00:00Filmmaking is the dearest thing to me in my life.
00:05It's my God, it's my mother, it's my father, it's my lover, everything is cinema.
00:12You have to understand that I am very cursed and very blessed.
00:17I am very loved and I am very hated.
00:19I am very successful and I am very unsuccessful.
00:30And when you have somebody to talk to, you are not lonely.
00:39When you are not lonely, you don't get tired very fast.
00:42You don't feel exhausted, you don't feel low in life.
00:45And art should be created out of loneliness, yes, out of angst, yes, but out of great joy.
00:53So now I am a little, I am a joyous filmmaker, I am a happy filmmaker.
01:00Hello everyone, welcome to THR Talks.
01:13This is the first on-ground event for The Hollywood Reporter India.
01:17And I cannot tell you how thrilled I am to kick it off with an artist who has mesmerized audiences for more than 25 years.
01:29I think he has changed the aesthetic of Indian cinema.
01:33And I would say that there is more beauty in our lives because of him.
01:38So please put your hands together for the incomparable Sanjay Leela Bhansali.
01:59So Sanjay, I am going to begin.
02:03One second, how many of you love me?
02:05You can go for it now.
02:10I am going to start by diving into the deep end.
02:16Okay, with something you said just after Guzarish.
02:20And your words were, I didn't realize how tired I was until the film was over.
02:27Then my body just gave up.
02:29All my films are a process of self-annihilation for me.
02:33With every film of mine, a part of me gets left behind.
02:38Is this still the process?
02:41No, that has changed.
02:42With time, everything changes.
02:44Tell me what happened.
02:45After Guzarish, if you realize, I was very rejuvenated.
02:48I realized that black didn't work very well at the box office.
02:54Sabariya didn't work well at the box office.
02:57Guzarish didn't work well at the box office.
03:01So maybe it was in that state of mind where I said that I am feeling very tired.
03:06I am feeling I have left behind a lot which has not been seen or understood or acknowledged.
03:11So then you got up and said, well, let me get back to my Bhuleshwar basic melodramatic self.
03:21So came Ramlila, Bajirao, Padmavats, Gangubai, Hiramandi.
03:26I just am not tired anymore.
03:28And I have yet left a lot of myself in each work that I do.
03:33It's very intense.
03:35My work is like I work like a Mazdoor.
03:39All those big sets and the opulence and the beauty that you see.
03:45It comes out of hours and hours and months and years of hard work
03:50which you enjoy.
03:51It's not that you have to just do hard work and labor.
03:54You have to enjoy.
03:55You have to be inspired doing that work.
03:57So I've been very inspired.
03:58I've enjoyed doing war sequences for a change and action sequences for a change.
04:04And after Devdas, the big song dance routines.
04:10So there was so much of life that came into me and all that I wanted to pay tribute to
04:17great characters like Bajirao, like Padmavats, like Gangubai.
04:20And I chose those characters because they are a part of,
04:23they helped me express through my film a part of something that I was,
04:28that I am, that I've seen, that I've experienced.
04:30Otherwise I wouldn't make those films.
04:32So part of me still is left behind.
04:35I do finish seeing some chapter which closes.
04:38Then after two films I realize it has not gone.
04:41Those moments of your life which you grow up with,
04:44which inspire you to make a particular character or a particular film.
04:47You feel you've said it.
04:48You've done it.
04:49You have purged.
04:52But then you've not because it again comes back to you in some way.
04:56And you realize that, yeah, Gangubai, I know I made two mistakes.
04:59I know I left two things behind unsaid.
05:01We'll try and solve it somewhere.
05:04So a part of me is always going to get exhausted given.
05:08But I have now started enjoying because I got the love of the audience.
05:13When your work is seen, is understood, it is, the audience is interacting with it.
05:19They've understood your way of filmmaking.
05:21They grant you that place that, okay, we are audience.
05:24We may not like your film sometimes.
05:26We like your film sometimes.
05:27But I found that dialogue.
05:29And when you have somebody to talk to, you're not lonely.
05:32When you're not lonely, you don't get tired very fast.
05:35You don't feel exhausted.
05:36You don't feel low in life.
05:38And art should be created out of loneliness, yes, out of angst, yes, but out of great joy.
05:46So now I'm a little, I'm a joyous filmmaker.
05:49I'm a happy filmmaker.
05:50How lovely.
05:51Oh.
05:52And speaking of a dialogue with the audience, Netflix recently released What We Watched,
06:02which is what people watched in the first half of this year.
06:06Heera Mandi folks, the only Indian series in the top hundred of Netflix.
06:11How amazing.
06:15So that's definitely a dialogue.
06:18But let's talk a little bit about this process of creation.
06:22Here's what I'm fascinated by.
