Filmmaker Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri, who won the National Award for best screenplay – dialogues for The Tashkent Files (2019), says that casting actors for films isn’t an easy process anymore, as the decision is no longer just based on the goodness of the script. In fact, a filmmaker’s political inclination is also a huge factor these days.

“There are some young actors, who want to work with me, but they’re also doing big films with some big banners, and those producers and directors are politically active. They give the actors a choice between me and them. Obviously, I am not making such big commercial films and those actors have stakes over there,” shares Agnihotri.

He further adds that this is a new phenomenon, something that he has not seen or experienced before. “Actors have started choosing films based on the other person’s political inclination. It is a sad commentary. This has never happened in the history of Indian cinema. People would never think about someone’s political inclination while doing a film. But now, actors are blackmailed and threatened… a lot of young actors out of the FTII and NSD tell me that this is the problem that if they do a film with this person, that person does not want to cast them,” he adds.

Agnihotri, who is currently in the US along with wife, actor-producer Pallavi Joshi, for the pre-release screenings of his latest film, The Kashmir Files, says he did face it first-hand while casting for his film. “We had planned to take an actor as lead and the person was threatened by other producers and he told me about it. I then cast (actor) Darshan Kumaar,” he says, adding, “There is no dearth of good actors.”