I react to the times I live in, says Vidhu Vinod Chopra on his filmmaking

Filmmaker Video Vinod Chopra says his films have always been shaped by the world around him, whether it was the 1989 gangster drama “Parinda” or his most recent movie “12th Fail”.

Speaking at a session during the ongoing 56th International Film Festival of India (IFFI) on Saturday, Chopra said his films are not manufactured but an expression of what he sees and feels about the times.

“I react to times; an artist is not independent of the times he lives in. Shakespeare wrote what he wrote because he is doing plays there, and Van Gogh, painted, what he (wanted to). I’m a reflection of society. For an artist, the right thing is to represent what he’s going through in his work,” Chopra said.

“Unfortunately, now it’s all about, Sanjay Dutt told me, ‘You’re the only one who uses paper and pencil to write scripts.’ Now they just say, ‘proposal, this is sold to Netflix, Amazon, this is sold to this, profit. They don’t even write scripts anymore, which is very sad. It shows in our cinema. The content decides and determines how you’re going to prepare that film,” he added.

The director said he made “12th Fail”, which won the best feature national film award recently, as he was “sick and tired” with the corruption around him.

“‘12th Fail’ came from the level of corruption in our system, it was a reaction to that. I’m personally sick and tired of the level of corruption. I’m sure everybody’s trying to make sure that it kind of calms down a bit. But ‘12th Fail’ was my attempt at saying that, ‘Let’s be honest for a change.’

“When I made the film, I was like, ‘If I can convert 1 per cent population, 1 percent bureaucracy to 1 percent political system to honesty instead of dishonesty, I would have succeeded,” the filmmaker said.

The film, starring Vikrant Massey in the lead, is based on the life of Manoj Kumar Sharma who overcame extreme poverty and educational setbacks to become an IPS officer. Massey won the national film award for best actor, an honour he shared with superstar Shah Rukh Khan.

Chopra also revisited the making of “Parinda”, which follows Kishan (Jackie Shroff), a loyal aide of underworld don Anna (Nana Patekar), whose world fractures when his younger brother Karan (Kapoor) returns from the US and seeks revenge for his friend’s murder.

The filmmaker said the film’s central message was clear to him from the start — “violence begets violence” and he revealed that many people wanted him to change the film’s ending in which Kapoor and Madhuri Dixit’s characters are killed.

“The whole idea of ‘Parinda’ was that violence leads to Anil and Madhuri being massacred and Jackie’s left alone in the movie. When ‘Parinda’ was to release, all the distributors got together and got Rs 11 lakhs in cash for me. At the time, I didn’t have money to have dinner, so Rs. 11 lakhs (was huge).

“And they said, ‘Please don’t kill Anil and Madhuri, kill Jackie, and we will give you Rs. 11 lakhs, if you can turn it around’. I said, ‘I can’t do that’ because what I’m saying in the film is that violence begets violence.”

Chopra further shared that a distributor from Punjab was harrowed after seeing the reaction of the audience towards the climax.

“I still remember my Punjab distributor calling me from Jalandhar, and all shows were full. Just before that ‘Ram Lakhan’ was released. He called me during the interval of the film and said, ‘Sir, we’re ruined, you’ve ruined us?’

“I said, ‘The film is yet to get over, it’s just interval point’, and he replied, ‘Anil and Madhuri are getting killed and people are clapping, (thinking) this is a dream sequence’. So, that film was made at that time because that is what who I was,” he said.

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On a lighter said, Chopra credited his wife Anupama Chopra, a noted film critic, for bringing a sense of “calmness” to his life.

“When I made Parinda, I was a very violent man myself, I’m far less violent now, thanks to Anupama, who married me and stayed married for 30 years. She has calmed me down. Her mother is here. I hope this will go back to her, but this is true,” he said.