Herald Café: What brings you here to the Film
Bazaar?
Rohan Sippy: I have been invited to speak on a panel about remakes. My last film, Nautanki Saala was a remake of a French film. The discussion is going to be about different aspects of adapting from the legal to the creative all of those things. I’m hoping I get to share more creative parts of it at the session as there are lawyers and studio guys who may talk about their respective aspects that have their own focus. The original French film was set in a French bistro which doesn’t have any context to Indians, so I set my film up in the world of theatre. As such, it was quite a different adaptation all in all, but it was a fun part of the enitre process.
HC: Do you think your films like Taxi No 9211 or Dum Maaro Dum could have done better commercially? Do you somewhere feel that the audience has let you down?
RS: Nobody lets anyone down. It’s an audience that spends its hard-earned money. What they decide to spend on is entirely their prerogative. The audience here is pretty honest and generous. Maybe I have missed out on some things and it is for me to get them right in the next film. But it is never a disappointment for me from the audience. That’s a very condescending attitude to have and can be quite dangerous.
HC: A lot of people, especially Goans, were upset about the negative portrayal of the state of Goa in your much acclaimed film, Dum Maaro Dum…
RS: What rubbish! There were no ‘lots of people’. There was just one blogger who got a lot of publicity complaining about the film before he saw it. There was a court case that we had to divert our energies into before the release of the film. I think people have cursed Mumbai certain times and they have cursed other places. So I think we have the freedom to express ourselves. If you watch the film in its context, it is very positive about Goa. That is again my freedom and my choice to portray it that way. In India I should be allowed to say what I want if we call ourselves a democracy. For the media or a certain person to pick up on one aspect and highlight it - there’s no justice, because you’re not keeping the thing in context. We are making fictional work. We try to connect emotionally with the audience. If you see the response, the people in Goa who have watched the film have actually liked the film. You can see the media reports as well. From Mumbai there may have been a lot of people who didn’t like ‘Bluffmaster’ in which I have talked about Mumbai being the city of conmen. If everyone starts taking things with that level of sensitivity, it is a disaster for us as a society on the whole.