Sanjay Leela Bhansali is known to make films that are mounted on a grand and lavish scale. With his creative vision, he has brought alive stories like Bajirao Mastani and Padmaavat from the pages of history onto the screen. His last outing, Gangubai Kathiawadi, surprised the industry with the kind of numbers it clocked in at the box office, even during a year when many big-starrer films failed to make an impression.

Talking about the changing tastes of the audience and making films in the post-Coronavirus era, Bhansali said, “Any filmmaker who says he knows the audience is living in a fool’s paradise! You never know the audience. You are here because of them. The audience is our mai-baap. The filmmaker should understand himself and he should be able to do the kind of work that the audience doesn’t expect. The filmmaker is the one who needs to go and change the audience. A filmmaker should believe in what he is doing rather than thinking that the audience wants this or that because then it’s like doing mathematics. You just make a film that comes to your heart, you instinctively go ahead and make it... whether people like it or not, you have to be fearless. If it does well, you will be happy, if it doesn’t, you will go into depression, which is good because you will rise again and make another film.”

Elaborating further on how today the audience demands unconventional subjects, Bhansali shares, “Post COVID, everything has changed. I don’t know what people want...People want spectacular films for theatre, and out-of-the-box content for OTT platforms. Filmmakers are now on high alert, they are on guard because now they have to work very hard to present a new treatment, new subject, and he demands more from the actors. So, the idea is that the filmmaker has to believe (in his work), he has to cause the change and not let the audience change you.”

Talking about the kind of research that goes into making his films, he says, “When you are working on a historical, you have to be a little careful. Yes, you need to get your facts right, and that is where my research ends because most of it is imagination. Most of it is how I see the period. I see the architecture, but when I go there, I start dreaming of my own extra pillars, roofs and carpets.”

He adds, “I find research very boring. As a filmmaker, I have not set out to make a documentary that I make something exact. I want my impressions — be it child-like, grownup or heartbroken lovers’ impressions. I feel bored when people say I did a lot of research (for a film). This is my take on it, and they, too, are right in the way they do it.”