The biggest takeaway from the ‘In conversation with Rajkumar Hirani’ session on Tuesday, as part of the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) 2015, came as an answer to a question posed by the audience.
When asked by a film student for his take on complex movies such as the Christopher Nolan-directed Inception , which tested the intelligence of the viewers, and whether such films could be made in Hindi, the filmmake said he relied on simplicity.
“Making a film confusing does not make it intelligent. Our films are not unintelligent, but they are simple,” the 53-year-old director said.
This statement sums up his style of filmmaking which, if one may hazard a guess, belongs to the Hrishikesh Mukherjee school. It is the kind of cinema where the director treads the middle path, trying to present a dry or serious subject as a sugar-coated pill, where the quantity of sugar never exceeds the quantity of medicine.
Hirani kept trying to drive home the point of making a film palatable while discussing his filmography — from Munnabhai MBBS to PK .
Another point he highlighted was the importance of an editor in filmmaking. Having done a course in editing at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) and having worked as an editor for a decade before taking up direction, he was full of appreciation for the role of an editor.
“An editor does not just join shots. He creates emotions out of the shots. A smart editor can give one-and-a-half laughs with a comedy scene that offers scope for just one,” Hirani said.
Collaborative effort Speaking about his long association with Vidhu Vinod Chopra and Sanjay Dutt — on whom he is now making a biopic — the director said cinema was “one of the only art forms that can be truly called a collaborative effort.” Hirani, whose cinema can also be seen as simplistic at many levels, having reduced Gandhian thoughts to ‘Gandhigiri’, also spoke of the research he did on Mahatma Gandhi. “I wrote the script about a middle-aged man who hallucinates about Gandhi. The thought of having Munnabhai in it was to make it lighter.”
On PK and the debate on religion he has provoked, Hirani said the idea was to look at religion from the point of view of someone who does not know about it. “Religion is man-made. Every religion says my God is the best. I wanted to show it from the point of view of a protagonist who comes with a blank slate, in whose way of understanding and questioning the world contains a certain innocence,” he said.
Apart from throwing light on his filmmaking, he stressed the importance of the FTII in his student days as well as his career. However, Hirani had little to say on the current wave of intolerance and indiscretion that lead the FTII students to protests.
