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| Aditya Bhattacharya, Producer, Director, Actor and Writer. |
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| Producer, actor, director, Aditya Bhattacharya, in a tête-à-tête with students from the Class of 2008, Ralston Sequeira and Vinay Rajpal Raj, shares his perspectives on Bollywood feudalism, piracy, Italian film making, and the need for youth-based niche markets in cinema. |
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ISB Insight: You have been in the film business for a long time now. The management of film business is very different today. How has it evolved since?
Aditya Bhattacharya: I don’t think management of the film business has evolved at all. It is just that, at the moment, there are more people into the business, getting higher salaries and learning on the job. This is simply because most film specific professionals, say in the administration side, line producers, production managers, etc., are not people out of an institute like the ISB. They don’t usually speak English, but they are very good at what they do.
Right now, we are in an awkward space, where we are still teething. The hardcore work is being done by the same people who did it eight years ago. We just have some more people who come in fancy cars, sit around, and make marketing projections, which are a lot of hogwash.
A lot of artists have benefited from piracy and have actually thanked it. What is your take?
That is actually a very myopic way of looking at things. I believe in the unique contribution of a film-maker towards the lasting value of the film in the market place. I believe thereby that a piece of the action needs to keep going back to the film-maker even after a hundred years or so. That cannot happen if piracy prevails. In piracy, the pirate makes the money and that’s it.
If we want to replicate or get anywhere close to combat Hollywood,
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we have to absolutely maximise revenues from every single viewer around the world. Right now, I would imagine that we do not get to see about 60 percent of our global revenue. That’s a serious thing.
Does the whole economics of the film really depend upon the star?
Depends on the kind of film. If it is star-based film, then yes. I think it is an unhealthy and temporary thing. All the stars have raised their price. They know that sooner or later things will change so hard and so fast that they better get what they can now.
In the past when you saw a Basu Chatterjee film, nobody asked who is in it. He had his core audience. He made his film within that framework. Today, if you have a Mani Ratnam film, nobody asks who is in the movie. It does not actually matter. If he has big stars, yes, but even if he has one little girl and an old man, he still has his bible. It is terrifying for a filmmaker to be stuck in a situation where his casting has already been pre-decided. Yet, Shah Rukh is still the ‘Window’ of that world – he is the brand, he can still fill up a stadium bigger and better than anybody else can. We have to continue to live with the fact that we are going to have some superstars.
You made an Italian film, Senso Unico. How different are the economics of movie-making in Italy?
It is much more protected. All European economies take benefit of this idea of fighting off American global power. So, they all have subsidies. All Italian and European
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