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Neelima: Do you take film critics seriously?

Shyam Benegal: I have a complaint that newspapers don’t take critics seriously. National newspapers are not serious about them. They simply look out for reviewers who can tell you that see this film and don’t see that film. I think that is not the way it should be. You have to be a critic like what you have for say New York Times. We don’t have even a single person who is paid that kind of attention. We don’t have any body. In international dailies like The Guardian, The Financial Times or The Washington Post, critics are taken very seriously both by the audience and the filmmakers. They feel what they are doing is worthwhile. But here my fear is that people who write on films are not taken seriously by the newspapers, forget about the public at large. For years, I know of national newspapers who had given up writing reviews altogether. Like they had given up book reviews and the situation of music reviews is even worse. They are hardly seen. You see art has been neglected in that sense. So you when you talk about criticism, any kind of criticism to flourish, you should know the source from where it is originating. People you are writing for must appreciate you before the public. Now it has become fashionable to write criticism in a strange fashion. There was a time when everybody was exceedingly polite; the idea was not to hurt anybody’s feelings. And now what they do is to hurt everybody’s feelings. Even for television film critics it has become fashionable to say that it is awful. Please do not go and see it. We have criticisms but they are not very serious

Raghavendra: Any subject which is close to your heart and you have still not been able to make? And if you can name them, say if there are any stories which producers are not willing to sponsor?

Shyam Benegal: There are many such themes but I can’t name them until I make a film. As for not getting producers there are a number of plots in my mind. For instance, I wanted to make a film on Begum Samroo because I thought that she had a great historical importance. I wanted to capture that period of Indian history, particularly towards the end of great Mughals. It was an unsettled time in Northern India. But it also was a time when so much poetry flourished. Extraordinary things were happening in the field of art. It was to be an international production and in my mind at that time I had mentally caste Jaya Bachchan to play Begum Samroo because she had the perfect built for Samroo. I spoke about this project to Columbias in Los Angeles but nothing came out of it but then I did have a project like that. And it would have been a wonderful film, which I am sure is a possibility now than it was then. I am talking about 20 odd years ago. It was also very interesting time because a lot of these Hollywood companies who were showing films in India could not repatriate the money. They had to spend it here and some of them decided to put their money into production. So that is how that project and others like that came up. Some work was done on many of them but they never reached any where. And you just gave it up.

Raghavendra: Any film that you regret making.

Shyam Benegal: I do not regret making any film. None at all because one thing that I do not like is looking back. I don’t look back at any of them and continue to believe that all my films are flawed. None of them is totally flawless, that is an attempt to make a film that is flawless until I make them I am totally enthusiastic about them. But once I make them, I simply forget about them. That is the only way to function because I don’t feel the need to burden myself by looking back into where what went wrong.

Anushree: Is your forthcoming film on Noor Inayat Khan, your most ambitious project yet in terms of production and recreating Second World War?

Shyam Benegal: This story has been fascinating from past 13 years when I came to know of her at the tome of the 50th anniversary of the Second World War in Britain. There everybody was talking about the great heroes of the War and things were being published there. And the Indian community in London was doing there own little compilation of people of Indian origin who were also warriors but remained unacknowledged in Britain. Among the many stories was the story of Noor Inayat Khan, which I read and it struck to me as a great subject for the film and subsequently a novel came and then Sharbani Basu wrote her biography with great deal of research. The moment the book came, I read it immediately and wanted to get the rights of that book. But the rights had already been taken by Lord Meghnad Desai and Ishwar (please confirm name) so I sent a message asking them for the script and they asked me if I would like to direct the film on a condition that they would write the script and I agreed. And at the moment we are just putting it all together, the script is more or less in a shape.

Coomi Kapoor: Initially you had to struggle a lot and even keep your job while you made your first movie.

Shyam Benegal: Making fiction films for me was always seen by myself as a kind of vocation. It amy or may not be my profession but surely was a vocation in life. When I started making features, I wasn’t holding a job at that time. I got an opportunity to come out of my job because I was married and afraid of taking this risk of making a feature film which may or may not work. So I was holding on to a lucrative job as creative head in an ad agency, which was very good. But what happened was that I got the Homi Bhaba fellowship and those two years convinced me that there was no way I could do without making films. So when I came back, I was running a small advertising-film company with a friend of mine, where we made commercials. And that’s where I made my first feature film which was successful but my producer said to me that forget about money, just go on making films. You become famous and I become rich. That is what happened. A chap called Mohan Bijlani in partnership ran a company called the Blaze advertising, which were at that time the largest distributors of advertisements to be shown in cinemas in the country. And Mohan Bijlani was the person who offered me to put money into my picture but he askd me not to accept money out of it. But it did work and then they went on to produce my five more films.

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