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I first saw Smita Patil on TV as a Doordarshan Marathi newsreader. A friend of mine knew her sister and sent her to me. I thought she represented a very Indian look. When she met me, the first thing she said is I don't want to act, so don't offer me a role. I offered her one, nonetheless which she declined. It was her mother who persuaded her to accept. Thorughout our first film she would ring up her mother every day and complain that she hated the work and couldn't understand what we were upto. It is only after she saw the film, that she understood and appreciated what we had done. However, until she acted in Bhumika and won a National Award, she didn't want an acting career. After that she took to it seriously

Pallavi Jassi: As a director, when you cast actors from the younger lot, what is it that you look for? Are you still looking for actors and not stars? And does choosing a star limit your creative insticts?

I am looking for actors and if I get a star, my work gets easier. But yes, like others, I am looking for talent to figure in the films as actors. Plus you are also looking for other talents in terms of technical support. So casting can be at times easy and some times tough.

As for creativity, you chose a star as per the part you think is in the ambit of what the star represents. So the kind of roles they have been doing in the past, you may extend it but then casting them in a new light absolutely is not all that easy. It can be dicey. But it depends but some people manage to do that. There are people who are stars because they can do all kinds of parts. Aamir Khan for instance is a huge star but at the same time does different roles brilliantly. But then we do not have too many such stars in the industry.

Aditi Das Nigam: In the past ten years, we have hardly seen a movie with a rural background. It is primarily urbanised. Do you think multiplexes and corporatisation has removed rural India from the mindscape of Bollywood filmmakers?

Shyam Benegal: Aspirations I think, people’s aspirations are responsible for the same. The whole liberalisation of the economy and the kind of urban options that people have today and also the process of urbanization itself has made the aspirations of the young are totally within the urban format. Even if you look at aspirations of the young people in the village, they are also very urban. And the entertainment media generally tend to reflect the aspirations of the young and in that space rural India seems to have fallen off the map over a period of time. I feel very sad that this has happened because half of our world is there but now in a sort of darkness, which I find very saddening. But what I have done now is my latest film Mahadev ka Sajjanpur, actually revisits a village. I want to bring the village back in and include it in our urban lives once again and not think that it does not exist anymore or goes completely out of consciousness. So the film that I have just done is set in a village but is a comic satire. It deals with today and seems as a comedy though the situation in Indian village is quite grim because the village in fact has got neglected.

Neha Sharma Bahl: You are the pioneer of the parallel cinema. What is your take on the present status of the so-called parallel cinema is it there at all?

Shyam Benegal: I don’t like, rather never liked that term “parallel cinema”. Some people did it for sake of convenience that you can neatly sideline certain films in that fashion. But it does not help. I don’t think it helps. I can only say that films since they are made as per individual sensibilities and if your sensibility work in a certain way, you surely end up making those kinds of film. At different times young people come into the film business and they start making films thinking that may be they can make films and express themselves better by not using the existent forms and also come with ideas that are different and original as compared to what is being constantly done. Because a lot of what is being constantly done is based on previous successes. When you look at the business end of it, it has always been like that. Say, for instance, if something has worked in the market as a product you bound to have people imitating the same product or you work on that model and create something else. Those who are conditioned to work as per the convention of filmmaking, then they will function very much in the mainstream areas. And those who are not may be on the margins. So that is what it was. When people used the term parallel cinema, it was not as if there was some kind of movement but what did happened was that when the Film Institute had the first batch of graduates coming into the film business, they came with certain background of the cinema and those who were from within the industry came with a certain other background of the cinema. Therefore, the films started looking different from one another. And somebody started calling these sorts of films as parallel cinema.

Surabhi: You said that you try to have a social message but since the time you started, a number of other mediums of communication have come in so do you think that cinema is playing the kind of role, it used to at one point of time?

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