ShekharKapur

What took you so long to get back to directing a feature film?

Oh! You know I was exploring other ways to tell stories. I am a story-teller. And part of the job of a storyteller is to tell stories in any form that he or she can. So I also do theatre. I do musical theatre. In Expo 2020 Dubai I did a

Oneof the most celebrated filmmakers internationally, Oscar-nominated and the National Award winning director Shekhar Kapur has never let his creativity be bound by the platforms or mediums of story-telling. From making the big screen his canvas with feature films that have made an impact and tugged at emotional strings globally to his musical spectacles that have mesmerised audience in theatres, his artistic projects have proven his brilliance as a master story-teller. While the cult classic Masoom and the mega-entertainer Mr India continue to be cinema favourites of generations across, the National Award winning Bandit Queen, Academy Award winning period drama Elizabeth, and the Oscar-nominated sequel Elizabeth: The Golden Age, along with The Four Feathers, are just some of his works that have earned the cinematic genius, recognition as a filmmaker par excellence globally. His latest directorial offering - the British romantic comedy What’s Love Got To Do With It, starring Lily James, Shazad Latif, Shabana Azmi, Emma Thompson, and Sajal Aly, with a screenplay by Jemima Khan - has garnered acclaim worldwide. While the creative nomad is also based out of Dubai, we caught up with the filmmaker whilst he’s in London. In a candid chat we talked about his penchant for women-driven stories, his perception of love and find out why his ambitious Paani is a film that needs to be made! Excerpts from our exclusive interview: huge show Why? The Musical with AR Rahman. I did a show in Switzerland and Vienna, in Germany. I did a show called Will about the young life of William Shakespeare. So it’s just that I’ve not made a movie, like a theatrical movie for a while, so now we came back.

So for us movie-goers, it’s been a long wait, I would say.

Don’t tell me you don’t watch OTT (laughs). Anyways, I also think it’s been too long since I made a movie.

So what made you take up What’s Love Got To Do With It because we know that you are extremely selective about the kind of work you associate yourself with?

I just liked the script a lot. You know, the script is the platform on which you direct. So when the company with whom I had earlier done Elizabeth - The Golden Age sent me the script by Jemima (Khan) I found it to be a very modern script. And this idea of the search for love, the search for identity, this search for intimacy, is very relatable and real. The question is: Are you in love, are you in search for love, what’s love? And immediately, it’s the biggest conversation in the world. Where do you find it, how do you find it. Most people go through their life looking for it. So I thought it would be fascinating to tell a story and the new ways, like if you are on dating apps, are you going to be able to find the love and intimacy, which sometimes is almost casual and very frequent sex. Is that the way or is arrange marriage the way? What appealed about the script was that it did not make assumptions for you. So it’s you who has to find out what works for you. But love in itself is a constant journey. It’s a constant question, a constant mystery. And if the mystery goes away then the love goes away because we love that. Many may call it a rom-com, but this is not just a rom-com, it goes deeper into the idea of relationships. Deeper into the idea of intimacy. And so at one point it just becomes a very light look, but a look into what is love and intimacy and how do people perceive it. I have my own perception.

It’s almost like an arranged marriage versus love marriage with this generation caught between the two.Were you biased about one of the two? It’s like when I was 18 years old, I had come to London. I was caught in that London of the 70s. Drugs, music… no drugs for me, but people were taking drugs all around. And the fact is… well the film doesn’t say this or that either. My own personal opinion is not something that you can always say… accha ab ho gaya hai, pyaar ho gaya hai. Ab theek hai na abhi kya hai. No, that way you’ll absolutely lose it.

Do you think that instead of becoming easier, finding love has become all the more complex now with all these dating apps and the instant gratification that the generation seeks? I think, finding love, you can make it complex for yourself quite easily. You have an arranged marriage, you live in a family, love them. But suddenly you find yourself very lonely. And when you find yourself lonely, it becomes very complex. There’s no more greater complexity than loneliness. At times we get very lonely and then you question love and relationships, and you get lonelier. So it’s never not been complex. There is an assumption that these dating apps are a way to get out of those lonely complexes. And the fear of loneliness is very strong. So perhaps there’s a lot going on these dating apps because they just don’t want to be lonely, so they get into a relationship. But then the question comes: ‘Can I find my soulmate!’ And you think may be one of these would be my soulmate. Do they find it? Maybe, I don’t know. But you know that’s what I always keep saying, love will always be a mystery. The question is, did I find love and that’s it, that’s never going to happen. What you can say is - I found somebody with whom I can explore love with. And I would never get bored of exploring love with this person. Or I would never go bored of exploring the idea of intimacy with this person because when I’m exploring love with this person, I’m exploring myself. That’s what you are you know. Whoever you fall in love with becomes a mirror to yourself. And that’s what a relationship is. And if you’re exploring and say, ‘accha ab ho gaya, its done,’ does that mean you stop exploring yourself!

