We have to take the hint: Arjun Kapoor

Speaking with Arjun Kapoor is never time wasted. One always comes away with hope. He seems to understand and comprehend what works and what are the failings of cinema in Bollywood, in its current avatar. Also, as a star kid — dad Boney is a known producer and uncle Anil and Sanjay actors — he is intricately aware, despite being only a few films old — why certain films work here and others don’t. As an insider and industry watcher, he has a unique perspective on why Hollywood regularly outperforms us, what we need to fight back and how we ought to create homegrown superheroes and internationally acclaimed animation films. Here’s what he had to say on a variety of topics...

On Hollywood outperforming us

“Along with us, the South East Asian film industries are also doing fairly well, so we aren’t the ‘last surviving industry’. Their films, content-wise, production-wise, and even recovery-wise have become pretty decent. Take for example, The Jungle Book, which did great business globally, including in India. It’s an Indian story with Indian characters. The dubbed version of the film did better business here than the English one. We have to take the hint that audiences are watching films like these in Hindi. The English film-viewing market has eaten into our business because our content is not good enough. If we provide great content on the same day, even our films would do well. There is food for thought that we have to pull up our socks.”

Audience ka signal

“The audience is giving us a signal... ‘ki yaar, tum log kuch banaoge jo hum logo ne nahi dekha, toh hum aake dekhenge theatre mein’. It’s just the way you look at it. I completely understand that the thought of Hollywood taking over Bollywood has come up, but they can never do it, because we consume films in Hindi. English films dubbed in Hindi do well. Almost 60 per cent of their collections in India come from the Hindi version. What people don’t realise here is for every Jungle Book and Fast & Furious film, there are 20-30 other films, which are dubbed and they still don’t do well here. Even they have flops, it comes to India. Here, certain kind of films do well like action so there’s F&F which has become a franchise everyone’s looking forward to. People love such films. Vin Diesel is the typical Hindi film hero in that sense.”

On the absence of superheroes in B-Town

“Hollywood makes superhero films. We don’t make as many of them here. Indians love mythology and their superhero films are like mythologies. They have a backstory, they have a journey, they have a reason for becoming who they have become. There’s an added element of kids liking it. So overall, it’s a deep-rooted thought about content more than anything else. We have to be aware and we should learn from it rather than get scared of it.”

On lack of good animation flicks

“We do not make great animated films. We don’t even try much, I feel. We cannot imagine a budget that they have. But never say never. Also, we have never had that one film that made people wake up and notice. We never had a genre-breaking film. The day that happens, things will change drastically. Budget is, of course, a reason. But then, people think that ‘Arre, it will take around three years to make an animated film. Let’s just make a live film’. In India, it’s more about speed, people don’t want to wait that long to complete any project. In the special effects studios we have, there are a lot of American elements that are sublet into the Indian VFX agencies that are doing great work. But also there needs to be a director with a foresight and the passion to make an animated film. With Baahubali doing so well, it changed the thought process about period films. You need an animation film to pull off what Baahubali did — to cut through all language barriers, audiences — and then you feel okay, we can afford to do it The moment that happens, we will see a lot more animated films.”