Nikhil
Advani recently produced the film ‘Lucknow Central’, starring Farhan Akhtar, while Akshay Kumar
starrer ‘Airlift’ released last year. Speaking about the response his films
received, he said, “The delivery was disappointing as ‘Lucknow Central’ was a
good film. It needed a better time period to have a clean run. The problem with
films like ‘Lucknow Central’ is that it can get lost amongst the larger films.
I am very proud of the film and of Ranjit Tiwari as a director. It got a lot of
critical acclaim but I just feel that it needed space to breathe. There were a
lot of releases in the week.”
“Everything I have chased, runs away from me but the other
things that I do, fall into my lap. In the case of ‘D-Day’, I wanted to make a
very simple, frothy, desi version of ‘Sex and the City’ for women, but studios
kept asking me, ‘Hero kaun hai?’ because at that time it was unheard off to do
a film with only women. Suddenly, Osama bin Laden was captured and killed and
my driver asked me,‘If they can do it why can’t we?’ I went back to office and
everyone in office was asking the same question. Even for ‘Lucknow Central’,
Ranjit had read a small article and he came to me and said this is what I want
to do. I said I hope you can write something on this because I am sceptical.
The rest is history,” he says.
As a director himself, Nikhil understands the qualities required
in a director. “Everything depends on the director. Cinema is a director’s
medium. You can give the same script, set of actors, locations, songs, same
amount of budget to two different directors and you will still see two
different films. The film is not only in the script, it is in the director’s
mind – the vision he has and how he works with the actors and converts them
into his characters,” he explains.
He adds, “I think the biggest challenge for me is to keep my
director’s hat on the side and look at it as a producer. In ‘Airlift’, my role
was to become a wall between studio and my other co-producers and keep Raja
Krishna Menon, (director) away from everything so that he could just direct the
film. There is a certain level of trust that a director has with one person he
has on his side.”
Nikhil’s next projects include, directing a biopic on Dr K
Radhakrishnan, the former Chairman of ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation)
and the man behind India’s Mars mission aka Mangalyaan, and producing ‘Batla
House’. “I am directing the Mission to Mars story with Dr K Radhakrishnan, who
is one of the top scientists in the country. It took him a year to trust me.
This is the reason films have a disclaimer that it is based on true events. For
‘Batla House’ too, we had to get the NOC in place and still, every name in the
film will be changed because it is not fair to the people involved in the real
incident. Saif Ali Khan has agreed to play a role in the film,” he says.
Nikhil
is a jury member for the feature films category at IFFI and he shares his
experience of how the festival has grown. “I am an IFFI child as I have been
attending IFFI since 1993. My first brush with the film industry and cinema was
at IFFI because I was always following Sudhir Mishra. He took me to IFFI in
Mumbai and Hyderabad. ‘Airlift’ was at IFFI last year, and before that, ‘Delhi
Safari’ was featured at the festival. I love the festival. It is a great place
to meet people and talk, without getting stressed that your film is releasing
on Friday,” laughs Nikhil. “As a jury member, I have watched almost 21 films of
the festival, including ‘S Durga’ and ‘Nude’.”