Vidhu Vinod Chopra, who is both one of India’s most revered filmmaking veterans and a self-confessed angry man, took to the stage on Friday for a (mostly) good-natured introspective conversation punctuated with musical interludes.
Though he scarcely needed prompting, Chopra, the dynamo behind “3 Idiots,” “Munna Bhai MBBS” and “12th Fail,” was pressed by friend and musician Shantanu Moitra, to examine the moments in his career when he doubted himself.
They were speaking at the Kala Academy in Goa, hub of the International Film Festival of India, and were treated like rock stars by a 500-strong crowd of festival-goers and film students.
An accomplished screenwriter, director and producer, Chopra said that one of his many “zero moments,’ or low points, was trying to break the news of his desire to be a filmmaker to his father who aspired for the young Vidhu to become a doctor. “The only dream I had was to assist Vijay [Goldie] Anand,” he explained.
While Chopra earned an Oscar nomination for 1978 documentary short “An Encounter With Faces,” early setbacks included waiting in vain for a letter of introduction to Anand. And buying a telephone on which he hoped to hear news of a rights sale for 1986 film “Khamosh.”
“Everybody loved the film, but nobody bought it. The National Film Development Council put in INR8 lakh ($75,000), which had to be repaid, or I would not receive further funding,” Chopra said. After several other false alerts, including the delivery of flowers and praise from filmmaking legend Yash Chopra, the film remained unsold, leaving the filmmaker to become distributor as well. Even that took some sleight of hand, involving buying up every ticket in a theatre in order to be able to make the claim that it was sold out.
But since then, Chopra has frequently defied the odds, and his detractors, to enjoy success with “Parinda,” “Lage Raho Munna Bhai,” “Eklavya the Royal Guard” and international hit “3 Idiots.”
Chopra recalled how he was warned against using reputedly wooden actor Jackie Shroff in “Parinda.” And said he was pressured to change a key scene, in which a couple portrayed by Madhuri Dixit and Anil Kapoor is gunned down on their wedding night. He kept faith with Shroff, who won awards for his role, and with the controversial scene, reasoning that “I was trying to say that violence begets violence. And at the time I was a violent man.” The film is credited with ushering more realism into Indian mainstream cinemas and was remade in Hollywood by Chopra himself as 2015 title “Broken Horses.”
Chopra described his relationship with actors as “not good,” confessed to a heated falling out with Naseeruddin Shah, and to mistrusting other directors. “I don’t trust directors. I only trust a [specific] human being,” he explained bluntly.
Chopra’s self-belief was a through-line of the on-stage discussion. “I don’t see much difference [between directing and producing] as I only make the films I believe in,” he said at one point. At another moment, he downplayed the value of India’s National Awards. “Awards are from people outside you. They are not important. The real question is ‘did I make a good film?’”
Moitra offered further evidence of Chopra’s headstrong tendencies. “He is the toughest man in the universe to work with. This universe or the next,” Moitra told the Kala crowd. “He doesn’t know where he wants to go, but he knows where he doesn’t want to stand.” But the pair’s repeated bursts of song and the musical explanations that peppered the session suggested that Chopra is capable of finding harmony with some exceptional individuals.
Echoing Swedish filmmaking genius Ingmar Bergman, Chopra said that it is every filmmaker’s duty to entertain, preferably without selling one’s soul. And summed up his filmmaking mantra as “three Es.”
“The three Es of Vidhu Vinod Chopra Films are: to entertain, to educate if you can and to elevate. That’s the way I want to live my life.”
