Spaces in Between

Like most filmmakers, he goes by his instincts yet unlike most he takes no prisoners. That’s why he chose not to do the biopic on late South African president Nelson Mandela. Last year, Kapur tweeted: ‘Mandela once asked ‘If u make a film a about me, wld all events b true? I said the way I string true events together could b a great lie.’ Today, he explains his choice. “I decided to leave because the script they wanted to do was not the script I wanted to do and I think I was right,” he says, “I trust that if I like what I am doing, people will like it too. I have never made a film that hasn’t touched people, be it Bandit Queen, Elizabeth or Masoom.”

With the lectures and Masterclasses he has been taking of late (at IFFI 2014 as well), has he found new ways to tell a story? “I have found Twitter to be a new medium to express myself. But I have always been like this. In fact, I lecture more on technology and its future than on creativity. The fundamental question is: Who am I? Why am I living and why am I limited when existence and the universe is not? These are the questions I have been asking since I was 10 or 12 and am still searching for the answers, which is why I tell stories,” he says. Like these answers, Kapur is in search of that masterpiece. “Every creative person, be it a painter, a poet, or a writer, feels that way; that the best is yet to come,” he says. He rues about the ‘soulless’ themes of today. “Where are those Pyasaas, Mother Indias and Mughal-E-Azams?”

In India, the problem is compounded by the lack of infrastructure. “Unlike the west where independent theatre is very big, in India just the number of theatres restricts innovation. We have only 1,4000 theatres for over 15 languages. In China, they are adding 15 theatres everyday,” he says.

Yet, as he begins to shoot his next Hollywood film he feels that what is really different between the two worlds is their politics. He says, “Between my saying ‘Start Sound’ to saying ‘Cut’ it’s all the same. It’s what happens before Start Sound and after Cut that makes all the difference.”