Filmmaker Vidhu Vinod Chopra said his body of work has always mirrored the social climate of its time, from his 1989 gangster drama Parinda to his recent national award-winning film 12th Fail.
Speaking at a session at the ongoing 56th International Film Festival of India (IFFI) on Saturday, Chopra said his films emerge from lived reality rather than assembly-line thinking.
“I react to times; an artist is not independent of the times he lives in… I'm a reflection of society. For an artist, the right thing is to represent what he's going through in his work,” he said.
Chopra lamented what he described as a shift in the industry towards pitching over writing. “Unfortunately, now it's all about, Sanjay Dutt told me, ‘You're the only one who uses paper and pencil to write scripts.’ … They don't even write scripts anymore, which is very sad. It shows in our cinema,” he said.
He said 12th Fail was born out of his frustration with corruption in public life. “I’m personally sick and tired of the level of corruption… 12th Fail was my attempt at saying that, 'Let's be honest for a change,’” he said, adding that converting “1 per cent” towards honesty would be success enough.
Starring Vikrant Massey as Manoj Kumar Sharma — who rose from poverty to become an IPS officer — the film recently won the national award for best feature. Massey shared the best actor honour with Shah Rukh Khan.
Chopra also looked back on the making of Parinda, revolving around two brothers in the Mumbai underworld. He said he refused distributor pressure to alter the film’s bleak climax.
“The whole idea of Parinda was that violence leads to Anil and Madhuri being massacred… When Parinda was to release, all the distributors got together and got Rs 11 lakhs in cash for me… And they said, ‘Please don't kill Anil and Madhuri…’ I said, ‘I can't do that’ because what I'm saying in the film is that violence begets violence.”
He recalled a panic call from a Punjab distributor during the film’s interval, worried that audiences were misreading the impending deaths as a fantasy sequence. “So, that film was made at that time because that is what who I was,” he said.