A TENDENCY TOWARDS HAGIOGRAPHY?

For filmmakers working on biopics, there’s always a risk – will biography turn into hagiography? Most directors and writers agree that there’s a thin line dividing the two. “The important thing to remember,” said filmmaker Hansal Mehta, who made Shahid and Aligarh, “is to maintain the essence of that person’s life and never lose focus on why he/she resonated with you in the first place.”

“It’s a trapping we have to avoid,” said Neeraj Pandey, director of MS Dhoni The Untold Story, in a newspaper interview earlier this year, responding to a question about why most Bollywood biopics glorify their subjects and the ways in which the fawning adoration can be reined in. Pandey added that during the making of the film on Dhoni, they used “this slang commonly in the team, ‘agarbatti nahi dikhani hai’ which resonated with all of us. He’s an achiever. And his is an impossible journey. If someone made this as a fictional story, people would walk out of theatres saying kya bakwaas hai yeh, aisa thodi hota hai. It’s that degree of impossible that he made possible. We have only tried to show that without being star-struck.”

“Biopics can be a whitewash of someone’s life and some films avoid the grey areas,” said producer Siddharth Roy Kapur. “But I think in Dangal and Paan Singh Tomar, we did manage to show the subjects with warts and all. Dangal depicted Aamir’s character as having antiquated notions of what women can do and what men can do. He doesn’t consider girls to be equal to boys. There’s also a certain amount of hardness and harshness in the way he trains his daughters. We have shown the grey areas within Mahavir Singh Phogat’s personality. What we celebrated is the personal achievement and his growth as a person and what he could do for his daughters in the end.”