Hindustan Times (Lucknow) - Hindustan Times (Lucknow) - Live
‘Story needs to be appealing, not the commercial possibility of it’
Filmmaker Meghna Gulzar is all about going by her instincts. A story, she says, needs to appeal to her enough, to go ahead and adapt it for the silver screen. She also prefers waiting for the right story to come her way rather than hurrying into things. And that’s how she explains the success of her latest film, Raazi. “This is something that has been there since the beginning of my career. Not that I intended it to be like this, and also not like I thought that this would be my billboard or strategy. For me, choosing a story is an instinctive thing,” says Meghna, before explaining how the process works for her.
“There has to be this grit/ grain in the story that [should] immediately connect with me. At that time, the genre becomes irrelevant, what its commercial possibilities are is also not taken into consideration. How I will go about casting and choosing the crew, etc... happens later. First and foremost is if the story has jumped at me and if I’ve jumped at it, instinctively. Only then I know that I will be able to do a good job with it. And I believe that we make stories for the people within our society, so if the stories are from within the society then the connection is better,” says Meghna, who is happy with the way the audience has received her latest movie, Raazi starring actors Alia Bhatt and Vicky Kaushal.
Meghna earlier spoke about how Alia was her first and only choice for the film.
Looking back, the director of films such as Filhaal... (2002), Just Married (2007), Dus Kahaniyaan (2007) and Talvar (2015), says that she has taken the same risk before too: “In Filhaal, Tabu and Sushmita [Sen] were my only choice. In Talvar, I knew it could only be Irrfan sir and nobody else, and now Raazi. I feel fortunate as a filmmaker that my first creative instinct got fulfilled.”
There has to be this grit/grain in the story that [should] immediately connect with me... How I will go about casting and choosing the crew, etc... happens later.
MEGHNA GULZAR
FILMMAKER