Adoor Gopalakrishnan: I believe you, normally, invite politicians. I hardly have any politics of my own. I am not even involved in the politics of cinema. I just make films. People ask me, do you make art films? Or, why don’t you make commercial films? I say, every film I make is commercial. The moment I release my films in cinema houses, the moment people are buying tickets to see the film, it’s a commercial film. Unfortunately, we believe only singing and dancing and the improbabilities shown on the screen make commercial cinema. It’s not true. This misconception about what is cinema is widespread. Not only in our country but even abroad, Indian cinema means Bollywood. In India, we have many Indian cinemas. People tend to say, there is Hindi cinema and then there is regional cinema. It’s a wrong term to use. The best of Hindi cinema is regional. Bollywood is a cinema that doesn’t belong to anything, because it doesn’t address any particular problem. You are made to dream, but these are dreams that you wake up from feeling extremely bad. Whereas the function of art is to make you live, to love life in the most affectionate way. It should equip you to understand yourself, to make you understand the people around you, the society you live in. And, to make you feel what another person is feeling — what we call compassion, a concern for others. If cinema teaches you to escape from the real, I call it a negative cinema. I belong to that minority of filmmakers in this country who try to relate their work with the life they live. When I give an introduction to my films abroad, I tell the audience that unless, at some level, you relate to the culture in which these films are set, you won’t really understand the films. And for that very reason, ironically, they also tend to be universally understood, because they are relevant. When I look at an Ingmar Bergman film, I learn a lot about life lived in Sweden, not the externals, but the real internal lives of people. That’s the function of art. In India, when you look at Satyajit Ray’s work or Mrinal Sen’s work or Ritwik Ghatak’s film, you get to know the people.

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