Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra on why Bollywood creates escapist cinema

On Bollywood

The first thing which Mehra clarified was that he didn't know where Bollywood was, believing in the Hindi film industry label more, instead. "I once asked a cab guy in Mumbai to take me to Bollywood. He said he didn't know where that was. Then I asked another one and the third cab guy asked me to get inside. He took me around Mumbai and left me in front of Amitabh Bachhan's house!"

Bollywood is often criticised for not making enough "meaningful" cinema, and that has increasingly become a problem. Mehra said there was also a phase when a lot of films rooted in reality came out of Bollywood.

"Films like Neecha Nagar and Do Beegha Zameen are still shown in film schools," he said, but reality progressively became grimmer due to various socio-political factors of the time some years post-partition. When it all became too much to handle, Bollywood went into a shell and started making seemingly outrageous films as a form of escapism, said Mehra.

"All that is mostly behind us, however, and now is the time to move on to what can be called a universal world cinema."

Films with social imapct

There's also the age old problem of market demand. "I was working on a film, Samjhauta Express which didn't work out primarily because it showed Abhishek Bachhan as a Pakistani terrorist." Till the time we, as a bigger community, can't get over our prejudices, reminded Mehra, how will filmmakers produce anything constructive in the first place? "We can't have a narrow view of things, and won't progress unless we imbibe a 360-degree perspective."

Mehra also spoke about another project which didn't happen - "the producer ran away!" It was a film on toilets. What inspired him to take on such a film? His encounter with a kid from a slum near the Mithi river. "These kids used drainage pipes across the Mithi river as toilets. So one of these kids pointed to a distant building and asked me how many floors it had and how many apartments in each. He calculated the total number of toilets in that building, and said the slum where they live nearby, with more than 1000 homes, has zero toilets."

Another thing which Mehra was quite categorical about was that "films aren't about providing solutions to social ills. Entertainment in some form or another is essential, and that's our main aim." However, Mehra also acknowledged that when creating a film story it's great if a lesson or a moral comes through. "Even our nani-daadis used to tell us stories and at the end of it would ask us what we learnt," said Mehra.

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