In 2018, Imtiaz Ali took to social media to announce that he’d be directing his dream project – the ‘epic love saga’ of Radha and Krishna. “I have always been fascinated by the eternal love story of Radha and Krishna. In all of Indian folklore I know of no other story, which is so intensely personal and yet has such an epic scale (sic),” he had written. The film was supposed to be produced by Reliance Entertainment. However, it didn’t get made.
And now, in an exclusive chat with News18 Showsha, the director, for the first time, breaks silence on the love story that he was set to helm. “I want to make the Radha Krishna film. I’m very inspired by their stories and the mythology. But I’ve to bring myself to a positon where I can make it and by that I don’t mean a physical position. It’s just that I need to imbibe some of the characteristics of Radha and Krishna in myself to be able to make that film,” he tells us.
Meanwhile, he’s waiting for the right time to tell the story to the Indian audience and requests them to ‘pray’ that it happens soon. “When I’m making a film like that, I can’t do it just like that. I need to get there somehow. That time will come, hopefully. To all those who want to watch this film, I would urge them to pray that I can make it,” he smiles.
At present, Imtiaz is riding high on the success of Amar Singh Chamkila starring Diljit Dosanjh and Parineeti Chopra. This, interestingly, comes years after Jab Harry Met Sejal and Love Aaj Kal, both of which had an underwhelming performance at the box office. Needless to say, the director is thrilled especially since making the film also required taking some risks.
He explains, “I feel enthused by the fact that Chamkila has been liked. There were many things in the film that were risky. We used animation. Continuous shifts from live action to animation may not have made sense at all. The screen had translations of the songs coming up to explain its meaning.”
Imtiaz continues, “Another question we had was, can we have Punjabi songs in a Hindi film? But I didn’t want to change Chamkila’s original songs at all. There were many challenges and we responded to them with many techniques of storytelling. All of them felt right and people accepted them. It’s very gratifying.”
The success of the film has also reinstated his belief in the Indian audience who he always believed is ‘truly evolved’. Talking about how they’ve managed to catch every nuance in the film, he says, “We might say things like humaara audience bewakoof hai but I think we, as filmmakers, cannot reach the level of this audience. They’ve digested some very complicated and sophisticated texts like the Mahabharat and the Ramayana and understood every moral in them. We can’t say that we’re making films that are more complicated than these mythologies!”
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