Filmmaker Sanjay Leela Bhansali sat down with Alia Bhatt to talk about their film Gangubai Kathiawadi. The film premiered at the Berlin Film Festival 16 February and released in India on 25 February.
Talking about the Indian release, Bhansali said, “On the day of the release (in India), I was very calm and surprisingly all the nerves had disappeared. This film mattered because it was saying a lot of things. It was the most personal film I’d made in my life. This film mattered because it was celebrating a woman that doesn’t normally get celebrated in Hindi cinema.”
Talking about Alia Bhatt’s performance in the film, the filmmaker said, “This film matters to Indian cinema, I think, because here was a performance that will be celebrated for the next 50 years or 100 years. It could be at par with the great Nargis ji in ‘Mother India’, Seema Biswas in ‘Bandit Queen’, and Meena Kumari in ‘Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam’.”
Sanjay Leela Bhansali talked about the things that influenced his art and said, “I would sit at home and I would say, ‘Can I colour this wall? It has no colour. Can it be pink, can it be magenta, can it be blue? All my homework was distracted and broken completely. My mind was always living in a make-believe world. I assimilated all of this….the brothels I would pass by on my way to school, those women selling their bodies, I saw them painting their faces and I saw their faces broken with time through pain."
Bhansali added that being born in Kamathipura helped him tell Gangubai’s story.
“I only wanted to hear Lata bai from childhood. I would sit in the staircase and listen to the whole (‘Aandhi’) record because her voice mesmerised me. As I grew up I realised that there is so much art and artistry in what she has left behind. I was taking all this in rather than the things people were trying to teach me.”Sanjay Leela Bhansali
The filmmaker said that he always wanted Alia Bhatt to play Gangubai, “I feel your eyes exude a lot of power. I still remember, when you walked in when you were nine, I only saw the eyes. They reached out to me, I said, ‘These are very unusual eyes’. In you, I saw so much power. If you remember the costume trial for ‘Inshallah’, I wanted you to wear this white saree. You kept asking, ‘Why am I wearing this white saree?’ Then we brought you out and put a red bindi on you. I was doing the Gangubai look test in my mind.”
Bhansali, who has a reputation for being a domineering director, recalled an incident on the sets of Gangubai Kathiawadi, and said, “After Dholida, there was a shot that I was trying to conceive, and my associate Anisha came and said that we’d run out of time. So I freaked out on her, and she turned around to the assistants and said, ‘Tum logon ko bol rahe hain, not me’. And I have fallen down laughing. I said this is the spirit with which you should take it, otherwise you would’ve sulked and gone home.”
Before the interview ended, Ranveer Singh crashed the meeting hinting at his involvement in a ‘Part 2’. The actor entered to ‘Dholida’ playing in the background and said to Bhansali, “Maine socha dono ek saath, ye kaise mauka haath se jaane du? (I thought, ‘Both of these people together?’ How could let this opportunity go?)”
Alia Bhatt stars as Gangubai, a woman trafficked into sex work as a young girl who grew up to become the madame of Kamathipura. The film, based on a chapter from Hussain Zaidi’s ‘Mafia Queens of Mumbai', released to a great response from critics and the audience.
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