One of the surprise hits of 2006, Dibakar Banerjee’s Khosla Ka Ghosla, lay in the cans for several years before it got into distribution. The rest is a fairy tale. Saket Chaudhary had to wait for two long years before he could get his Pyaar Ke Side Effects off the ground. When he did, it turned out to be an unqualified success. As lead actor Rahul Bose says, “The quality of the writing made all the difference.”

Good ideas and smart scripts still demand a degree of patience, but they do not go abegging. There is enough elbowroom in the industry today for a filmmaker like Kukunoor. In the wake of the rousing success of the Subhash Ghai-produced Iqbal, he went ahead with his next film (the wonderfully well made Dor) entirely on his own steam.

Ramesh Sharma, who co-directed the critically acclaimed television documentary, The Journalist and the Jihadi: The Murder of Daniel Pearl last year, provides a somewhat different perspective on the incipient Bollywood revolution: “The entrepreneur-filmmaker does exist, but only in the low-budget commercial filmmaking space. If you want wide distribution, you have to join hands with a big player.” That’s precisely what Barua and Chaudhary did. The former had his film distributed by Yashraj Films, no less. The latter had the support of Pritish Nandy.

Says Shahnaab Alam, executive producer of films like Sanjay Gadhvi’s Dhoom and Imtiaz Ali’s Socha Na Tha, debut films both: “The breed of filmmakers who refuse to let their vision be diluted and their scripts be tampered with is definitely growing. These filmmakers instinctively turn to like-minded producers rather than seeking to work with the big production houses.”

... contd.