06:25Don't look like that, dear.
06:26No, no.
06:27I'm already thinking of how many times have I said it and I have to say it a little differently one more time.
06:33No, no.
06:34Here's my question.
06:35Okay.
06:36Here's my question.
06:37You've always said that it's very much a subconscious sort of flowering, right?
06:44You told me lalish came to you when you were taking a shower.
06:49Images, characters, lyrics, music, it all just springs out of you.
06:55You're not a filmmaker who's fussed about research or rehearsals or, you know, even somebody who's extremely connected to being realistic in that very literal sense.
07:09What we see when we come to your cinema is the world you create.
07:12Right.
07:13But making movies is so expensive.
07:16It's all about deadlines.
07:18The subconscious is so mysterious.
07:21It's so unknowable.
07:23Is there a contradiction there?
07:26Like, how do you sort of make the subconscious work to what you want it to?
07:34It's a difficult question, isn't it?
07:38You have to understand where I come from in the first place.
07:42If you visualize a small little chawl in 300 square feet, colorless, the walls had no color.
07:50And we had a family of four or five people living in a cramped place.
07:55The conversation that I heard early in my life was when my father invested money in some film called Jhaji Lotera, which was released before I was born.
08:03But while I was born and I was growing up and I started understanding words, all I heard was that cinema mein paisa dalna nahin chahiye.
08:10Dekho where we've landed up.
08:12How do we do?
08:14Yet the lure of cinema in my family remained so much that when my grandmother collected some 10,000 rupees out of whatever she was finding,
08:22she went and invested in a film called Sone Ke Haath.
08:25That's 10,000 rupees to the producer who was my father's friend.
08:29We never got that back.
08:31But this child who was staying in that house realized that I started living in a dream world.
08:40The reality was very harsh.
08:42So I would never go anywhere near a realistic film or anything that is real or anything that is...
08:48It has to be in my mind.
08:50That mind of the real world I rejected.
08:52I feel I'm that filmmaker who has painted those 300 square feet of walls into innumerable number of huge, beautifully painted, designed sets.
09:04Because that is where the dream started.
09:07That is the power of watching something that you...
09:12I get emotional when I talk about it.
09:14But that is where the filmmaker is born.
09:18Now what happens is that you are living in a parallel world.
09:23Everybody doesn't understand that.
09:26To go with my grandmother to get that 10,000 rupees from the producer took hours and hours of walking back to Colaba,
09:32coming back all the way.
09:33She would carry a bottle of water so that if we are hungry we would drink that water.
09:38Is this what cinema does to you?
09:41This is the film.
09:42My mother used to dance.
09:43Beautiful dancer.
09:44She would dance in that 100 square feet that she would get.
09:47So after that my heroines danced in the biggest sets ever shot in a Hindi cinema.
09:53So all that angst, which I was an intelligent kid to understand, to imbibe, to react,
10:00to translate it into a vision.
10:03I want those 10,000 rupees back with interest.
10:06So I have made very big films.
10:08I have earned the right to make big films.
10:12So the subconscious or what remains in the back is a lot of angst and chaos.
10:19Out of that comes all my work intuitively.
10:23It is how I respond.
10:26I would not like to, but since I am here and this is the first and the last time I will be talking to an audience.
10:33You are going to have so much fun.
10:34You will want to do this every other month.
10:38Ask them, not me.
10:43So you realize how much power of communication from their effect to this child.
10:51So all that cinema that comes out of Devdas is a tribute to that alcohol bottle my father cherished.
10:57And then I have every film as a subtext.
11:00From that subtext comes out the natural expression.
11:05It is not here is a story of a spy who goes here and does this.
11:10There was action and there was beautiful dialogue.
11:12No, no, no. It is personal cinema.
11:15This cinema is uncomfortable.
11:17My films will never be the blockbuster that other directors would give.
11:20It is not about counting crores.
11:22It is about impressions of what came on to me as an artist.
11:27Can I put them back?
11:29Filmmaking is a very, very dear most thing to me in my life.
11:36It is my God. It is my mother. It is my father. It is my lover.
11:39Everything is cinema.
11:41If I look at it, in some birth I may have been a poet.
11:46In some birth I may have been a musician.
11:49In some birth I may have been an architect.
11:51In some birth I may have been a painter.
11:53In some birth I may have been nothing.
11:56But in this birth I am a filmmaker.
11:58And I now take all those experiences because I know that my soul is old.
12:03It knows a few things.
12:05And that is the subconscious from where things emerge.
12:09Because it comes from so many lives.
12:12It is abstract.
12:13It may be a little awkward for a lot of people to listen and say what crap, what nonsense is he talking.
12:18But this is the time to combine all those births and all that I know from the past
12:23into one art form which allows it all to come together.
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