‘Indian cinema or Asian cinema will become the prime cinema. (But) are we ready for it?’

And that website is a year old.

• That’s a year old?

And in a year, I have been into five other professions…Impresario, producer of musicals.

• I think that’s more than anything else…Impresario. But tell me, Bombay knows its stars. You bring an actor or actress here, there will be crowds. But will any other producer or director get a crowd like this? So, is this the era of the star producer or star director?

I thought I used to be an actor… don’t forget that… a long time ago.

• But most of these guys…

…Were too young you mean? (laughs) I am not that old. But I guess I am a little controversial… the one thing that I have always done is stirred up — not that I attempt to — but I always had the ability to stir up controversy. And, therefore, people get to know me.

• Tell me some of the controversies you have enjoyed the most.

I enjoy a good fight. Actually, I have to say this, I have to confess that I enjoy fighting because when I have to fight then I am stirred to take action. And when everybody says, ‘‘well, he is very successful,’’ you tend to become complacent. It’s when people say ‘‘he has made a bad film’’ or ‘‘we won’t let his film be released’’, then you are challenged.

• Which is your favourite big fight?

Well, there are two fights… I mean Bandit Queen was a huge fight. Huge.

• Shekhar Kapur versus Arundhati Roy.

Arundhati Roy who has been…

• Two hugely creative people…

And against the State of India. Actually it was against the Government also. It was against the Censor Board… I’ve had many fights.

• Yes.

But there is another fight also. Every time I make a film, I find I am compelled to fail. Because when I fail, then everybody starts saying he’s just a flash in the pan… he’s lost it… he is never going to make another film… he has announced too many more films… Shekhar Kapur has had it… Shekhar Kapur, you know, is a conman. And then I get angry.

• When was the last time that was said about you?

Yesterday.

• But you sound quite cheerful.

Yes, now I enjoy it. And then I get angry and make a film.

• Let’s go back to that fight with Arundhati Roy. What exactly happened? How do you look back on it?

Arundhati and I were friends.

• I know that.

I guess we are still friends.

• Yes.

And I have to assume, because I cannot find any other reason…

• …Because she is as delightful a writer as you are a filmmaker.

Yes, absolutely. So, I have to assume… I must assume that everything that she fought for, she believed in. And then I have to make (up) my mind… So, I think that her beliefs were wrong. I do not believe what people keep telling me that…

• She thought obviously that you were exploiting Phoolan Devi as a woman… you were over-sexualising her life to sell your movie.

Yes. I think she did not get one point. There is a difference between nudity and nakedness. Nudity is a cinematic form that can be very exploitative. Nakedness is a state of being. So part of the film… for example, in that scene where Phoolan, or the person who played Phoolan, walked out totally naked… If I had treated it cinematically, it would have been nudity and therefore cinematic, and therefore, possibly exploitative.

• It wasn’t titillating.

It wasn’t titillating. And then the other things she talked about were… like if you look at the rape scene… I mean, the rape scenes that we see in Indian films — and nobody objects to — are cinematic, titillating, action scenes. In my rape scene, you barely saw anything except her close-ups, a door opening, men coming in, men going out… and people would get sick. I kind of realised that rape…

• …But she said that those were hugely voyeuristic.

No, they were not voyeuristic at all. They were my attempt to understand what goes on in the mind of the person who gets raped. And to try and portray the act as an act of ultimate humiliation and an ultimate act of degradation, and not at all an act of sexuality. So, I actually challenged anybody to take a look at that and say, ‘‘hey, we felt very sexy during that act’’. Not possible, In fact, people were screaming and walking out of the theatre.

• In the usual Hindi movie, rape is actually romanticised so much…

Yes, of course. It is cinematised.

• Individual stars have made a living by being called rape specialists.

Yes, but it is not only in India. You look at the way rape is treated in Hollywood. Look at The Accused… It was very cinematic… So, it was not only here. It is all over the world that the explosive mixture of sexuality and violence have been exploited by filmmakers constantly.

• Well, that’s one thing that’s changed lately in Indian cinema. You know, we talk about crossover cinema and Indian cinema going overseas. In one way, Indian cinema has come closer to foreign films and that is in the treatment of sexuality, nudity, violence, tough language.

Yes.

• Now, we have all these gangster films in which loaded words are used. They look realistic but these words would have shocked my folks.

It is the beginning of freedom.

• You mean Mallika Sherawat and the rest… that is the beginning of freedom?

It is the beginning of freedom.

• And gangster movies?

