For a filmmaker, there is no experience quite as brutal as a box office flop, or the sight of an empty ticket counter at a theatre. The biggest names have suffered the humiliation of being branded a failure at some time or the other. A few of them talk to DNA about how they coped with the crisis.

Imagine this: it is a Friday and you are a filmmaker whose movie has just debuted. You fight jangled nerves as you watch audiences spill out of the hall after the make-or-break ‘first day first show’. They look totally unimpressed. A few are vocally tearing the film apart. The writing is on the wall. Your movie is a flop.

Empty theatres are a filmmaker’s worst nightmare. And every successful filmmaker has dealt with it at some point in his or her career.

“I cried profusely at a friend’s place when I realised that my first film was a flop,” says
director Madhur Bhandarkar recalling his first low budget masala film Trishakti.

Bhandarkar remembers going from one theatre to another — Shaan in Vile Parle and Alankar in Girgaum among them — to gauge audience reactions. It didn’t take him long to figure out that the film was a dud.

Today Bhandarkar can rationally analyse the film’s failure: the producers wanted a complete masala entertainer while he was pulling in another direction. Trishakti’s
collapse taught him an important lesson — that a director should stay true to his vision.
But it is easier to be wise in retrospect.

Most filmmakers say that the box office fate of their films took them by surprise. For instance, Rumi Jafry who has written some of Bollywood’s funniest screenplays, thought he had a sure winner in God Tussi Great Ho, his directorial debut. The scale was ambitious, the star cast great. Yet it failed to draw viewers. “Before the release, everything seems rosy. You dream about ‘housefull’ boards at theatres and the sound of coins falling at the box office. Then reality strikes,” quips Jafry.

The one man who finds nothing even remotely funny about a film’s failure is the producer who puts in the crores and the resources. Boney Kapoor is an old hand at this. For the last 30 years, he has produced a number of films: a few did well but many did phenomenally bad business. “Yes, I went wrong a few times. But what works with the audience, can’t be predicted,” says Kapoor.

The ‘few times’ Kapoor went wrong in the past few years, he gave us films like Khushi, Kyun… Ho Gaya Na?, Koi Mere Dil Se Poochhe and Shakti. Among these, Kapoor believes that Shakti is one film he would like to go back to, “because it had potential. We just didn’t execute it right the first time round”.

But Kapoor’s biggest disaster was the extravagantly-mounted Roop Ki Rani Choron Ka Raja. Released in 1993, the film boasted a record-breaking budget. But none of the hype around the film could save it. “While watching bits of the film during production, I had a feeling that things were going wrong. I tried to rectify the damage by having highlights introduced at regular intervals in the plot but it was in vain,” he recalls.

It was Satish Kaushik’s first film and a debut disaster could have sunk him. But he bounced back to deliver huge hits like Tere Naam and Mujhe Kuchh Kehna Ha.

There are many such directors who started off shaky but steadied themselves later.
Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Khamoshi, Ashutosh Gowariker’s Pehla Nasha, Rakeysh Mehra’s Aks and Kunal Kohli’s Mujhse Dosti Karoge were all debut debacles.

Director Abhishek Kapoor says the key to success is finding the right team to work with. He was lucky to find suitable producers in Farhan Akhtar and Ritesh Sidhwani to back his second film, Rock On, after his debut effort, Aryan, sank without a trace at the box office. The Sohail Khan-starrer was produced by first timer Tele Brands, who Kapoor believes did not have the experience to market the film.

“You can’t just hope to make a good film. You also have to find the people who’ll market it with passion. If I were to make Aryan again, I’d make it in English, and try to cater to the international audience,” says Kapoor.

But the box office is a fickle entity and no formula is fail-proof. Film writer Bhawana
Somaaya has an interesting theory: the audience can ‘smell’ a bad film even before it is released. Trade analyst Komal Nahta points out that most big flops lack one simple ingredient: a good script. “Take the example of Drona. Its makers thought they could hoodwink people with special effects, but they could not cover up the special defects in the screenplay,” he says.

Is there a way to ensure a hit then? In the olden days, leading filmmakers would discuss their screenplays with their contemporaries in order to gauge how their film would be
received by audiences. “BR Chopra would send his script to Raj Kapoor, Raj Kapoor to Mehboob Khan. Today, everyone thinks his/her film is the best. It’s the overconfidence that does them in,” says Somaaya. Raj Kapoor would, in fact, run the first cut of his film past his family, staff and even domestic help to gauge their response. If it didn’t sit well with his experimental audience, he would make changes to the film.

This is no longer the case. The plot of every film is guarded fiercely, and when it arrives on the screen many fail to live up to the mystery created around it. Every Friday, now, comes as a revelation, both for the audience and the filmmaker.