CINEMA PARADISO

VIKRAMADITYA MOTWANE'S WEB SERIES JUBILEE IS THE TALK OF THE TOWN. HE TELLS TANZIM PARDIWALLA WHAT MADE HIM WRITE A NOSTALGIC LOVE LETTER TO THE HINDI FILM INDUSTRY

- TANZIM PARDIWALLA

Ask any film geek who their favourite Hindi cinema personalities are and more often than not, they’ll cite the greats - Satyajit Ray, Raj Kapoor, Guru Dutt, among others. It’s easy to slip into the rabbit hole of the classics and yearn for the Golden Age of Bollywood. That yearning contends with the realities of a film industry that was just learning to walk against the backdrop of the India-Pakistan Partition in Vikramaditya Motwane’s period drama Jubilee. Having directed some of the most experimental films of our times - Lootera, Udaan, Bhavesh Joshi Superhero, AK vs AK and produced equally fascinating titles, Motwane set out to dig into the nuances of what it meant to make movies in the late ’40s and ’50s and penned an opulent love letter about the era, featuring Prosenjit, Aditi Rao Hydari, Aparshakti Khurana and others. Excerpts from an interview with the enigmatic and enchanting filmmaker:

WHERE DID THE INITIAL IDEA FOR JUBILEE COME FROM?

It began the moment when we were all realising that the topic was shifting from movies to series. It wasn’t about have you seen the latest film, it was more about have you seen the latest episode of Game of Thrones or House of Cards or Mad Men? The idea that was doing the rounds was that what if we did a really interesting behind-the-scenes series about the Golden Age of Indian cinema? Me and Soumik Sen ended up creating a template of the world and what these stories could be. I gave it to Atul Sabarwal and he turned it into something interesting.

WHAT WENT INTO THE OPULENT WORLD-BUILDING OF JUBILEE?