Click here to follow Screen Digital on YouTube and stay updated with the latest from the world of cinema.
© IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd
Tags:
One of the biggest hits of Abhay Deol’s career was the Zoya Akhtar directorial Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara and in a recent interview, the actor shared that the experts within the film industry did not believe that the film would work as it did not have a villain. Abhay said that the chatter within the film industry at the time suggested that the audience wouldn’t care much about “Hrithik Roshan’s inner conflict” in the film.
“When we were making Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, so many people in the film industry were asking ‘who is the villain? There is no villain. What is inner conflict? Who will come to watch Hrithik Roshan’s inner conflict?’ We were hearing this kind of chatter,” he told BBC News Hindi. In the film, the three primary characters are going through their internal struggles as they travel through Spain.
Abhay added that with the kind of packaging that it got, the film could become successful despite the naysayers. “That is how it was fresh. That these kind of actors and making this kind of film and in this budget, and it worked. But the film industry did not have much faith that it would work,” he said. In the same conversation, Abhay also spoke about Manorama Six Feet Under and said that the film hardly git any screens and had a smaller marketing budget, which was one of the reasons as to why it did not make much money at the box office.
Abhay said that “films create culture also” and said that if the audience is fed the same kind of film, it doesn’t give them much chance to experiment with their viewing choices. He added that over the years, audience has been groomed into liking a certain kind of film, which is seen as the mainstream film. When asked if he is trying to introduce the audience to different kinds of cinema, Abhay said that apart from making films, it is extremely necessary that the films are promoted well so the audience can get a chance to watch them.
He said, “Like Manorama Six Feet Under… if it has 60 screens and the marketing budget is Rs 25 lakh, people won’t even come to know that it has released and then obviously, theatrically it did not work. It worked well later on DVD but by then, the film was already in loss. And the industry said, ‘look, we told you that these kind of films don’t work’,” he said.
Abhay Deol was last seen in the Netflix series Trial By Fire.
Click here to follow Screen Digital on YouTube and stay updated with the latest from the world of cinema.
