Forty years after he made his first movie, Shekhar Kapur is again with the romantic comedy What’s Love Got to Do With It? and a movie on colonialism
Forty years after he made his first movie, Shekhar Kapur is again with the romantic comedy What’s Love Got to Do With It? and a movie on colonialism
A uncommon Indian filmmaker with a genuinely international profile, Shekhar Kapur has eked out solely seven narrative options in a profession spanning 40 years. He has by no means, nevertheless, been off the radar. His debut movie, Masoom (1982), lives on within the collective reminiscence of Hindi film followers. So does his enormously fashionable 1987 sophomore enterprise, Mr. India.
His newest, What’s Love Got to Do With It?, set for worldwide theatrical launch on January 27 subsequent, is his first fiction characteristic since 2007’s Elizabeth: The Golden Age. “I did two big series in between,” the 76-year-old London-based director says throughout a tv business shoot in Faridabad. “I worked on Damien [a follow-up to the classic 1970s horror film, The Omen] for Fox and on Will [a series on a young William Shakespeare] for TNT,” he says.
A nonetheless from What’s Love Got to Do With It?
| Photo Credit: Robert Viglasky
Several false begins and artistic fallouts adopted his two early successes. Unfinished or unrealised tasks collected. The string of aborted Mumbai motion pictures prompted him to go international. The transfer paid off. “It might sound arrogant. I left the B-Team and went to compete for a place in the A-Team,” he says about his departure from Bollywood within the 1990s. “I wanted to test myself. I wanted to see if I was good enough to play in a higher league.” He was. He imparted to his fourth movie, Elizabeth (1998), a UK-funded manufacturing with an Australian star taking part in a British monarch, a pronounced, effervescent Bollywood model. It fetched Kapur heady international dividends.
Working with digital
What’s Love Got to Do With It?, a romantic comedy written by Jemima Khan — which has already picked up the Best Comedy award on the latest Rome Film Festival — is produced by Working Title, the outfit that backed Elizabeth and its sequel. “The script came to me through the producers. We were going to make it earlier, but COVID came. So, we had to wait,” he says of his first-ever digitally shot characteristic movie.
Jemima Khan and Shekhar Kapur on the Rome Film Festival the place What’s Love Got to Do With It? picked up the Best Comedy award
| Photo Credit: Getty Images
The movie unfolds between London and Lahore, the place Kapur was born two years earlier than India gained independence. Has the shift from movie to digital impacted his aesthetic? “Digital has its advantages and disadvantages,” he replies. “You are not constrained by the cost of raw stock. Production is easier and cheaper.” But one of many challenges is attaining the ‘film look’. “Digital has such great depth of field that there is no out-focus,” he says, explaining how the ‘film look’ is an emotional manner of telling a narrative. There are visible layers to it. “When we look at something, we constantly focus and re-focus. When we look at something, everything else is put out of focus. The film look is much more like how we look at the world.”
What’s Love Got to Do With It?, Kapur’s first rom-com, has been lit and shot by cinematographer Remi Adefarasin, who additionally lensed the 2 Elizabeth movies. It options Shazad Latif, Lily James, Emma Thompson, Sajal Aly and Shabana Azmi (Kapur’s 1970s co-actor) in key roles.
Shabana Azmi and Emma Thompson on the set of What’s Love Got to Do With It?
| Photo Credit: Robert Viglasky
Inclusion and the filmmaker
Kapur’s performing profession — he debuted in his maternal uncle Dev Anand’s Ishk Ishk Ishk (1974) after chucking a profession as a chartered accountant in London — was fairly uneventful regardless of the one movie every that he did with Mani Kaul ( Nazar), Govind Nihalani ( Drishti) and Basu Chatterjee ( Jeena Yahan) and appearances in Kamal Haasan’s Vishwaroopam 1 and 2. As an actor, he knew precisely what he wanted from his director. “I was screaming for it, but did not get it,” he says. But his on-screen expertise impacted how he was to direct his actors.
“My job as a director is to help actors find their selves in the characters. I have an idea how the camera should move, what the frame should be and how the actors should choreograph themselves, but I see what they do and let them go with it. That is what I’ve done in every film since Masoom,” he says.
Shazad Latif and Lily James in What’s Love Got to Do With It?
| Photo Credit: Robert Viglasky
Addressing inclusion and variety in cinema, two key points right now, Kapur says he believes that filmmakers are accountable individuals. “Nobody should need to tell them what to do,” he says. “Take the Mr. India song picturised on Sridevi in a blue chiffon sari. Even today I feel it was amazing. But if the film comes out now, people might say it is objectification of women. So, would I do it today? I am not sure.”
