In this episode of THR Talks, Anupama Chopra engages with the legendary filmmaker Sanjay Leela Bhansali, who shares his profound insights into the world of cinema. With over two decades of experience, Bhansali reflects on the duality of his artistic journey—feeling both blessed and cursed by the craft he cherishes deeply.
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00:00Filmmaking is the dearest thing to me in my life.
00:05It's my God, it's my mother, it's my father, it's my lover, everything is cinema.
00:12You have to understand that I am very cursed and very blessed.
00:17I am very loved and I am very hated.
00:19I am very successful and I am very unsuccessful.
00:30And when you have somebody to talk to, you are not lonely.
00:39When you are not lonely, you don't get tired very fast.
00:42You don't feel exhausted, you don't feel low in life.
00:45And art should be created out of loneliness, yes, out of angst, yes, but out of great joy.
00:53So now I am a little, I am a joyous filmmaker, I am a happy filmmaker.
01:00Hello everyone, welcome to THR Talks.
01:13This is the first on-ground event for The Hollywood Reporter India.
01:17And I cannot tell you how thrilled I am to kick it off with an artist who has mesmerized audiences for more than 25 years.
01:29I think he has changed the aesthetic of Indian cinema.
01:33And I would say that there is more beauty in our lives because of him.
01:38So please put your hands together for the incomparable Sanjay Leela Bhansali.
01:59So Sanjay, I am going to begin.
02:03One second, how many of you love me?
02:05You can go for it now.
02:10I am going to start by diving into the deep end.
02:16Okay, with something you said just after Guzarish.
02:20And your words were, I didn't realize how tired I was until the film was over.
02:27Then my body just gave up.
02:29All my films are a process of self-annihilation for me.
02:33With every film of mine, a part of me gets left behind.
02:38Is this still the process?
02:41No, that has changed.
02:42With time, everything changes.
02:44Tell me what happened.
02:45After Guzarish, if you realize, I was very rejuvenated.
02:48I realized that black didn't work very well at the box office.
02:54Sabariya didn't work well at the box office.
02:57Guzarish didn't work well at the box office.
03:01So maybe it was in that state of mind where I said that I am feeling very tired.
03:06I am feeling I have left behind a lot which has not been seen or understood or acknowledged.
03:11So then you got up and said, well, let me get back to my Bhuleshwar basic melodramatic self.
03:21So came Ramlila, Bajirao, Padmavats, Gangubai, Hiramandi.
03:26I just am not tired anymore.
03:28And I have yet left a lot of myself in each work that I do.
03:33It's very intense.
03:35My work is like I work like a Mazdoor.
03:39All those big sets and the opulence and the beauty that you see.
03:45It comes out of hours and hours and months and years of hard work
03:50which you enjoy.
03:51It's not that you have to just do hard work and labor.
03:54You have to enjoy.
03:55You have to be inspired doing that work.
03:57So I've been very inspired.
03:58I've enjoyed doing war sequences for a change and action sequences for a change.
04:04And after Devdas, the big song dance routines.
04:10So there was so much of life that came into me and all that I wanted to pay tribute to
04:17great characters like Bajirao, like Padmavats, like Gangubai.
04:20And I chose those characters because they are a part of,
04:23they helped me express through my film a part of something that I was,
04:28that I am, that I've seen, that I've experienced.
04:30Otherwise I wouldn't make those films.
04:32So part of me still is left behind.
04:35I do finish seeing some chapter which closes.
04:38Then after two films I realize it has not gone.
04:41Those moments of your life which you grow up with,
04:44which inspire you to make a particular character or a particular film.
04:47You feel you've said it.
04:48You've done it.
04:49You have purged.
04:52But then you've not because it again comes back to you in some way.
04:56And you realize that, yeah, Gangubai, I know I made two mistakes.
04:59I know I left two things behind unsaid.
05:01We'll try and solve it somewhere.
05:04So a part of me is always going to get exhausted given.
05:08But I have now started enjoying because I got the love of the audience.
05:13When your work is seen, is understood, it is, the audience is interacting with it.
05:19They've understood your way of filmmaking.
05:21They grant you that place that, okay, we are audience.
05:24We may not like your film sometimes.
05:26We like your film sometimes.
05:27But I found that dialogue.
05:29And when you have somebody to talk to, you're not lonely.
05:32When you're not lonely, you don't get tired very fast.
05:35You don't feel exhausted.
05:36You don't feel low in life.
05:38And art should be created out of loneliness, yes, out of angst, yes, but out of great joy.
05:46So now I'm a little, I'm a joyous filmmaker.
05:49I'm a happy filmmaker.
05:50How lovely.
05:51Oh.
05:52And speaking of a dialogue with the audience, Netflix recently released What We Watched,
06:02which is what people watched in the first half of this year.
06:06Heera Mandi folks, the only Indian series in the top hundred of Netflix.
06:11How amazing.