Yeah, it is the beginning. When you have kept people… when the Censor Board has kept people tied up so long, and you suddenly open the gates, there will be floodgates that open. Then, the raging waters will calm down, and as they calm down, even for the audience, they will become selective. Filmmakers will become more selective. Because now it will be passe to use that kind of language, it will be passe to use that kind of shots. So, initially give them their due. You know, it is suddenly (that) you have opened the floodgates and everybody is exploring something they could never explore before.

• I think you seem to be saying that this new sort of rush for what we see as vulgarity, tough language is a temporary phenomenon.

Yes, maybe people will get bored after a while. And it is better, because then instead of voyeuristically looking for things, you see it explained in front of you, and you say, I am bored, give me something different. And you will explore more subtext, you will explore more emotion.

• You are a crossover filmmaker. What’s more fun, working here or working there?

I realised working here is much more fun. Because there is more freedom in what you… especially now there is a lot more freedom in what you can make, because India is making all kinds of films.

• Right.

So, I would assume, because we still have what we call independent cinema… although there seems a lot of move towards corporatising the whole Indian entertainment business… but yet the director here enjoys the same kind of power that a director enjoys in Japan and Europe where the final cut of the film automatically belongs to the director. For example, in France, by law it belongs to the director. Whereas in the US, the final cut, unless it states in your contract that it belongs to you, will normally belong to the studio.

• And in Bombay, till the other day, if you had a problem, then ultimately you called the third umpire in, in the Gulf or some place.

Right. So, the director has much more power here.

• The bhai figure.

In the West, you get a far bigger market, you get bigger budgets, you get to explore issues that you probably cannot get financing for here. So there is an aspect. So, I am now trying to divide my time, working there for films like Elizabeth or films about wars and things which need far more budget and coming back here to make other films like Paani.

• Right, but what is it that grabs you more: Paani or a Mandela?

Hmmm.

• What will take your mindspace now? What will take the lion’s share of your mindspace?

Both are filmed out of anger. Mandela is built out of an anger that I think…

• …At injustice?

Yes, it comes out of that. You know, the anger that why, for centuries and still today, the white man thinks that he’s better. Not like a conqueror. I can understand that, we have conquered races and we think okay we are the conqueror races and these are the slave races. But to think that, for some reason, the white men thought, and continue to think sometimes, that they are genetically better… that’s what gets me.

• But do you feel, do you experience that when you deal with the white man back in Hollywood?

I think that they would not…I experience the fact that they assume sometimes…

• Subliminally.

Subliminally they feel… not individually towards me but individually towards my culture and where I come from… they feel that they have a right to call themselves better.

• You think they patronise you… that you are so good despite coming from India?

Hmm.

• How do you feel… an actor coming from a third world country… how do you think he lives like that? Indian filmmakers became famous internationally, but for making movies here. I think you were the first to…

You see, I don’t allow them to patronise me. But you are right, the tendency is there. But I cut it off just like that. In fact, when I made Elizabeth, I had to decide. There was, for example, a film called Sense and Sensibility that was made by a Taiwanese director. If you saw the film, you would not be able to tell whether it was made by a Chinese or an English, you thought it was so English! He got it absolutely right. When I started Elizabeth, I had to decide whether I was Asian — I had learnt my craft in India — or I was going to try and be an English director, you know, to make it. I said, hang on, I am an Asian. So, I pushed the Asian as a background… Which is why I think it succeeded…

• You see, that’s what intrigues me. I am no expert in cinema, but in this period of globalisation when everything is becoming global… cinema is a very global thing… art, culture is a very global thing now… music, everything. Even in the Oscars, you know, there is a category for foreign language films. And there is a patronising air to what goes on… So what is mainstream, what is ethnic, what is regional… It’s funny and unfair.

Hollywood and English language cinema must be what, 20 per cent or 30 per cent of the films made in the world. So, I love the fact that 70 per cent of the rest of the films of the world are ghettoised into one category for best foreign language film. That’s because that’s their thing. It’s time that in India we had the Oscars or something…

• Can you rectify this?

Of course you can. I keep saying let’s have an Australasian film festival, let’s include Africa, and let’s give the best foreign language film to any English film. (laughs)

• Tom Cruise. (laughs)

Tom Cruise or anybody… because the rest of the world is now more important… You know what, we can keep joking about this, but whose fault is it that we get hurt? Whose fault is it that people have this attitude towards us?

• And whose fault is it that we have allowed our cinema to be dismissed as Bollywood. It is such a pejorative, silly term. And I find people in Indian cinema using it all the time.

Yes, it is all out fault. All of this. We will be ghettoised, we will be looked upon like that as long as we allow it. But that’s what we do. We look at success in ourselves in context to the West. The West accepted yoga, so yoga became a big thing in India. The West accepted Deepak Chopra, so Deepak Chopra became a big thing.

