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Exclusive | Vivek Agnihotri accuses the film industry of considering the audience dumb: You threw common man out…
The Bengal Files director Vivek Agnihotri feels that the reason why the Hindi film industry is suffering losses, is because of the lack of relatable stories
Filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri’s recently film The Bengal Files released after much opposition owing to its controversial nature. However, Vivek is of the opinion making cinema influenced from socio-political issues is not something he has introduced and in the same breath rues that other filmmakers have stopped bringing stories catering to the common man’s interest.
In an interview with us, Vivek says, “Our film industry has always, raised social political issues in the film. Be it Raj Kapoor films, Guru Dutt films, or, Yash Chopra’s films, Salim Javed films, Manmohan Desai films. Yes, they were entertaining song, dance, everything, but at the end of it they always touched you because there is socio political issues, whether the women’s problems, widow with problems,, marital issues, or political issues."
Citing the example of Amitabh Bachchan’s films in the 1980’s and 1990’S he says, “His character will go and take revenge against the oppressor and that was giving everyone hope. Suddenly when the international market became very big people started assuming that audience is dumb, so give them dumb stories and that’s why we have been creating kind of easy answers to everything in our stories. ”
The filmmaker, whose brand of cinema includes other hard hitting films like The Kashmir Files, The Tashkent Files, The Vaccine War, decodes the reason behind why several big budget films fail to invite audience to theatres nowadays.
“Which film in last few years is about the society or the common man? I haven’t seen any, any successful film in the last so many years. Where is that story on the son of a teacher, the hero, son of a farmer, son of a clerk, son of anybody, son of a middle class who stands up against the evil and he fights them, give me hope. Tell me, ‘yes, there are good people in this world’.That’s why the film industry is dying because you have thrown common man out of your films, common man has thrown you out of their life.
