Subhash Ghai was in town as the keynote speaker at Infocom 09-10. “I was named after Subhas Chandra Bose as I was born within a few hours of his birthday,” he smiled. A walk down memory lane with Bollywood’s original showman who has signed an agreement with the provincial government of Valencia, Spain, to set up a branch of his Whistling Woods International Institute at Alicante Film City.
You spoke on your vision for the IT-enabled media entertainment business. How has technology changed filmmaking?
I have been making films for 35 years now. When I was making Kalicharan it took three days to change a shot as the whole film reel had to be run all over again. Today it takes three clicks of the button to edit with a software like Final Cut Pro. With digital prints available, there is no need to send badly scratched films to the B and C centres.
How has the movie-making business changed?
So many ways have evolved in terms of generating revenue. In our time, we sold all music rights to HMV. Today, 85 per cent of music sales come from Internet and mobile rights and barely 15 per cent from physical sale of albums. For Taal, I paid Aishwarya (Rai) less than Rs 30 lakh. In two years when she became a big star, I felt guilty and told her “I am sorry I paid you so little.” She said: “No Subhashji, I am thankful to you. I have earned Rs 3.5 crore by dancing that Taal song in stage shows.” Now I, Yash Raj... we all include a clause on share of income from shows in our contracts. But the art and craft of story-telling is the same. You still got to tell a story with your heart.
You started as an actor. How did you shift to direction?
I did five films. But I felt uncomfortable in front of the camera, with people telling me “Bhai aisa karo, waisa karo.” (He played the young Rajesh Khanna in Aradhana) I realised acting is not right for me, I’d rather be a writer. I had written six scripts which I took to various producers. One of them said, “Why don’t you direct it?” I said ok. That was Kalicharan in 1975.
You have worked with the biggest names. Which actors were the most involved?
Most involved were Shah Rukh in Pardes and Dilip Kumar. I am the only director to have done three films with Dilip Kumar. Not for a single shot did we have a conflict. There were disagreements but in a sweet way. He’d say: “Yaar, kyun yeh karwa rahe ho mujhko? Main buddha ho gaya hoon.” I learnt so much from him, especially about the technique of performance. Jackie, Anil, Madhuri and Sanjay — they were my students. I had introduced Sanjay. Vidhata was his second film. For Khalnayak, 10 years later, I told him: “I can cast you on one condition — that you dedicate yourself, you can’t go loose.” He promised and worked very hard. We would shoot up to 2 ’clock at night when 8pm was the normal pack-up. All actors are child-like. Directors are like mothers.
How was the experience of tackling Dilip Kumar and Raaj Kumar together inSaudagar?
The film was shot in Kulu-Manali. Every paper wrote that the film would take years to complete. But we shot in nine months. Both are senior actors. Yet they had to surrender to me. I started calling them Chunnu-Munnu. I’d send word, “Chunnu ko bula, Munnu aa gaya.” The whole unit started calling them that. At the end of the film, they also got to know that they had been named like that. Dono mein competition toh tha hi. It helped me. Raaj Kumar particularly used to come up and say: “He has better lines.” I’d tell him: “No, you have better lines. He is speaking better.”
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