Gazal Dhaliwal calls out Sandeep Reddy Vanga for taking ‘writer’ credit for Animal: ‘The deep-seated need of power…’

Dhaliwal mentioned that it is a common practice in the film industry where filmmakers, in their hunger for ‘power’, want to have the ‘writer’s’ credit as well. She continued, “There is a particular kind of filmmaker who claims the ‘Writer’ title in the top credit of their film, even when there are other writers who have written the Screenplay and Dialogues of the film. It happens a lot, by the way, in our world. These filmmakers have a deep-seated need of power. Even though being a director is the most powerful anyway… for some reason, it would seem that claiming the ‘Writer’ credit is what gives them the biggest high.”

 

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Dhaliwal said that Vanga could have taken credit for writing Animal’s story and credited his brother Pranay Reddy Vanga and Suresh Bandaru for the screenplay, and Saurabh Gupta for dialogues.

Animal, starring Ranbir Kapoor and Bobby Deol in the lead roles, is being called out for its portrayal of violence and toxic masculinity. Dhaliwal pointed out what she found ‘disturbing’ in the film. She mentioned the scene where the lead character Ranvijay tells his love interest Geetanjali (Rashmika Mandanna) that women were always attracted to alpha men. So, the beta men, who wanted to grab women’s attention, tried to write poems to seduce them.

Dhaliwal wrote, “The protagonist, claiming to be an alpha male, tells the girl he likes that evolutionarily, women would always choose the alpha man to mate with. So, then the beta men were like – and I paraphrase – what should they do? After all, they had desires too. And that’s how, says this alpha protagonist condescendingly, ‘poetry’ came to be – so that the beta men could seduce women by cooking up words. And I couldn’t help but think – how small, how very petty of this alpha male, who is cooking up words to seduce the woman.”

She added, “By the way, a poet, as we all know, is a ‘Writer’. Which also happens to be a credit some filmmakers find difficult to share.”

Gazal Dhaliwal’s post attracted a lot of attention. Filmmaker Tanuja Chandra commented, “Loved reading this.”