality that is spoon fed to them and over the top stories they can relate to.”
Absolutely agree with it..you will find people who will like a movie and then people who lap it..many Indian films are liked a lot by western audience..what is missing is the lapping of the movie..and that statement from the director sums it up beautifully!
having said that..apart from Hollywod movies..no other movies from over the world have been lapped..discounting a dozen freak examples
my concern is when our filmmakesrs will think about audience of allahabad,darbhanga,rohtak,devigadh,koymatoor,guntoor,katni,dhaulpur,nasik etc?
now a days all discussions are only focussed on usa and uk market.
be local,only then your film will be universal.