You have just simplified one of the most beautiful and one of the most complex emotions. Taking that further, would you say that storytelling is your love?

Yes. But it’s something everybody does. All perception is storytelling. Anything that you look at it, if you cannot tell a story, even about an object. Then how do you perceive, how do you understand an object without understanding some story that you tell yourself about that. Otherwise, it’s nothing. It’s an object. So, from the time when human beings looked up in the sky, and saw lightning, they had to tell a story. So, it was a God of lightning and God of this and that. And we all developed mythology around those ideas because we had to tell stories to understand it. So I love story-telling because it brings everything down to the common human perception. So I tell stories all the time. I used to do that even as a child, and my mother used to say, ‘Kahani banata rehta hai.’ Like, every time I would come late, I would tell her a story and then she used to get fed-up of me and say, ‘You’re just telling me another story, you’re lying.’ And I used to say, I’m not lying; I’m just telling you a story. So, I used to have that conflict with my mother. ‘You perceive that I’m lying, I’m just telling you a story!’

As someone who feels so passionately about story-telling, do you find yourself compromising to fit into the commercials of the movie-making business?

Yeah, it was a bit of a conflict in me. Constant conflict. But the fact is, you’re not telling a story unless somebody’s listening to your story. So that’s the point. If you tell a story that somebody’s listening to, that is the idea of being commercial. It’s not just marketing. If I’m making a film and nobody is watching and understanding their own life from my film, then what’s the point of me telling that story! So I’m telling stories from my life to people where they can comprehend it so they can understand themselves through my stories. So in that way, otherwise I wouldn’t tell a story. I did Masoom which is one way of telling a story. Then I did Bandit Queen which is a completely different way of telling story. Then I did a Mr India which was another way of telling a story too. And the fact with Mr India is like people have watched it for 30 years now and everybody’s still watching it and I fail to understand that. But obviously something was told that still affects their lives. So that time was a long ago and people still watch it, and that story continues the story doesn’t end. So even a painter tells a story. So when I go to an exhibition, I watch Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’. It was so many years ago but people watch it and each time you watch it, you’re mesmerised by it because it’s telling you your story, not Van Gogh’ story. So I always have to be very honest in this. I’m not making this one for myself. I’m making a film for other people.

This year you complete four decades as a director. What has been the learning, the takeaway from your journey?

Be as simple as possible. The simpler you tell your story, the more effective the story is, the more honest the story is. Now there may be a lot of complexities in the simplicity. It’s not easy to attain that!

Your films are very women-sensitive, in fact, very women driven to a large extent. Is it a conscious thing about presenting femininity or being very pro-feminist like that?

I think that is more I am driven towards. I remember my filmmaking what it used to be at that time in Bollywood. The moment you make a story of a man, the genre of the filmmaking is that the man fights back with violence and fists. That’s boring. But when you’re dealing with women, they fight back with something that I call the Human Spirit. So if say Elizabeth was about a king, the king would have gone to war and there would have been a battle and somebody would have lost and somebody would have won. But then for Elizabeth, I had the chance to explore the spirit of a human being, because if she’s a woman, so she had to fight the country. Whether it’s Bandit Queen, same thing. Masoom, Shabana Azmi’s issue was the same. In this film also, Lily James’ issues are the same. So I find stories of women allow me a greater depth of storytelling. Stories of men, unless they are like the

Buddha or Mandela or somebody who has a very strong feminine aspect to themselves; and feminine I’m saying, we’re both masculine and feminine all of us. But I like to talk about the feminine side because it’s more spiritual because it’s more of the spirit. The masculine side is kind of violent. Then you can get it over with. That’s why I like stories about women. They are more complex, they are more about the human spirit. And I have more to explore about being human.

What’s next?

I’m going into a film which I’ve been trying to make for 12-15 years now - Paani. Because if I don’t make it now, the environmental changes that are coming, we are barely going to survive them. I had been planning to make it then, but I’m going to do it now. It’s a story about what happens when a city runs out of water. So the fundamental emotion behind it is: Is water a resource for us to manage or are we the resource for water to flow through? Every faith uses water for their spiritual aspect, yet if we don’t get it fresh, we get upset. We need to assess what water is to us.