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Passionate about his craft, he demands respect for his skills. He is someone who finds pure joy in creating and chooses to celebrate that joy uncompromisingly. Can creativity and compromise share a platform? Over to Khalid Mohamed, journalist, writer, filmmaker and above all a beautiful human being…
 1: It is over five years since you made your last film (Silsilay), when do we get to see a Khalid Mohamed movie?When? Perhaps never. But if I persist I could maybe revive my project Rutba. This was to be produced by Vikram Bhatt last year but there were major creative differences. It's better not to make a movie than to make a compromised one. Silsilay was made with Vashu Bhagnani who turned out to be a nightmare. The film, I could just about complete, and he chose to give it a shabby release. After that I had resolved to stick to writing. But the filmmaking bug doesn't stop biting. So I have completed the shoot of two documentaries, one, of the illusions of Bollywood aspirants and the second on the last of the Irani cafes in Mumbai. If I have the nerve and persistence, will start looking for an enlightened financier for Rutba later this year. 2: These days there are plenty of film reviewers, but we do not have a single critic. Your comments... No comments would be the best answer for this simply because the answer would be too subjective, only from my point of view, and I would end up sounding patronizing. 3: Your views on the changing trends in Bollywood. Not much changing out here...the star system still rules. You get one saleable star...a male, and you can get a project going even if it doesn't have the beginning of a script. Sure there are smaller-budget films being made and a new voice is being articulated by say, Anurag Kashyap, and there are unusual films like A Wednesday and Ishqiya...but these are the proverbial drop in the ocean. A shallow film like My Name is Khan makes box-office waves, which indicates that all is not well in the state of mainstream Bollywood cinema. 4: Actors should be more focused on their part in a plot rather than the movie. Is that possible in our film industry? Impossible, every actor is a control freak. All of them behave like part-time filmmakers and look at the final result from their own subjective prism. 5: How important is an Oscar nomination/award for Bollywood? Can an Oscar put us right up there next to Hollywood? Certainly, a nomination at the Oscars is big news as it was for Lagaan. But awards are not the only measure for our cinema to come up to international standards. More adventurous scripts, an intelligent worldview and technical competence are the prerequisites for the world's largest film making nation to score not only in quantity but quality as well. photo courtesy of: www.mid-day.com |
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