Sanjay Leela Bhansali talks to Indu Mirani

• How do you look back on the two years plus since Saawariya and its failure? I have become a far more evolved person. I have understood what success means, what failure means, what relationships mean. What other things I need to do in cinema as an expression of finally expressing myself as a human being. What are the wrong things I have done, what are the mistakes I have made, what corrections I need to make. • How do you cope with failure? I am used to it. I started off with Khamoshi that didn't do well at all at the box office. It completely shatters your mind as a first filmmaker when you realise that your first film has completely not connected with people. It's a different matter that today people like Khamoshi a lot and think it is my best work. But as a debut it brought about a lot of turmoil in my life. It's been a long long life of seeing lots of failures on a personal and family level. I have seen lot of struggle in my house, around my house. I only started seeing success with Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam. • You always lived more in your head than in reality… Yes, and that life is very beautiful as well as the only escape from the dreary world I lived in. There is far more edge in people like me who struggle and come from nowhere. People like me are artists, connected with music, dance and painting. We are not connected to life and relationships. I think my closest relatives are the characters from my films. I have created them. They are like my children, my aunts, uncles, all of them talk to me in my mind. We are more raw, not finished as a person who has all the perks because they have seen it happening through their fathers or uncles or brothers making films or acting. The edge is very important and that is the difference between a Ritwik Ghatak and a Satyajit Ray film. The edge is the difference. • And yet you work with privileged actors, superstars…  Why? Nana Patekar is a very edgy character, Seema Biswas is very edgy. Salman for me is a very edgy person, he is not just a simple chocolate love story hero. He has got far more than that. Shah Rukh is very very dramatic in real life, very witty, wicked, sharp. They are not simple people in that sense. They are very charming, strange, temperamental stars. They are not easy people to work with at all. Amitabh Bachchan is an extremely powerful, power packed, edgy person. • Why are all your characters so emotionally disturbed? Because they have stories to tell. There has to be a tamasha in a person's life so that you can tell a story. How can you make an emotionally flat film? My films are usually about human suffering because that is something common to everyone. I have been very blessed that I have a very large audience for subjects like these. The most insulting thing for an artiste would be to be told that it doesn't matter what your work is, it doesn't matter who you are. I want my audience to go home with the film, I want them to come back to the film five years later, 20 years later. 15 years later, people are going back to Khamoshi. It is very reassuring in that sense.

• Do you play up your eccentricities?

I am not eccentric at all. I am an extremely normal human being. I am simply very passionate about my work. So it has to be done beautifully and correctly. I feel that all this that we write about filmmakers, about their eccentricities, about their personal lives, is irrelevant. What is relevant for the world is the work. People are not supposed to know how I create my work. There are so many myths about Guru Dutt, or Ritwik Ghatak or Bimal Roy or Raj Kapoor or Mehboob Khan. These are romanticised versions of filmmakers who just worked hard and were wonderfully talented people.

• But you are antisocial.

I am not anti-social. I do go to parties, when I feel it is about a close friend and I have to go. And sometimes I do go and enjoy myself completely, where I am dancing the whole night and am also laughing and cracking up
completely. So there are times when I am enjoying my life completely. Why am I answerable for wanting to be less socially active? I am not harming you. I am not taking anything away from you.

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