Failure drives him harder

It was in 1997 when his long-cherished dream of becoming an actor crumbled instantly on a make or break Friday. His debut film ‘Uff! Yeh Mohabbat’ had failed miserably at the box office, and he had no choice but to recollect and regain his composure and confidence.

That, indeed, was the darkest phase of Abhishek Kapoor’s life and he took two-long years to resurface again, but this time as a director.

His directorial debut ‘Aryan: Unbreakable’ met a similar fate and it immediately vanished from public memory. But instead of getting caught into the cycle of depression, he buried past failures and started working on a new script which later gave him the taste of his first commercial success as a writer and a director. The film was ‘Rock On!’

“‘Aryan’ was a film I really struggled on. After I failed as an actor I took two years off and wrote the story, I believed in it. It took me five years to shoot it and while shooting I was having so many problems raising money. The promos started in January and the film released in December...the movie was collapsing and many people told me not to release it saying ‘you failed as an actor and now you will fail as a director’. But I had to release it and the day it came out and I laid it to rest and started working on my next,” Kapoor tells ‘Metrolife’.

The 44-year-old writer-director has been following this philosophy ever since. He gives his heart and soul to the film and once it releases, he chooses not to ponder over its failure and success.

This philosophy has a lot to do with his darkest phase that has made him comfortable with failure.  “All those dark times tell you not to be afraid of failure. I have dealt with it before. I can go back to failure... I have a palace there and I am comfortable there. Failure drives me harder to come back,” he says.

“I find success very fluffy. It is all about praise and praise is just garnish... the real power. The real motivation comes out of failure. Failure is a good friend who speaks bitter truth. It isn’t easy to hang out with it, but it’s important to have it around,” he adds.

This time he is talking about the failure in love, the heartache and the bitterness that comes along with this sweetest, yet the strangest emotion in upcoming ‘Fitoor’. The Aditya
Roy Kapur and Katrina Kaif starrer is based on Charles Dickens’ ‘Great Expectations’ — a novel that has lead to multiple adaptations in Hollywood films and television.

“It is a story about love, heartbreak and the repercussions of that. Love is such an intense thing that it generates rosy images. But people wear their masks and to love someone is to let them enter very vulnerable space within,” he says, adding then one allows that person to either create havoc in your life or help you rise in life.

Even his last film ‘Kai Po Che’ was based on Chetan Bhagat’s ‘The 3 Mistakes of My Life’ but Kapoor says it just happened that Fitoor too is based on a book. But he instantly points out that it is always a difficult task to create something from a book since people come “with their own visions in their heads and great expectations”.

“This is the reason why I have tried to add many layers to the story and have tried to understand why people generate that kind of negativity,” he says. ‘Fitoor’ also features Tabu in the main role. It is produced by UTV Motion Pictures and is releasing on February 12.