Shut Up And Party With The Bachchan!

His take on the changes in cinema and the need of the hour... Amitabh Bachchan shares it all, with a sprinkling of his sparkling wit, with Shubarna Mukerji Shu.

- Shubarna Mukerji Shu

 

 

His have been the eyes of time where Hindi cinema is concerned. He has seen it through the angry ’70s, the racy ’80s, the horrid ’90s and well into the neo-millennium. For someone who has been our constant, we had to ask him how cinema has stirred and shaken him, his work and his perspective. Here’s what the coolest dude of Hindi cinema has to say about the movies and the magic.

This being our 42nd anniversary, it’s flashback time. Having grown with Bollywood, how do you perceive the changes in the industry? Are there any old school ways that you miss in this corporatised jungle?

Corporatisation was inevitable. Whether it is successful or not, time will tell. But it is an essentiality. It brings in professional culture, administration and accountability; a most urgent and mandatory need. There is the obvious technological change – equipments, innovative machinery that makes work less cumbersome, computerisation etc - but most important of all, there is no ‘film’. That roll of celluloid has become redundant; all work is now on digital. The immediate effect of that is change in our vocabulary. Words like celluloid and film that entered the domain of cinema are now absent and gone. Moving with the times is a clichéd observation, but factually quite relevant. Society, morals, political, geographical changes are observed by creators of cinema story tellers and they start reflecting in their work. Speed of communication has evolved. The number of editing cuts in earlier films would be much less than what we notice now. The power of the ‘stay’ has reduced. Audiences do not have time for that. Instant or rapid progress is appreciated and therefore the method of story-telling changes. This brings in change in performance, in direction, in writing.