The Filmmaker Is The Last Person To Know That He's Made A Bad Film: Ram Gopal Varma

Ram Gopal Varma aka RGV is always known for pushing boundaries in terms of new technologies and working styles in filmmaking. Explaining his new creative venture named 'Your Film', the filmmaker says, “You don't need the film industry to make a film anymore, your phone is enough. With the internet, you have access to all the relevant information. The only issue is the production and distribution of the film and this venture will try and solve it. I had access to Nagarjuna and I became RGV. There are many such RGVs who didn't have the access." That's where ‘Your Film’ comes into the picture. Through this process, the audience gets to vote and choose the team that puts a movie together.

"It is a platform to open up doors of the film industry to everyone, moving away from the so called nepotism model. Everyone has a fair chance and their fate is not decided by few people in the industry but by all people. That is why I used the term democracy in this context where it is a film by the people, for the people and of the people.”

He adds that all the technicians and actors in the film will be selected through a first round of online submissions which are ultimately voted by the audience. Then they will be tested in a reality show type of format and the final film will be produced and distributed by the Den (RGV’s production company). "Even if there is a submission from a particular person that I personally didn't like but if the public are saying they like them the best through voting, how can I be stupid to not go ahead with that? Somewhere in the future I want to make this into an ecosystem where the audience can also buy, produce and own the film.”

RGV might sound like a cynic but his words come from a place of practicality. “No one truly knows anything in the industry. Everyone is trying to outguess the taste of the general audience. This is an industry with barely 10% success,” he says. To explain this further, he gives multiple examples. “When I made Aag (2007), I wanted to show Amitabh Bachchan as a very laid-back character who is drunk on his power. So I gave him a peculiar laugh which sounded like a cough. After the film released, a very senior police officer called me and asked why my villain had a fever in the first scene. I didn't realise it till then. The filmmaker is the last person to know he's made a bad film.”

Elaborating on his mistakes and how sometimes they go unnoticed, the filmmaker goes onto share, "There are so many mistakes in my films which go unnoticed purely because of emotion. Cinema is about emotion not story. I barely had scripts for my biggest films; I just had an emotion in my head. I got my maximum flops from full bound scripts because here my mind is not active, I am just copy pasting whatever I have already done. Not that the films without scripts were all hits. They both have their own advantages and disadvantages.”