Ajay Devgn: Making a Hindi film is the most difficult

Ajay Devgn believes that making Hindi films is tougher than regional ones due to audience diversity

Ajay Devgn believes making a Hindi film is more challenging than making a regional film because filmmakers cannot always pinpoint their target audience in a country as diverse as India. Speaking at a FICCI Frames session on Wednesday, the actor says, “It’s not taking credit away from any other cinema. International cinema. All the international cinema. Things like this are not taking credit. But I personally think that making a Hindi film is the most difficult. Because you do not know what your target audience is. In a regional [film], you know this is for a certain region. And you know their taste. So you will target their audience. Hindi film, to do numbers, I think every 80 to 90 kilometres, the language changes. You have cities. Urban areas. You talk about town. You talk about the suburbs. Either it is liked by one section of the audience and the other section does not like it. So the numbers do not come.”

Ajay Devgn: Making a Hindi film is the most difficult

Devgn explains that this diversity makes it difficult for Hindi cinema to create a film that connects uniformly across audiences. “But as in any other cinema. International cinema. They know their target audience. This is their mindset. This is how they think. This is how they behave. And we need to make room for them across to everybody. So that is where I feel that it is the most difficult,” he says.

The actor also believes audience expectations have changed with the abundance of content available today. According to him, viewers are no longer willing to settle for a film simply because of the names attached to it. “I guess it has changed. It has changed because today… They only like something which is good. They will reject it, because they have lot of choices. Earlier there were not so many choices. So it has changed,” he says.

This shift, he adds, has also changed the relationship between a film’s content and its box-office performance. “Today numbers will only follow if you made a good film. Otherwise the numbers are not going to follow. Earlier the numbers could follow in spite of you not making a good film also. Because you were afraid of these things. But today it crashes on the second day. So I think it has changed,” Devgn ends.