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'Our hearts are different and that's why we have different kind of films'

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What about you. Are you incorporating any of this?

No, I'm not doing so. I don't have any comedy or anything that is strenuous to my film. I'll have music because that's a very important part of our films. I want my audiences to like my film since I'm making it. The others I don't care about. I'm not catering to everybody. I am catering to a family consisting of a father, mother and daughter.

Your later films didn't do very well. What went wrong?

That's what the general idea is. My Ram Balram sold for Rs 20 lakhs (Rs two million) per territory. It did a business of one crore (Rs 10 million). Rajput did the same thing. Those days Amitabh Bachchan films got 100 per cent initial. Mine got 98 per cent. So it was assumed that the films didn't do well. The trade papers said that they were flops and the media carried it on. The fact is that the film earned money for all of us, for everybody concerned.

What serials did you want to make?

I wanted to make a serial on Buddha. But not the Mahabharat or the Ramayan kind of serial. I wanted to make it seriously. If you are recreating a period, you can't do it in bungalows. And then there wasn't enough money either. It has to be well planned. I didn't want Buddha's mother playing anybody in other serials. I want my cat not to be working anywhere. I wanted to have three people playing Buddha. I was doing serious research, meeting eminent scholars for the serial. Unfortunately, they didn't have the money. So it came to nothing.

Did you shoot for the serial at all?

No, I didn't. I was casting when I came to know about the financial situation. When Buddha died, there were 500 of his disciples meditating with him and sitting like stones. I wanted the whole cast to be completely involved, by becoming vegetarians, shaving their heads etc, and really get into the characters. But that required a certain kind of approach, dedication and money.

Did this fetish for perfection stop you from making more films?

That's right. I can't have a second grade behaviour, to anything. If I can pinpoint anything saying that it could have been better, then I would curse myself. I have had no opportunity to say that till now. When I finished Rajput, I had some work of Vinod Khanna left and he had already left India for good.

I called him and asked him, to come down for this film, he refused. Till he got his green card. I didn't want this to leak out since the producer would have lost a lot of his money. So I re-edited the whole film, shot some scenes with doubles and finished the film.

I knew I could not do better than that under the circumstances. None of my films could have been improved. They were perfect the way they were. And it was a big achievement on my part.

The age of dedication is gone now. The producers tell what they want, the actors are not co-operative any more. The devotion has gone. They just want money. They work with you two days a month. And the films take such a long time to make. So I decided I won't make a film. For Ram Balram, I had Amitabh and Dharmendra working together.

Amitabh couldn't come very late on the sets because he had three shifts those days. He told me he could come early mornings at seven and go by nine. He was honest with me. But Dharmendra couldn't come before eleven. These are the conditions of film making. Because I was an editor, I could manage their scenes together.

I did have a big film with a big star cast at one time. I told the producer that he was inviting trouble. And then the film would take ages to finish. Rajput and Ram Balram took seven years in the making. Till then, I never took more than a year on a film. Seven year, and only for 100 days' work. Times change.

With Dev Anand, Indrani Banerjee and Rajeshwar. Click for bigger pic!

Hema Malini was young when I started; I finished when she was pregnant. She looked so beautiful when she was a mother. She looked quite haggard before that. I looked at the screen and realised what I was doing. How was it going to work at all? I like the American way of working. They have strict contracts and the actors are disciplined. That is the way to work.

How does one get that kind of discipline here?

By having such strict contracts. Be available on the sets whether we want you or not. Finish the work in three months. And no breaks at all. Here we have one actor busy with other assignments and we wait for those to finish.

Lata Mangeshkar is in America. We wait for her to come back which is after a month. And then she records the songs. We can't finish our films that early with the kind of scripts we have. We take a break and write the rest of the scripts. We take long gaps. And that is why the films take so long. Commerce rules again.

You are saying that actors give priority to makers who pay them more?

Yes, I am saying that. That is the way they work.

Do Hollywood films inspire you?

Surprisingly, they don't inspire me. The moment you make one English film your model, you cannot make a good Hindi film. Titanic can be made into Hindi because it is a love story. And the effects can be managed. It requires only money, nothing else.

