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Actor Ratna Pathak Shah expressed appreciation for filmmakers of today, and said that in her time, most directors had no idea what they were doing. Ratna participated in a roundtable discussion for Zoom Entertainment, which also included actors Sobhita Dhulipala, Amruta Subhash and Rajshri Deshpande, each of whom has worked with Anurag Kashyap. As they were appreciating how he handles actors on his sets, Ratna said that she didn’t have the same sort of freeing experience with the filmmakers she worked with earlier in her career.
She said, “I have come from a time where directors really did not know. You sat around set for hours, waiting for a scene to come, waiting for things to get organised, waiting for a prop which was written on the first page of the scene but has still not come. Every little thing was a problem. And in the meantime, they would discuss, ‘Iski picture kaisi chali? Lunch mein kya ayega? Aaj toh sarson ka saag manga lete hain (How did that guy’s film do? What’s for lunch?). They’d have a long, two-hour discussion on what we’re going to eat. They weren’t bothered about the scene.”
She added, “There’s been a huge change.” Addressing her co-panelists, she said, “You guys can’t imagine it also, and this is what it was, and that’s why the kind of films that we made were the kind of films that we made. There has to be a reason, it’s not like we were all fools. There was a reason why we made very mediocre films for a very long time. Except for a handful of people who did something unusual and good, we’ve just had a long, long period of totally mediocre stuff. Today, even the level of mediocrity seems to have bumped up.”
This isn’t the first time that Ratna has complained about the lack of professionalism and talent that the industry was hampered by in the ’80s. In an interview with Film Companion recently, she said that there were no ‘real writers’ in the film industry a couple of decades ago. “We had no real writers for a very long time. At least in the ’80s and ’90s, I just saw plain copies of Hollywood movies, being made over and over again, and passed off as original. Some of our ‘best-known films’ are literally frame-by-frame copies. We unfortunately spent a lot of time being happy to make the same kind of things over and over again,” she said. Ratna was last seen in the comedy drama Dhak Dhak, also starring Fatima Sana Shaikh, Dia Mirza and Sanjana Sanghi.
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