Young romances have found a large audience fanbase this year with international shows like Off Campus and Sterling Point, becoming fan favourites. Even in India, the fandom for these shows have been huge. However, Indian romances made for the younger generation in recent times have failed to connect with the audience, and director Shakun Batra has a theory for it.
Batra, who recently showed a complex romance between two people in their 20s in Lust Stories 3, says, “I believe that you can't put yourself into somebody else's head and think about how they will look at it. If I have a point to say, I'll put it out and if I have done my job right, if not today, in a year or two, they will understand and accept it and that's what happened to me when I grew up watching movies.”
Watch the entire chat with the team of Lust Stories 3 here:
He adds, “As directors and storytellers, what you're doing is putting your most authentic self out, and not figuring out what that person needs to watch. If you're doing it that way, then you are doing a work for hire kind of a thing, where you feel that I need to make this person feel good. I don't think I can work like that. I need to portray what I am feeling and what I need to express and hope that I've done a job of simplifying it enough that somebody else can also receive it.”
{{/usCountry}}He adds, “As directors and storytellers, what you're doing is putting your most authentic self out, and not figuring out what that person needs to watch. If you're doing it that way, then you are doing a work for hire kind of a thing, where you feel that I need to make this person feel good. I don't think I can work like that. I need to portray what I am feeling and what I need to express and hope that I've done a job of simplifying it enough that somebody else can also receive it.”
{{/usCountry}}Elaborating on why he feels filmmakers are failing to connect with the younger audience, Batra says, “There's nothing wrong with wanting to make something for a younger audience, but you should still make it from what you feel, not what you think they would feel. I've been in many of those meetings where they're like ‘ye chal raha hai’. But mere se wo nahin ho raha hai, and that’s why I've had enough breaks in my career. If somebody's flipping up and down and that's working, I can't do it. I'll just do it so bad, and why put myself through it?”
The filmmaker also insists that Bollywood romance shown over the years is also a reason behind the disconnect as it is far from reality. “We've done a huge disservice in movies for the last decade, or maybe more, of just simplifying love to be: You meet this person who is your soulmate and then life is amazing. But it never is. So when people get into marriage, they're like ‘dude, this is not like the love I've imagined’,” he ends.