Basically, Hollywood films are very cold. They don't hold your heart. They are smart films, technically very good. Hindi films have songs and dances, emotions, drama. The whole approach is different. Our audiences are different.

Americans laugh at our films. A mother meeting her son with tears in her eyes is not acceptable to them. But that's our tradition. We cry when our daughter gets married. It isn't so there. They are happy and don't understand why should anybody cry. Our hearts are different and that's why we have different kind of films.

Did you like Hum Aapke Hain Kaun and Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge?

I did like those films. I know what it's all about. I know what it's catering to. When I go to see a film, I don't become a critic. And if the audiences have accepted in such a big way, then we've touched a chord somewhere.

Our Indian minds are different from any other minds in the world. We are still living in the villages. And there it's a reality. Our values are still the same. The films were hits because, finally, what we thought was wrong didn't happen eventually. So everything was right in the end.

The film-maker was catering to modern times. The film would have flopped if the girl had married the other man. The film reconciled the old ideas with the modern ones very nicely.

Would you make such a film?

No, I wouldn't. I won't accept such a theme. Because in order to show right, I don't need to show a wrong. But that's what cinema is and that's what the pundits would sit and talk about. I like it to go the way it ought to go. I'm different. To be successful isn't my first priority. To be able to express myself is. And whenever I have done so, people have gone along.

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Maybe not immediately, but sometimes after many years, they've appreciated it. I found that my colleagues have accepted it, despite thinking I'm a little ahead of time. I survived. I want to make a film my way, absolutely different. I should not be repetitive. Like I am not today what I was yesterday. I am not a stone, I am growing, I am living. I am changing. Everything has changed, my views, my heart, my mind, my priorities. I don't intend to revive my past.

How does that happen?

I've never been commercially successful like a Subhash Ghai or a Yash Chopra. I've never been able to make that kind of mark. They kept digging the same well, they kept making the same films. I wanted to be different in every film. Even where acting was concerned.

You underplayed your acting a lot.

Yeah. People who have underplayed their roles have always been successful. Motilal was a great star and he was a very natural actor. Ashok Kumar, when he matured as an actor, became very natural and he still is. Sanjeev Kumar, and even Amitabh Bachchan, underplayed his roles quite a bit. It is not that the industry is full of people who overact. If you do that, then you don't know what acting is. You can't portray a character who doesn't exist. In melodrama, one can understand overacting. Not otherwise.

You also had a imagination. Like the song in Tere Ghar Ke Samne in which Dev Anand is singing the title song and sees Nutan within his glass...

(Laughing) Yes, I did and I let it run. Fortunately, they were accepted. A man in love can only see his beloved everywhere, and I thought that would be a good idea. It's a very poetic thing and I let my camera say it.

How did you come up with the story idea?

Actually it was inspired by the Indo-China war. Two neighbours call themselves brothers but are competing with each other all the time. It was a light comedy and not meant to be taken seriously. But they aren't brothers. They're fighting a war.

You even gave Shammi Kapoor his dancing hero image.

It was a polished kind of a film. People have tried to repeat the film; they haven't been able to. An original is an original.

Naseer Hussain came to me one day and told me to write and direct a film. We were sitting one day and I asked Naseer about a story. A small idea came to Naseer and he told me he saw these two girls sitting at a petrol pump and talking. A boy comes on a scooter and stops at the pump. He overhears one girl telling the other that she's going to Mussorie to meet a man called Rocky, a drummer at a hotel, who's supposed to have killed her sister. I told Naseer to stop right there. I had the idea for Teesri Manzil. That's how I wrote the story. And I knew that it would be a hit. Naseer gave me the full liberty to direct the film. I edited the film myself too.

Will the slickness of TM be visible in your latest film too?

Hopefully. Yes, I should think so. I will release my film in March. There is one sequence I want to do in America and I am not getting the visas there because of the nuclear testing here. So let's see, when I can finish this film.

Why don't you make a cartoon film since you wanted to make one?

Because we don't have that kind of technicians, the infrastructure. If I've to make a cartoon film now, I'd have to train people for years before they know what I want. I wouldn't want to make a film with machines, like computer animation. I would want them to draw it and then make it. It would take a long time. I think it is a little late for that now.

Anand hi Anand