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.
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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.
