Shekhar Kapur is back in the world of cinema with his Hollywood project, What’s Love Got to Do with It? The filmmaker’s last feature-length directorial effort was the Cate Blanchett-starrer drama Elizabeth: The Golden Age in 2007. He asserts that he might have been away, but he is not detached from Indian cinema.

“I haven’t made a film in India since Bandit Queen (1994). I don’t know why people call me a Bollywood director, unless you consider Mr India (1987) and Masoom (1983) Bollywood projects. I don’t know what describes Bollywood,” the filmmakers tells us in an exclusive interview, when asked about the long gap.

The 77-year-old continues, “It’s been 30 years since I made a film in India. I’ve been making films outside during this time. I’ve been doing theatre outside (of India). I teach at MIT. I have been a part of the World Economic Forum. I am an environmentalist. So, life was busy. Then I found time to make a film, found a script, and made What’s Love Got to Do with It?” 

When it comes to the film, the cross-cultural project is led by actors Emma Thompson, Lily James and Shabana Azmi, and deals with the complexities of love, marriage, relationships and intimacy.

“When you see the film, you realise that at the end, the characters realise that we have to forgive, and be compassionate. Because relationships are not about saying, ‘I love you’.... Love is a mystery. It’s a question of exploring that sense of mystery,” he shares.  

The film deals with the concept of arranged marriage in the age of dating apps, and the director admits that this became more of a reason for him to do the project: “We are all looking for intimacy in our lives. When we are born, we are put on our mother’s chest. That’s the first act of intimacy that a baby feels. When we die, we want to hold somebody’s hand. In between, we complicate things, like if I put my hand around my friend’s shoulder, we are dating. We developed these keywords that interfere with our desire and our need to be intimate.”

Explaining further, the filmmaker says, “In the film, one fundamental question is: how do you know if it will work if you haven’t had sex before marriage? When I was a chartered accountant, my mother took me to meet some girls. The question in my mind was, ‘How do I know if it will work unless I have had sex? What if sex on the first night was a disaster?’ There’s an exploration of how it might work the other way. I’ve asked them all my life.”

He has infused his memories of Lahore, Pakistan, into the films as well. But border tensions are something that continue to restrict the exchange of art between the nations. Ask him the same, and he says, “Art transcends boundaries, as it should.”