Bollywood sells that dream of fame and glamour to everybody because it needs to, to survive. But actually the story is tougher… I would not want to paint a rosy picture for young people aspiring to be here.

‘A world of hurt awaits you baby, because I can only promise you a lot of pain!’ I would not want to paint a rosy picture for young people aspiring to be here.

See, the film industry is disproportionately visible and disproportionately hyped for the amount of people it can sustain, for the amount of capital base it has. For example, for the steel industry it could be a few lakh crores, divided into the number of people it can sustain and so there will be millions working in the steel industry. But the film industry is a very low capital base industry; it’s really not very big in terms of the money it operates with when you compare it to banking, or manufacturing, or FMCG, marketing or whatever. But the problem is that the film industry is visible disproportionately and because in India particularly the film industry is hugely star-oriented and Bollywood has figured out a way of being in the news continuously, so it becomes easy to over-estimate the financial strength of the industry. But the truth is that it is not that big and there isn’t room for a huge number of people.

Bollywood sells that dream of fame and glamour to everybody because it needs to, to survive. But actually the story is tougher.

So I would rather shatter illusions. Only if you say, ‘I want to make a film because I want to say something,’ should you attempt it. Because only then can you survive. If it’s for any other reason, you won’t.

It is my belief that to become a good filmmaker, you have to be a good reader, you have to be a good traveller, you have to be into food, you have to be into music, you have to be into people, you have to be a good watcher, you have to be a good listener… all these things are very important because that’s what you funnel down into the screen in front of you. If you haven’t heard how a Jat in Delhi talks or seen how fights break out in DTC buses, and if you haven’t carried that in your head and you have not obsessed about that, then you will not be able to make Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! For instance, I used to travel in buses all the time in Delhi, even when I had a car, just to be in touch, just to hear the language, just to hear the sound and just to see people interact.

But if you are just looking for fame and if you are looking to hobnob with the stars and get your face on page 3, then really, don’t bother.

So I think I would push you to go through a lot of introspection before making this decision.

Well, what I have realised is that every last person on earth wants to express himself or herself, but a banker or an engineer expresses himself/herself, on an average basis, far less than a filmmaker, or a writer, or a lyricist, or a script writer does. The number of times I have had my school friends saying to me – ‘Yaar, I have this story, you make a film.’ Everybody has got a story, everybody has got things hidden in their heart, everybody has got emotions, but modern life does not allow you to unlock them really, in other professions. And I think the main reward is that there is a chance that you could be a little more unlocked, a little freer than your average successful banker… By the way, the banker who loves banking would be as free as me. But there are far more bankers, far more engineers and far more system analysts who are doing it because they are just doing it, it’s a job. Filmmaking cannot be a job, it is a true calling. All the directors, singers, writers, lyricists, music directors, production designers, cinematographers, who are known for their work and who are famous are pursuing it as a way of life first and then as a bread-winning job.

And you know, once in a while, the craft of cinema ends up as art. For me, art is supposed to communicate a feeling or an emotion that you can’t say with words and which lingers with you. And art is not reality, art is not truth, art is not social comment, art is not protest, art is art. Take any late Fellini, or a few of Ritwik Ghatak films, or a few sequences of Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s films. There is something in them that’s bigger or beyond the sum total of the song, the story, the music, the shot, the actor. Raging Bull for me, for instance, will always be art. And that’s worth aspiring for, though you can never consciously try and do it.

What’s also rewarding is that you are your own boss.

It’s true for actors as well, but there’s a lot more ego and self-projection involved, because an actor uses his or her physical self – body, voice, face.

For aspiring actors, I would advise that they be clear about this – That what an actor does is provide an average human being a vision of life that he cannot himself have. And this is the way it has been for the last 10,000 years. 10,000 years ago, near a village or a cave somewhere, there would be one storyteller who would write the story, sing the story, act the story and tell the story. So he would be all rolled into one and he would make all those villagers sitting around a fireside go through the emotions of a hero flying through the sky. Because they can’t fly through the sky. And that night of imagining a hero flying through the sky makes the next day better, or more bearable. It makes existence a little less painful.

So what an actor truly does is that he makes the burden of normal, average Joes a little lighter. It’s a deep, deep job but what happens is that in a society like India, which is deeply disempowered and unjust and which is very, very poor, a lot of people start hanging their dreams and their fascinations and their obsessions onto you. And therefore the phenomenon of the star emerges. That is why a poorer country will always have a more powerful star than a richer country. So I would advise them to be mindful of that.

To answer that, let’s place it in some context.

The cinema industry all over the world is going through a churn on what kind of films to make so that you can make money. The problem is that the more people you want to reach, the less specific you can be. One way to see it is that you can be more universal but I also think that it tends to be emptier. The more people you want to reach out to, the more you have to mean nothing. So instead of saying something to a fewer number of people, you end up saying nothing to a huge number of people. And you basically catch them by the scruff of their necks, take their money and run. And that’s the kind of film making that has happened over the last 10 years.

The young people who are reading this must know that this has got to do with the absolute rise of the new economy, the new capitalism, which all started in the mid-80s with Thatcher and Reagan, and later in India, with Narasimha Rao. The space for intimate and sensitive and penetrative things slowly began to be taken over by big bloated giants. To tell you the truth, today it is far more difficult to make Khosla ka Ghosla than it was 10 years ago, though one would assume that it would be easier now that filmmakers like us who have known to have brought in that new wave, have been working, working, working, but it’s actually becoming harder for individual voices to come through. It is still happening though, and I don’t think one needs to lose hope but be realistic and aware of where things are coming from. And where they’re headed.

The biggest thing that is changing today is the way a film is seen, I don’t know how long the phenomenon of seeing a film on the big screen will last.