There are superstars and megastars, and then there is Amitabh Bachchan. He always stands tall with his of knowledge cinema and powerful performances. But when it comes to donning modesty, he beats all. The always punctual and ready to go Bachchan sits down and we chat about how the Indian film industry, as he fondly calls it, has grown up.
Q: From being the biggest superstar of the country to being a textbook on the craft of acting, you are someone who has managed to give mega blockbusters and films that have pushed the envelope simultaneously. Today, do you feel that the line between what is ‘parallel’ and ‘commercial’ has faded?
Amitabh Bachchan: Every film is made with a commercial angle, otherwise you won’t have a box office. So to say that there is a classified kind of cinema, there is not. I am getting films as per my age. These are the kind of stories that have been coming to me. Some of them, like Piku, are a huge commercial success. So I don’t think that you can classify that. I think this factor exists in every part of the world, there are some meaningful stories and some different kind of cinema. Cinema is a medium where everyone makes all kind of films. These are the kind of stories that I have got. These are the kind of people who wanted to work with me and I am just doing my job.
There is a lot of money involved when you make a film and you wish at least that money is recovered. We are all a part of the combined effort and cannot alienate ourselves from it. We are actors but we also have to be concerned if the box office is going to bring back the returns otherwise it is bad for the investment and you don’t want to make a financially losing product.Amitabh Bachchan, Actor
If you keep hearing only good things about yourself, you’ll be a destroyed person. Nobody is perfect, we all have our faults and we don’t have the capacity to notice all of it.Amitabh Bachchan
Q: Do you feel it is getting a little easier to experiment with various characters, as the perception of the audience is gradually changing?
Amitabh Bachchan: I think the audience has acknowledged a lot of the kind of cinema. Methods of communication have also changed. There are many more facilities available now as opposed to those days. Movie theatre was the only form of entertainment in those days and therefore your choices were limited. When you made an escapist film, you catered to all of the Indian audience. The kind of diversity that India has, Hindi Cinema had to cater to something that dealt with all of them. Hence, those were the kind of films that were made, and they were made for entertainment purposes.
Now the generation is exposed to a lot more. You have television, internet, mobiles, where you get to see the most modern products all over the world almost simultaneously. You get an opportunity to judge what is good and bad perhaps in a different perspective. That is very challenging for the Indian film industry, because we have to compete not just with ourselves, but from people outside as well. Therefore, whether it is the product or quality, what the content is going to be is judged by people who are also exposed to several others. Audiences have become a lot more intelligent and would not go to see a film if it is inferior in quality. Every creative artist survives of visibility. I could be the greatest painter in the world but if I don’t exhibit my work, how will people access that I am a great painter? You could be writing fantastic stuff but if you are just keeping it within yourself, then there is no acknowledgement of it. So creative people want recognition and want their work to be seen by many others. They want it to be appreciated or criticized. I think, these are very normal things that creative people do, whether you are a writer, painter, artist. Cinema is much like that, we are in this creative field and we want as many people as possible to watch our films.
Also, the younger generation is a mode of great learning, working with someone like Nawaz ( Nawazuddin Siddique), Irrfan (Khan). I haven’t got the opportunity but I wish that I do get to work with all the younger talents like Ranbir (Kapoor), Ranveer (Singh), Alia (Bhatt), Kangana (Ranaut). I did an ad with her but I would love to work in a film with her, as it is a great learning process, as I feel I am not worthy of being able to teach someone.Amitabh Bachchan
Q: But with the exposure of many territories opening comes a lot of criticism as well…
Amitabh Bachchan: You get criticised every day for what you say, what you wear, the films you do. I take criticism well and I feel it is very important for us to know. If you keep hearing only good things about yourself, you’ll be a destroyed person. Nobody is perfect, we all have our faults and we don’t have the capacity to notice all of it. When there is a critic/writer, there is an assessment of your work, it is wonderful to have another viewpoint as it helps you in improving yourself. I sometimes use criticism as an incentive and tell Abhishek that every time your film doesn’t work, put that criticism on a wall, get up in the morning, look at it and say that I am going to work harder to disprove what is written about me.
There are many times when things are derogatory but then I feel that is the challenge that creative people have. If you are in a category which is called a ‘public figure’, then you are bound to be facing all this. I think you have to reconcile with all that. You can’t call yourself a public figure and expect people to not react. When they shout and scream to praise you, then you take it very well. If they criticise, you don’t want to take it. How can you do that? That voice is not often heard and it is needed to.Amitabh Bachchan
Q: Speaking of your upcoming film Te3n, which happens to be a thriller, falls under a genre which has not been tapped into very often. Do you feel differently?
Amitabh Bachchan: I think tastes will change as people start watching different kinds of films. The entertainment value in such kind of films was there earlier on as well. We have lovely thriller films from the past by Dada Munim, Sunil Dutt, Mehboob sa’ab and they were huge successes. Mahal was one of the biggest successes and it was a suspense film. They are being made from those times. But sometimes people like to go and watch escapist films. Speaking of some of the films that I have enjoyed, Alfred Hitchcock’s films have been wonderful.
Q: Similarly, the comic genre suffers the most as there is hardly any recognition for it, even at award functions.
Amitabh Bachchan: Now I think, several awards are being introduced in this category- Best Comic Actor. Slapstick has always been more popular. One of the greatest comedians has been Charlie Chaplin, but a lot of his slapstick stuff has been more popular than say a film like Limelight. For me, Limelight was incredible but you still like Charlie Chaplin to be doing all that fun stuff. Even today, when someone will slip on a banana peel, you will laugh. It has been happening for the last 100 years, but it still is funny. What to do, can’t change the banana peel.
Q: Today a time has come when a Hollywood film comes and thrashes the box office in our country, wherein our own films are fighting to break even.
Amitabh Bachchan: I’ll tell you one incident, I had been on several holidays to the states in 1995, and every time I used to go there, all these big corporations like Warner, Sony used to send me letters about meeting me and I used to ignore them thinking why would they want to meet me, they don’t even know me. I had a lawyer friend in New York and he told me to go and meet them. I went, and for one and a half hour, the chief person I was talking to spoke non-stop about the entire film industry of our country. From the actors to how we do our films, to the way we produce them, the financials, the distribution- everything! I was shocked and came back to tell my lawyer friend this. He told me, “Go back to your country because the Americans are coming. Get your house in order.” Look what’s happening today. I predicted that in 1995 that the Americans will come with so much money. We are just a drop in the ocean. We have to fight them as there is competition.
We know that Hollywood is very powerful as wherever it has gone, it has destroyed the local film industry be it United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Japan…and that is what is happening here.Amitabh Bachchan
Q: Taking cue from that, the market for Netflix and short films in India has opened up quite widely.
Amitabh Bachchan: Attention span has become less these days. Instead of watching a 3-hour film, make something that is short, which can be easily buffered on to your mobile, which is the most prized possession these days. You can watch it anywhere. That is the concept Netflix, Amazon etc are working on. Sujoy (Ghosh) also made a short film titled Ahalya, and it worked so well. Perhaps that’s the way forward and I would be more than willing to do something like this. I watch a lot of the good ones like The Game of Thrones, Homeland, The Americans.
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