Kabir Khan: There’s a clever narrative spun that if you say anything against government, you are anti-India

For the same very reason, he has often been asked by people around him to keep his views to himself. “It’s not worth it,” is the argument that he faces every time, he makes his stand on prevalent issues public. But the filmmaker says that it would be quite hypocritical on his part if he takes a diplomatic route in his real life, when his films- from Kabul Express to Bajrangi Bhaijaan- chronicle human stories against political backdrops.

“I have been told that but I don’t believe that. I mean c’mon, I am making films, I am making content for the most powerful medium in the country. I need to be able to put my point of view out there. And I should also be able to support that politics off camera. And, I feel unfortunately, the liberal voice is the meeker voice. I think we shouldn’t be. We should scream as loudly as the lunatics do. People say, ‘It’s not worth it, leave it’. But I think it’s worth it. The position we are in today is probably because we didn’t shout back then. I don’t think we are far away from that day when someone tells me, ‘Aapki film mei na kebab mat dikhao khaate hue, use kaddoo dikhado!”

Also read | Tubelight director Kabir Khan to make an original war web series The Forgotten Army, based on Subhas Chandra Bose

The conversation was on the sidelines of the announcement of his maiden collaboration with Amazon Prime, for whom Kabir will be directing a war miniseries. With the working title of The Forgotten Army, the eight-part series will be centred around Indian National Army and women’s contribution in it. The Forgotten Army is actually one of the first documentaries Kabir ever filmed, and it is the material from this movie he is using in his web-series.

While he is happy to venture into a medium, which will allow him to tell real stories, pertaining to history and politics, unfiltered unlike cinema, Kabir, at the same time, maintains that he has learned how to blend his sensibilities with the syntax of Bollywood.

From his learning over a career of 11 years in the film industry, the filmmaker has realised that the audience will follow his vision as long as he puts a context to his narrative, which always has its basis in India and global politics.

“My first film was Kabul Express, which was a small movie and based on my own experiences as a documentary filmmaker. New York was my first mainstream film. It had mainstream actors, mainstream setting and a big budget. I put this whole world of politics in it and I heard this a lot, ‘Don’t put politics in the film’, It was considered a big taboo in movies. But I said I don’t know how to operate that. In that regard, Adi was cooperative. He said, ‘I am apolitical but I am understanding the politics when you want me to understand it in order to go ahead in the story. As long as you can do that for the audience, I don’t think there should be any problem using politics of a third country.’

“Strangely, it worked well, it worked really well at the box-office. It showed to us that we are unnecessarily underestimating the audience. It’s not politics that alienates them, it’s thrusting it down their throat without any context or a story or if the film is only about politics then the audience will get bored. But if the politics is in the backdrop and has a bearing on the story of your main characters, then the audience will follow your characters in any world, which it did.”