Hansal Mehta: ‘Adversity creates great art. It is an opportunity, not a hindrance’

Randeep, at an Express event a few months ago, Manoj Bajpayee had said there are two kinds of actors — those who go to the character they are playing and others who let the character come to them. You obviously are the first kind, who goes to the characters. Was this a conscious choice you made at the beginning of your career?

Randeep Hooda: It’s not that I choose a role and say, I’m going to method-act this role or lose weight for it. I get the role and then I realise, oh my God, I would go through that. It is an afterthought really. It’s basically that if you’ve got an accent or you’ve got a certain physicality or you’ve got a certain thought process, you just try and make that a part of your life 24×7 so that you don’t have to act when the shots are on.

Hansal, you said somewhere that craft is overrated. And that films like Aligarh and Shahid don’t come out of craft, but from love and freedom. Do you still have the same love? More importantly, do you still have the same freedom?

Hansal Mehta: We’ve had the Supreme Court telling us about how freedom of expression is so important. It’s a celebratory moment. In all the darkness, there’s always this glimmer of hope and that glimmer of hope comes from storytellers, from performers, from people who live lives beyond their own, freedom comes from that.

It’s the freedom that you feel, not the freedom that you’re given. That is artificial freedom that a government gives you, that the law gives you. It’s a freedom that you give yourself to express, to feel, to say things in a certain way, to feel the way you do about other people and that freedom to me is paramount.

You spoke up on the attack on Kunal Kamra. You also said that 25 years ago you faced the mob yourself which made you publicly apologise for one sentence in your film. You said how that humiliation bruised your spirit and made you a different kind of filmmaker and that it took you a long time to reclaim your own freedom after that episode. This is something we don’t hear enough about — what happens after the mob has gone and the rest of us have moved on?

Hansal Mehta: I was broken, one because of the film that had failed. And four weeks later when you’re dealing with financial losses, people enter your office and vandalise it, paint your face black and then they tell you to come and apologise. I said, how much more should I apologise? They had to create a bigger public spectacle so I was made to apologise in front of 10,000 people. The apology was not the issue. The issue, I later realised, was that people who violate your self-respect, your freedom, do not belong to any particular ideology, any particular party. It took me time to realise that I was not the coward. I was attacked by cowards. And the moment I realised that, I found my voice.

READ MORE: Kunal Kamra shares step-by-step guide to ‘kill an artist’: ‘Sell the soul or wither in silence’

Shahid came in 2012, Aligarh in 2015. Would you be able to make them today?

Hansal Mehta: Shahid was made before 2014. It won a National Award in 2014, the very year that the world claims that India changed. Yes, with every new establishment, there is change. The state trying to control the narrative is not something new. Why are we behaving like it is some new franchise that has opened up?

Randeep Hooda: It’s more in your face because of social media.

Hansal Mehta: It’s been there since the Emergency. Pre-Emergency it must have been there. I find that adversity very positive. Adversity creates great art. It’s an opportunity and not a hindrance. The issue is that we see it as a hindrance. I keep telling people, you will find newer ways to tell your stories. You’ll find newer ways to be critical. You’ll find newer ways to awaken the people, to provoke and to ensure discourse and debate.

Randeep, you’ve been asked about why you made the biopic of Savarkar and your answer has been that what you call the unsungness of Savarkar appealed to you. Were you not apprehensive that, in a time like this, you were inviting questions about politics, judgements?

Randeep Hooda: Many people advised me to not get into this kind of a subject, which urged me to read more about him. He was so maligned. I read Vikram Sampat’s book and other books on him. I went through a whole lot of hell to make it. I wanted to release it six months earlier but it was released during the elections and it was tainted as a propaganda film. And I am thinking who sells their house and loses 32 kilos to make a propaganda film? I want to meet that patriot. But if a movie can be made on Mahatma Gandhi, a movie can be made on Savarkar as it can be made on anybody else. I made the film because I was angry about the fact that all of our freedom struggle is brought down to two, three names and only to non-violence, which was not the case.

Why are you, Hansal, making Gandhi today? And Gandhi’s story has been made so many times already.

Hansal Mehta: My approach to characters is to not judge them. So Gandhi’s story is about his flaws, mistakes and learning from them. I found his journey mostly untold in all the telling that I have seen so far… I think it’s important that we understand that we are chronicling our times. Election campaigns and politicians have a tendency to change history according to their convenience but you cannot wipe out what is recorded, what is on celluloid. It is as important to tell Savarkar’s story as it is to tell Gandhi’s.

READ MORE: Randeep Hooda’s well-wishers advised him against making Swatantrya Veer Savarkar: ‘I was just flabbergasted…’

There is a sense of anxiety in both the movie and the streaming sectors. Are the best storytellers not coming forward or is it that the gatekeepers are the problem? The studio executives who are looking for data-driven storytelling now and telling you where to put the climax and where to bring the star in.

Hansal Mehta: I think the gatekeepers are the storytellers and we need to recognise that. The moment we recognise that, we will reclaim our space. But you see there has always been a crisis. Any business-minded person, if they decide to get into films, will realise that it is the least profitable business of all. But this is a business of passion.

Randeep Hooda: We have isolated ourselves in the ivory tower, which some people might call the Juhu-Bandra syndrome. I’m doing a movie with a Telugu director… they are still trying to make movies about their own culture or their sensibilities, basic human emotions, which is appealing to a larger audience. If you look at the big movies (from the South) that are doing well, a lot of them have the themes of the commercial movies of Bachchan saab. So they are making our films and selling them back to us, but with a bit more rootedness.

We talked earlier about the mob. Does censorship of this kind, or self-censorship — because it also generates self-censorship — also come in the way of making better films? These are all invisible barriers.

Hansal Mehta: We are living in a time where people have become more and more litigious. Litigation has become the norm rather than the exception. Log choti-choti baat par court chale jaate hain. So that quasi-censorship is far more dangerous. That fear of the mob, the  extra-constitutional censor bodies, they are the ones people fear. The CBFC has very clear guidelines. You may agree or disagree but the guidelines are very clear… we can still work around them. But how do I account for some random body that comes up and says, I am upholding the rights of so and so people?

Randeep Hooda: It happened with my movie Savarkar. These are the kind of things because some unrecognised body somewhere just picks up a thing to get attention for themselves, for their political gain.

Hansal Mehta: When I was attacked, 10,000 people came to watch my apology and I kept asking them, which dialogue are you objecting to? Nobody knew it because none of them had seen the film. That is the irony of our set-up that the people who are protesting don’t know what they are protesting about.