Directors down south know their audience well: Emraan Hashmi

This year, Emraan Hashmi is going South with two Telugu films. In Sujeeth’s gangster thriller, ‘OG’, his crime lord, Omi Bhau, is pitted against Pawan Kalyan’s don, Ojas Gambheera, while in Vinay Kumar Sirigineedi’s spy thriller, ‘G2’, his co-star is Adivi Sesh, reprising his role of Agent Gopi from the 2018 original, ‘Goodachari’.

Currently the cross-pollination between the talent in Bollywood and Tollywood to produce pan-India cinema is in demand. Point this out to Emraan and he quips, “I don’t understand terms like ‘pan-India’ even if they are commonly used now.” He insists that he greenlights a project going by the director’s vision, the producer’s conviction and his role. “For me, the journey starts with faith and trust in an idea and the people I’m working with. I loved the premise and characters in ‘OG’ and ‘G2’, it was something I had never done before,” he elaborates.

Is filming a Telugu film different from a Bollywood shoot, you wonder. Emraan insists he doesn’t see any difference. “It’s just that directors down South know their audience well,” he adds. “The grammar of their films is skewed towards larger-than-life entertainment, with all the masala there in the right doses and the right pitch. I can see it even while I’m listening to a script narration,” he shares. He goes on to rue that when it comes to Hindi cinema, there are very few directors who can push the right buttons and whip up the same level of excitement in cinema halls through the hero vs villain story, and the way they mount and shoot the film. “We are paying the price for that,” he sighs.

National Award-winning writer-filmmaker Hansal Mehta recently stated that Bollywood needs a reset. Emraan agrees, asserting that it needs a reset in all departments. “Mainstream films targeting a theatrical release are particularly scared to experiment with something path-breaking and conform to a hit formula to reverse-engineer a hit. But that way, you can never really make a good film,” he reasons.

The actor also agrees that cost correction is the need of the hour and the economics of a film has to be reviewed and reworked to cut out extra flab. “Yes, certain films require big investments, but most need to be made in the right budget for profit margins to increase. Also, it’s important that actors not burden the budget with their remunerations as films aren’t doing well at the box-office and it would be wrong of them to take a share of the pie while depriving others down the line of theirs,” he maintains.

Quiz Emraan on what his teenage son thinks of him as an actor and he wryly admits he wouldn’t know because he hasn’t sat Ayaan down and shown him any of his films or had a conversation about them so far. “He saw ‘Tiger 3’ with his friends in the theatre and really enjoyed the film. I’ll show him my next release, ‘Ground Zero’, and it will be interesting to see Ayaan’s reaction because his generation is ruthlessly opinionated. Having grown up with so much exposure to film, OTT and social media, he has a world view which I didn’t at his age,” he acknowledges.

Inspired by real events, ‘Ground Zero’, which opened on April 25, has the actor reportedly playing BSF Deputy Commandant Narendra Nath Dubey whose two-year investigation to hunt down the mastermind behind the 2001 attack on the Parliament is described as India’s biggest anti-terror operation. “There are people who would know about this, but what you read in the media is like scratching the surface. I feel that the operation did not get the kind of coverage it ought to have got so it’s good we have made a killer film,” he signs off.