Bollywood's own outlier

Filmmaker Dibakar Banerjee had clarity of thought when he recently returned his National Award, along with other filmmakers to protest “growing intolerance in the country”. But he was indecisive when it came to producing Kanu Behl’s directorial debut Titli. “The story deeply interested and moved me. But I really wasn’t sure about producing it. On some days I would convince myself to do it, and on some days I would think of dropping the idea. This indecisiveness took some time to mature into a decision,” Banerjee tells Metrolife.

“But I quite like being a producer since there isn’t much of the hard work involved. As Kanu was helming it and I know him quite well, communication was clear. But being a producer and director of a film definitely gets me down,” he says.

The 46-year-old, along with Anurag Kashyap is credited with changing Bollywood’s focus by defying all rules of commercial cinema which was deeply entrenched in “song-and-dance family sagas and fairytale love stories”.  He gave the audience a taste of Delhi’s land-grabbing mafia and a typical middle-class family’s tryst with them in Khosla Ka Ghosla, followed by a black comedy on real-life thief Devinder Singh alias “Superchor Bunty”.

“I am not doing such films out of sense of duty, but I am genuinely interested in such subjects. It is an aesthetic pursuit. I can’t move away from social reality,” he admits.

“I never had a choice. At the same time, I never stood at a crossroad. I could have made paper-thin films and mixed the concept of misogyny and created something for a target audience.  But I chose the other way. I really can’t complain because I have survived,” says Banerjee whose other films include Love, Sex Aur Dhokha, Shanghai and Detective
Byomkesh Bakshy.

Audience has been receptive to his kind of cinema that tries to capture the underbelly of a city or manipulative human emotions. The two time National Award recipient feels the younger audience is “experimental” and “clear-sighted”.

“They go for new content and celebrate every kind of stuff,” he says. However, he is quick to admit that commercial success of a film is extremely important for a filmmaker to survive. “If you don’t have reasonable success then it gets difficult to finance a film. Struggle for finding financers for your film is much more than directing a film,” he adds.