00:00I think the thing of what the perception of the film will be should be the last
00:15thing on a filmmaker's mind. I think the first thing that he or she needs to
00:18absolutely come from the point is whether the belief is total because this
00:23is a long journey. I mean even if we started April of 2014 and we're here
00:292016, that's two years of my life. So if I didn't believe in the
00:34material, if I didn't absolutely love and believe in the material, there's no point
00:39in taking this journey.
00:44I'm constantly asked why you know children's films don't do well in India,
00:48why we don't have a genre and why Disney and Pixar do things so amazingly well.
00:53It's because of exactly this, that they don't dumb it down to the point of
00:59incoherence for the adults in trying to reach out to the kids. The irony with
01:06Dhanak is it's a film with two kids, never ever thought it was a children's
01:10film. I never thought till in Berlin it got selected in the generation K plus
01:15which is a children's section. I was like oh so my initial jolt was oh are they
01:20treating it like a children's film but when we won the Grand Prix in Berlin
01:24that is given by the adult jury. So that was reinforcement that now I you know
01:31the space that I'm sort of making the film in appeals to the kids but
01:37absolutely appeals to the adult. There's not a single adult, not a single
01:40screening. 43 film festivals worldwide so far who've come out and say oh man
01:44that was boring I just sat through you know the film for my kids.
01:51That is sort of the bane of children's acting in India. Irrespective of whether
01:58it was a child's film or a film you know made for the adults with kids just
02:03playing a role, kids need to just be themselves and and that's the challenge
02:07because the worst part about today is there's such a strong conditioning of
02:11how kids need to behave and especially kids who are even remotely considering
02:15acting, they're all conditioned by this and these two kids came with a little
02:19bit of TV and you know Krish had done a couple of films in smaller roles and
02:24they're all playing cute. The crazy thing is these two kids are phenomenal off
02:29camera you flick a camera on and they go into cute mode that's that's the
02:33conditioning. So even with Krish and Hidhal the the challenge was to de-train
02:39them initially. And the moment they got it in their heads oh we can be
02:45ourselves in front of the camera and that was sort of the tone that was set
02:50for the entire film.
02:53Filmmaking is such a personal, personal, instinctual call okay there's no right
03:01or wrong that I really cannot trust anyone else. I'm talking about opinions
03:08or input I mean that is just my so when you have such an intense sort of selfish
03:16way of dealing or telling a story it becomes very hard to find other people
03:24to get invested in it if they don't believe as strongly and that always
03:30becomes a little bit of a challenge. Let's say I was one of those filmmakers
03:33who was a little more easygoing someone said you know look at those girls or you
03:37know look at that actress she's good for and you say okay you cast them. I've
03:42always said filmmaking is not a democracy it's a pure and simple
03:47dictatorship. So when you have that kind of madness towards making a film I mean
03:53I'll say the same thing I'm the sum total of my technicians and yada yada all
03:58that is it's good rhetoric actually. The truth of the matter is you can have the
04:03greatest technician but if I don't say huh that's a good shot leave it in the
04:07film or that's a bad shot take it out of the film then there's nothing. So it's
04:11there's someone constantly saying yes no yes no so it becomes challenging to
04:17somehow to sometimes get people invested in your idea yeah.
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