When Adil Hussain, a celebrated name in the theatre and film fraternity alike, looks back on his career graph today, he says there are no regrets, no complaints, just a little hope that the films can be helmed in a better way.
“I think they (the films) are changing- not as much as they should, but they are. I would say that's a drop in the ocean. We’ve a population of 3 billion and only 50 per cent of them maybe- to change their taste to watch meaningful cinema and enlighten their lives and make them feel worthwhile living through the misery as well and not only the good part,” he shares in an exclusive interaction with News18.com.
Given that in the past 5 years, there’s been an upsurge in quantity of quality content-driven cinema, one might think that the line between art house and commercial is now blurring. But Adil points out that “there’s still a huge line because the mindset of the distributors remains the same”.
“Most of the directors I've worked with, they’ve always wanted to make a good film- like both What Will People say and Mukti Bhawan are both mainstream films in Europe. In a country of 5 million, 60 thousand people have watched it- so it’s a big thing,” he adds.
In India, however, factors like “how you are releasing it, how much money you’re spending, what the distributors will say” come into play at the time of release. “It’s a disservice to the society that we don't allow those kind of films to flourish. And unknowingly we don’t allow it because we don't see the value of those films and all that they can do for the society. It is changing now- it’s the beginning of the end of umeaningful cinema.
According to him, the argument that “we want to escape through cinema” doesn’t help, because no matter how much one tries to escape, life eventually catches up. “That's the culture of what kind of films the audience has been watching. We did not give them enough variety of these kinds of films wherein they think and enjoy the process of confronting and encountering problems in life. So the contribution of filmmakers towards the society should be to enlighten the audience and not provide them things to help them escape.”
“The entire idea of going cinema to help in escaping slowly should disappear. We should help the audience to face and encounter the problems so that they grow up emotionally,” he adds.
Hussain, who is currently at the sixth edition of Dharamshala International Film Festival, is accompanying two of his critically-acclaimed films Mukti Bhavan and What Will People Say.
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