06:15So that's definitely a dialogue.
06:18But let's talk a little bit about this process of creation.
06:22Here's what I'm fascinated by.
06:25Don't look like that, dear.
06:26No, no.
06:27I'm already thinking of how many times have I said it and I have to say it a little differently one more time.
06:33No, no.
06:34Here's my question.
06:35Okay.
06:36Here's my question.
06:37You've always said that it's very much a subconscious sort of flowering, right?
06:44You told me lalish came to you when you were taking a shower.
06:49Images, characters, lyrics, music, it all just springs out of you.
06:55You're not a filmmaker who's fussed about research or rehearsals or, you know, even somebody who's extremely connected to being realistic in that very literal sense.
07:09What we see when we come to your cinema is the world you create.
07:12Right.
07:13But making movies is so expensive.
07:16It's all about deadlines.
07:18The subconscious is so mysterious.
07:21It's so unknowable.
07:23Is there a contradiction there?
07:26Like, how do you sort of make the subconscious work to what you want it to?
07:34It's a difficult question, isn't it?
07:38You have to understand where I come from in the first place.
07:42If you visualize a small little chawl in 300 square feet, colorless, the walls had no color.
07:50And we had a family of four or five people living in a cramped place.
07:55The conversation that I heard early in my life was when my father invested money in some film called Jhaji Lotera, which was released before I was born.
08:03But while I was born and I was growing up and I started understanding words, all I heard was that cinema mein paisa dalna nahin chahiye.
08:10Dekho where we've landed up.
08:12How do we do?
08:14Yet the lure of cinema in my family remained so much that when my grandmother collected some 10,000 rupees out of whatever she was finding,
08:22she went and invested in a film called Sone Ke Haath.
08:25That's 10,000 rupees to the producer who was my father's friend.
08:29We never got that back.
08:31But this child who was staying in that house realized that I started living in a dream world.
08:40The reality was very harsh.
08:42So I would never go anywhere near a realistic film or anything that is real or anything that is...
08:48It has to be in my mind.
08:50That mind of the real world I rejected.
08:52I feel I'm that filmmaker who has painted those 300 square feet of walls into innumerable number of huge, beautifully painted, designed sets.
09:04Because that is where the dream started.
09:07That is the power of watching something that you...
09:12I get emotional when I talk about it.
09:14But that is where the filmmaker is born.
09:18Now what happens is that you are living in a parallel world.
09:23Everybody doesn't understand that.
09:26To go with my grandmother to get that 10,000 rupees from the producer took hours and hours of walking back to Colaba,
09:32coming back all the way.
09:33She would carry a bottle of water so that if we are hungry we would drink that water.
09:38Is this what cinema does to you?
09:41This is the film.
09:42My mother used to dance.
09:43Beautiful dancer.
09:44She would dance in that 100 square feet that she would get.
09:47So after that my heroines danced in the biggest sets ever shot in a Hindi cinema.
09:53So all that angst, which I was an intelligent kid to understand, to imbibe, to react,
10:00to translate it into a vision.
10:03I want those 10,000 rupees back with interest.
10:06So I have made very big films.
10:08I have earned the right to make big films.
10:12So the subconscious or what remains in the back is a lot of angst and chaos.
10:19Out of that comes all my work intuitively.
10:23It is how I respond.
10:26I would not like to, but since I am here and this is the first and the last time I will be talking to an audience.
10:33You are going to have so much fun.
10:34You will want to do this every other month.
10:38Ask them, not me.
10:43So you realize how much power of communication from their effect to this child.
10:51So all that cinema that comes out of Devdas is a tribute to that alcohol bottle my father cherished.
10:57And then I have every film as a subtext.
11:00From that subtext comes out the natural expression.
11:05It is not here is a story of a spy who goes here and does this.
11:10There was action and there was beautiful dialogue.
11:12No, no, no. It is personal cinema.
11:15This cinema is uncomfortable.
11:17My films will never be the blockbuster that other directors would give.
11:20It is not about counting crores.
11:22It is about impressions of what came on to me as an artist.
11:27Can I put them back?
11:29Filmmaking is a very, very dear most thing to me in my life.
11:36It is my God. It is my mother. It is my father. It is my lover.
11:39Everything is cinema.
11:41If I look at it, in some birth I may have been a poet.
11:46In some birth I may have been a musician.
11:49In some birth I may have been an architect.
11:51In some birth I may have been a painter.
11:53In some birth I may have been nothing.
11:56But in this birth I am a filmmaker.
11:58And I now take all those experiences because I know that my soul is old.
12:03It knows a few things.
12:05And that is the subconscious from where things emerge.
12:09Because it comes from so many lives.
12:12It is abstract.
12:13It may be a little awkward for a lot of people to listen and say what crap, what nonsense is he talking.
12:18But this is the time to combine all those births and all that I know from the past
12:23into one art form which allows it all to come together.