• And accepted Shekhar Kapur as Shekhar Kapur because of what it says.

Even today. So, we have to stop saying that. We have to stop saying that the judgement of our own success lies in the context of the acceptance by the West. And they will go on making us do that.

• I find lots of people like you who are going from, say the outback… who are now making their mark, who are making mainstream artists work for them and who were doing mainstream work. They are being accepted more easily now.

Yeah, they are getting accepted more easily. It is a big, big fight because primarily every film that is being made, primarily 90 per cent of films made there, are by the white man because they are consumed by the white man or the white people. But I think that’s going to change.

• Let’s take the instance of Bandit Queen. When I saw Bandit Queen, in fact, I saw Bandit Queen in London, and I thought India is so full of great stories… And now foreign filmmakers, international filmmakers will come to India and tour India for our great stories. You know, somebody should do a great movie on the year when Shahjahan built the Taj Mahal… but a genuine movie, not with the usual romantic stuff.

I agree with you and I resent… I totally resent the fact that everybody talks about crossover films here. And they say the way to make a crossover film is to get one white man in the crowd. I am saying, why?

• It’s usually the chorus boy or…

No, one white face… or it will be one white woman who comes in as some token love story… or something like that. And if you actually look at all of what we call foreign language films, the more successful ones are Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon — all Chinese people; Like Water for Chocolate — all Mexican people; the one that’s just come out, City of Gods — all Portuguese, not a single white face. So, the fact is the most relevant films don’t have them. So, I don’t know why we have to.

• How come all international filmmakers haven’t taken a fancy to Indian stories, because Indian history, culture, folklore is full of masala?

I think it’s about to happen. I don’t think we even need to push it. I think what is going to happen soon…

• Except Gandhi, we haven’t seen anything.

And even there, there were some two or three white people who had no reason to be there. They actually had no bearing on Gandhiji’s story at all, except they were there. Because they were the stars of the moment and they needed some white stars to get the funding for the film… But I think that’s changing, because the audience is changing.

• Right.

For 50 years since the second World War, the largest amount of money from the entertainment business, the revenue, comes from the US, and then from Europe, and then from Australia and Germany. Ten years from now, 70 per cent of all the entertainment business revenue is going to come from Asia. Then what’s going to happen? As I keep saying all the time, we are still going to make Spiderman, but when Spiderman takes his mask off he will either be Chinese or he will be Indian. And a 15-year-old girl sitting in the Big West, is going to look and say when she sees Shah Rukh Khan taking his mask off, ‘‘oh, isn’t he sexy’’… like a middle-class Indian girl says isn’t Tom Cruise sexy.

• That’s right.

So, it is all going to change. It’s already changed. We have seen what is happening now. Aishwarya Rai is the most beautiful girl in the world according to Hello magazine… Ultimately, you know why that is happening? It is happening because…

• It is the power of numbers.

Yes, power of numbers.

• And then the market share.

Yes, Indian advertising supports Miss World.

• But I have heard you say this at Davos for two years running — you are a regular at the World Economic Forum — you have said this will now be Asia’s time as entertainment and cinema superpowers.

Absolutely.

• You keep talking about this 10-year plan. What are you up to?

Well, this 10-year plan is not only for me. I am hoping to start a kind of revolution… Deepak Chopra and I have formed a company called Intent. Again, it says we know this is coming. The ultimate battle is going to be between the western media conglomerates and the new Asian conglomerates that will come up for the Asian market, which will be worth about, in 10 years time, $ 700 billion. Who will win that battle? Let’s make sure we win the battle.

• And if that happens, Bombay is the capital of that market?

It will either be Bombay or Shanghai. Because Shanghai is very progressive, Shanghai is creating big studios, great infrastructure. We are not. That’s why I keep provoking everybody.

• For you, the Delhiwallah who became Bombay loyalist, to praise Shanghai now against Bombay…

I am not praising Shanghai. I am just saying they are making bigger strides than we are.

• Bombay cinema has come a long way. Now they have proper contracts, studios are getting better. But you are saying that still, if this revolution ever comes, we are not preparing for it. We’ve got to do something more drastic?

You know, the fact that Bombay cinema or Indian cinema or Asian cinema is going to become the prime cinema in the world… nothing can stop it. It is an equation of where the revenues come from. The fight is: are we ready for it?

• And how much of the pie they get?

Yes, will it be us who own it? Or will it be…

• The Chinese.

Doesn’t matter. I think we keep pitting ourselves against the Chinese. I think India and China should form the greatest alliance ever. We should stop all this… if India and China get together, it will be the unbeatable alliance in the world. Obviously, honestly.

• Fight the Americans.

Fight the West.