If any person had instructed {that a} Black actor play Elizabeth, it might not have made sense, Kapur avers. “Cate Blanchett seemed perfect for the role, so I cast her. Queen Elizabeth had brown eyes. Cate has blue eyes. Would I have changed her hair colour, too? How far can one take these things?”
Bringing opium wars to the display
An avoidance of repetition is the defining high quality of his oeuvre. “I am wary of copying myself,” the veteran director says. “If I copy myself, I do not struggle. If you’ve climbed a mountain, you do not return to the same mountain. You find a new mountain to climb, a new path to tread.”
With Masoom and Mr. India, worlds aside in substance and spirit, Kapur prolonged the boundaries of Hindi business cinema on the peak of the indignant younger man period. He might have rested on his oars and continued down the identical course. He didn’t. He made Bandit Queen (1994), as a substitute. A uncooked, stark, unflinching take a look at an India far faraway from the comic-book ‘invisible man’ journey terrain of Mr. India, the movie was a watershed not just for Kapur but in addition for Indian impartial cinema.
Clockwise from left: Stills from Shekhar Kapur’s movies Bandit Queen, Masoom, The Four Feathers, Mr. India, and Elizabeth.
“There was a showing recently of Bandit Queen. I hadn’t seen the film for 20 years. I had tears in my eyes. My assistants noticed and wondered if the film had moved me. I said no, it is because I don’t know if I’d ever be able to make a film like this ever again. Bandit Queen came from my heart.”
There had been loads of issues that made the movie doable,” he reminiscences. “I was doing it with a budget that didn’t kill anybody. It was under $1 million [₹2 crore]. Channel 4 told me all we need to do is recover the money. So, I did what I felt instinctually, without worrying about box office.”
A mixture of anger and frustration fuelled the movie primarily based on the lifetime of bandit-turned-politician Phoolan Devi. “I grew up a Punjabi boy with all the masculinity placed upon my shoulders,” he says. “I realised that the whole story happened 200 or so kilometres from Delhi. It was constantly in the papers. There was no way I couldn’t have been aware. In many ways, I was the villain of the film. I felt I was responsible. I knew about it but did nothing. The anger and frustration in me made the film.”
Another anger that Kapur in-built himself was in opposition to colonisation. He gave vent to it in his 2002 battle drama, The Four Feathers. “I had to delete scenes from the film because it was seen as anti-West,” he says, including that The Four Feathers was type of mis-released. “9/11 had happened. I felt that after the Vietnam War, everybody knew that colonialism was a terrible thing. But no, colonialism is back in a big way. That is why I am now making Opium,” he provides. The under-production drama sequence is tailored from Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies that appears at what colonisation did to China and India.
Shekhar Kapur throughout the tv business shoot in Faridabad
| Photo Credit: Samir Sarkar
Why South Indian movies win
Kapur believes that the ascendency of South Indian cinemas isn’t a brand new phenomenon. “It’s been happening for a long time,” he says. “These films are rooted in their own cultures. Mumbai films aren’t. That is what is going wrong with Bollywood.” By manner of distinction, he cites the examples of internet exhibits made by those that have come to Mumbai from smaller cities. “Take Panchayat [the 2020 show on Amazon Prime Video] as a case in point: there is so much authenticity about it,” he says. That, he provides, is what Bollywood filmmakers should attempt for.
Time to court docket the West
Bandit Queen helped cut back western apathy in the direction of subcontinental cinema. “When they saw the film, nobody in the West knew anything about Mumbai cinema,” he says. “They knew there was Bollywood, but they hadn’t seen anything. The OTT channels have since made western audiences familiar with non-English films with subtitles. In this regard, Korea has done the East a big favour with Paradise, The Squid Game and other shows and films.”
It is now simpler for Indian filmmakers to department out, he says, as a result of the West is extra conscious and higher budgets and expertise can be found. “I often wonder why more Indian filmmakers haven’t tried to go international,” he says, including, “The size of the Indian domestic market and the diaspora are a strength and a drawback. You can use it to springboard yourself like the Chinese or Korean films do. We have to get out of the fear of failure. The world market is 10 times the size of the domestic market.”
The author is a New Delhi-based movie critic.