The travails of being a 50-plus director
Are ‘senior’ directors losing their edge while young blood has a better feel of the pulse of new-age cinema-goers? Box office fortunes tell the tale
With the advent of around 10 talented newage directors and the tastes of the Telugu audience undergoing a change, a few directors who are over 50 have lost their Midas Touch.
Despite pocketing anywhere between `6 crore and `8 crore per film, these directors have been unable to recover even their pay from the movies, leave alone the budgets of their films. Although directors like V. V.
Vinayak,
Puri
Jagannadh, Gunasekhar, Teja, Krishna Vamsi and others have ruled the roost for many years with numerous blockbusters, few of them are able to draw audiences to the theatres on the strength of their names alone now. “Legends like Dasari Narayana Rao and K. Raghavendra Rao used to be crowd-pullers in their heyday, but there are no such names these days, except ace director S.S. Rajamouli,” says producer C. Kalyan, who lost big time after investing in movies by two 50-plus directors — V. V. Vinayak (Intelligent) and K. S. Ravikumar (Ruler). “I don’t want to blame only the directors since there were other factors which led to the films failure. In one film, I was unhappy with the second part of the script and in another, the projection of the hero wasn’t satisfying,” explains C. Kalyan, who however feels that it’s just a matter of time before Vinayak delivers another big hit.
“I also realised that I shouldn’t make films just because a star had allotted dates, but should rather wait for the appropriate script,”he adds. Puri Jagannadh delivered flops like Rogue and Paisa Vasool before bouncing back with iSmart Shankar. Gunasekhar redeemed himself with Rudramdevi after duds like Nippu. He is now, banking on the big-ticket mythological movie Hiranyakasipudu to prove his mettle. Director Krishna Vamsi is going through a lean patch after a series of duds like Paisa and
Nakshatram. Similarly, Teja, who returned to the reckoning with Nene Raju Nene Mantri, ended up delivering another dud, Sita.
On the stiff competition offered by young directors, Teja says, “Frankly, I am not threatened at all. Barring one or two young directors, most of them are ripping off content from Korean, French and Hollywood movies and turning out to be poor imitators, not even proper copycats. No doubt a few young directors are busy because stars want to hire directors who listen to their ideas, which seasoned directors resist.”
On challenges of attracting the new-age audience, Teja admits that audienecs are smart and knowledgeable and are exposed to world cinema.
“Now audiences are spotting and trolling first look posters not just movies, which is a more ominous factor than the age of the director,” Teja adds.
I had distributed films of seasoned directors since they make starstudded movies, but I am not sure of making films with them. I have made films with new-age directors since our wavelengths match better. I feel that audiences aged between 16 and 24 years are quite demanding, and only young directors know their pulse. Besides, I’ll have better control over the budgets — Abhishek Nama, producer and distributor
Some 50-plus dream merchants should become story writers or nurture young talent using their experience like Vidhu Vinod Chopra or Sanjay Leela Bhansali. Directors are full of ideas when they are between 25-40 years old, and after that, slowly, ideas begin to dry up. The cinematic narrative style changes every 10 years and automatically, some directors ran out of ideas — Madhura Sreedhar, filmmaker