Director Shoojit Sircar’s 'Gulabo Sitabo' starring Amitabh Bachchan and Ayushmann Khurana in lead roles was one of the few breathers (with its own share of criticism) during the pandemic when the industry witnessed a drought of films due to ongoing Covid waves.
Speaking about the OTT versus box office wars that are about to begin towards the end of this month in India, Shoojit said, “I think because of the OTT last year, a lot of burden from my shoulder was taken off. I think people will still be waiting to see the behaviour patterns, how comfortable they are in going to the theatres and again go back to normal but a lot of pundits are saying that it will be normal again back to a lot of pundits are saying that it will co-exist and I also strongly feel that we coexist because certain films I also enjoyed quite a bit in an OTT platform with good sound system and nice screen production at home or a TV or a nice laptop.”
“As long as the OTT platform is not interfering with the directorial vision, filmmakers will also keep the cinematic experience alive. Whether it's for OTT or in cinemas, doesn't matter, but the cinematic experience is cinematic. I'm gonna poetry is poetry whether you read it on a laptop or in a book or whatever form. That doesn't change and that integrity should be there,” he added.
His next big film which is all set to release on Amazon Prime Video is Vicky Kushal starrer 'Sardar Udham', a biographical film about Udham Singh, a revolutionary freedom fighter best known for assassinating Michael O'Dwyer in London to take revenge for the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar. Sircar said that Irrfan Khan was his first choice for this role but he was unable to shoot with him because of his health. “He (Irrfan) was quite thrilled that he finally got something like this to do. We shared a very good rapport and a relationship and it was quite unfortunate (Irrfan’s death),” Sircar told Asian Voice.
Since such Hindi films are a major source of information for NRI kids to learn about the history of India, we asked the director if he feels any kind of pressure and an added responsibility there. He said, “Yes, there are. Because even my earlier films had a lot of objections from various facets of society, which I never expected that somebody will come up, you know, with some, some group will have some objection to it or something. Now, I am really used to it also. The entire diaspora outside the country is going to see this film may be as a nice window for them to go back to the history also. But for me, if they find anything that they want to talk to me or a debate, I'm always available, so we can talk it over and understand their point of view, and they can understand my point of view.”
Sircar is known to have married music and his scripts so well in most of his films that they blend into each other and don’t look like a song-dance sequence shoved down the guts of the audiences. Commenting on how he manages to do that, Shoojit told us, “I think that's normal and that's how the films should be. That's how art should be presented. I think European cinema or our great filmmakers from Satyajit Ray to Akira Kurosawa have been doing this, so I think this is quite normal and normal things are easy for me.”
Sircar said that this is the first time he has completely experimented and not with a pure cinema feel, without any songs, or a background song or anything.
