Rajkumar Hirani says I have not given Sanjay Dutt a clean chit in Sanju.
Directed by Rajkumar Hirani, Sanju traces the life and struggles of Bollywood star Sanjay Dutt. Ranbir Kapoor is playing the lead in the biopic.
Rajkumar Hirani is the Bollywood film-maker with the Midas touch. Each of the four films he directed over the past decade and a half broke box-office records and won critical acclaim.
Hirani’s new film Sanju, which opens in cinemas on Friday, is expected to get the widest release for a Bollywood movie this year. The biopic on the troubled life of Sanjay Dutt, the leading man in Hirani’s first two films, is a departure from the director’s track record of comedies with a social message.
Hirani, 55, spoke to Reuters about the film, what makes a good biopic and whether Sanju redeems the actor who was jailed in a case linked to the 1993 Mumbai bombings.
A huge part of your career overlaps with Sanjay Dutt’s, especially the Munnabhai films. Was it difficult to maintain perspective while making Sanju?
Yes, I have done films with him, but I would never think of Sanju as someone who is a close buddy. He was an actor who worked on my film, we had a very cordial relationship with each other, but it was not that we were meeting for dinners or having a drink together. Sanju is friends with other people. He had a barrier, he would talk to me very carefully.
We are seeing a lot of biopics these days in Bollywood. What do you think goes into the making of a good biopic?
The biopic is a different monster. Our initial attraction to the biopic comes from the anecdotes we hear because when you are writing a fiction story, you might have a faint idea that this is your story, but the bigger battle is how to write your screenplay. How do you make every scene entertaining and engaging? With a biopic, every time you hear an anecdote and think this can be in the film.
Rajkumar Hirani is the Bollywood film-maker with the Midas touch. Each of the four films he directed over the past decade and a half broke box-office records and won critical acclaim.
Hirani’s new film Sanju, which opens in cinemas on Friday, is expected to get the widest release for a Bollywood movie this year. The biopic on the troubled life of Sanjay Dutt, the leading man in Hirani’s first two films, is a departure from the director’s track record of comedies with a social message.
Hirani, 55, spoke to Reuters about the film, what makes a good biopic and whether Sanju redeems the actor who was jailed in a case linked to the 1993 Mumbai bombings.
A huge part of your career overlaps with Sanjay Dutt’s, especially the Munnabhai films. Was it difficult to maintain perspective while making Sanju?
Yes, I have done films with him, but I would never think of Sanju as someone who is a close buddy. He was an actor who worked on my film, we had a very cordial relationship with each other, but it was not that we were meeting for dinners or having a drink together. Sanju is friends with other people. He had a barrier, he would talk to me very carefully.
So when we were working together, I didn’t know much about his life. Only what I had read or heard. It is only when I heard the stories I didn’t know that I got fascinated. And the fascination is not because I know him, but because I thought ‘somebody can have a life like that?’ Film-makers are greedy people - we want good stories and good subjects. This one just fell into my lap.
We are seeing a lot of biopics these days in Bollywood. What do you think goes into the making of a good biopic?
The biopic is a different monster. Our initial attraction to the biopic comes from the anecdotes we hear because when you are writing a fiction story, you might have a faint idea that this is your story, but the bigger battle is how to write your screenplay. How do you make every scene entertaining and engaging? With a biopic, every time you hear an anecdote and think this can be in the film.
But anecdotes do not make a film. You have to have a spine, which drives the film till the end. That was a discovery I made with this film. Initially, yes, I did get attracted to all the anecdotes but as we were writing it, we realized it was not enough - we had to be able to string it all together.
This post is from https://www.hindustantimes.com
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