Want to represent what India stands for: Zoya on Gully Boy’s Oscar bid
The world is shrinking and one has to compete with the best, says director Zoya Akhtar as she gears up for Gully Boy’s Oscar campaign. The film, about a budding Mumbai street rapper, is India’s official entry for the 92nd Academy Awards in the International Feature Film category.
Unfazed by the competition, Zoya says, “Even meeting people there opens your mind in so many ways. The world’s getting smaller and we are a huge industry. We all are going to be out there at some point or the other.”
The director is focused only on giving her best shot. “The country has selected you, now you have to go and give your best shot. You’ve to represent what your country stands for, what the film stands for and what its context is. You call it competition, I call it that ‘club’ where the best from different countries are there,” adds Zoya, who aims to hold as many screenings of the film as possible to familiarise the Academy’s voters with it.
“If they like it, they will vote for it. The thing is to get it watched,” she says, adding her team is working on a strategy.
Zoya shares Gully Boy was her attempt to look at the class system in India. “It’s a film about the class system, where we’re functioning in a way where certain people are kind of trapped in it and find it difficult to break out. That’s what the film is about, everything else is the backdrop,” she says, asserting poverty is just an angle, not the main plot and the pull for her was the human story at the centre. “They’re people. You connect with it not because it’s about rich or poor but because it’s a human story.”
Asked if she has thought of a sequel, Zoya says she has no plans to revisit the characters but would like to explore the hip-hop genre. “We want to do something in the hip-hop space but we don’t know if we’ll have a part two. It’ll be another chapter,” she says.
There were reports she had bought the rights for Martin Scorsese’s gangster movies The Departed and Gangs of New York. The director denies any such thing, but adds she’d love to explore the space. “It’s my favourite genre. Films like Scarface, The Godfather, Goodfellas and Casino are something I can watch again and again. I love them so I’ve to make one.” PTI