Upala KBR (DNA; June 20, 2017)

Of late, Ram Gopal Varma has been in the news more for his shocking statements than his films, which have been going out of theatres without even a whimper — like Sarkar 3. The director is now working on a web series, Guns And Thighs, and a short film, Meri Beti Sunny Leone Banna Chaahti Hai for his YouTube channel. He’s also mostly in the news for trolling young actors like Tiger Shroff, making berating comments at Sridevi, taking on Karan Johar (yawn) and quitting Twitter. Here, he explains why he does all that he does. Read on...

Why did you quit Twitter?
I enjoy that I can provoke or irritate somebody enough to react so strongly with whatever I have said or done. The reason I left Twitter was because I felt it had become predictable — the way I said things and people reacted. I thought I should change the medium and get on Instagram, where I could push myself to comment through pictures and videos rather than just saying a line or two.

If I said in a tweet, ‘There’s no difference between an engineer, doctor, pornstar and a housewife’, they would have collapsed on me. But the same content in a video called Meri Beti Sunny Leone Banna Chaahti Hai, (MBSLBCH) obviously would be taken in a very different way.

Why did you make MBSLBCH?
There is a female tennis player, whose father didn’t let her practise it beyond a certain age because she had to wear short skirts. You are using a woman’s sexuality against her choice, which is suppression. Meri Beti... is demonstrating the upper limit of the mindset. In India, we have an ex-porn star in mainstream cinema and nobody has a problem. On the one hand, you are conservative and on the other, you are liberal. Then there’s the mindset to suppress the same thing in your own house. I think there’s an incredible contradiction. Telling the story of a girl from a conservative, middle-class family who wants to be a pornstar, and is in discussion with her parents in the living room — that’s my attempt to bring it out in the open, to discuss the issue.

What if your daughter wants to become a porn actress?
Just because she’s my daughter, I don’t consider myself to be her master to order her on what she should do or should not do in her life. Whether my daughter wants to be a doctor, engineer, pornstar, pilot, soldier or a radical terrorist, it’s her choice. At best, I can advise or inform her from my experience but the choice and decision has to be hers. Truth is, no girl, no girl in her realistic sensibilities would want to do porn. Let alone try to convince her parents!

Please continue
The film is not about Sunny Leone, but using her as an example. In fact, Meri Beti… has got more hits than my trailer of Guns And Thighs. It is the first family film I made in my career. It’s about family issues between parents and children and their career choices. This is my Hum Aapke Hain Koun..!

Guns And Thighs have evoked some shocking reactions. Also, from Amitabh Bachchan. Comment.
I am not shocked by these reactions. People have not accepted that the digital world is a separate world from cinema. It is not pertaining to a region unlike cinema or language like Hindi, Telugu, Bengali etc. Narcos is being made in Columbia and people in South India are watching it — people who have never heard the word Columbia in their lives or that the country exists. Even Mr Bachchan’s first thought was, ‘Ramu, I don’t think Indian audiences will accept it.’ There is no such thing as an Indian, Pakistani or Saudi Arabian audience on the web. It will only connect to those people who have that sensibility and that could be anywhere in the world.

Why web series?
You can tell stories for an extended time or very short time depending on what the story is.

Looking back, do you think Sarkar 3 could have been a better film?
Anything could be better. Post analysing a film after the result has come out doesn’t make any sense. Once a film didn’t work, it’s best to leave it at that. Films are vague in terms of sensibilities and how people react to them. If I talk to 10 people, they will give me 10 different reasons why it didn’t do well and I will never know what happened.

What angers you?
Nothing upsets me. I never get angry about anything. I believe that everybody does things from their ability and their own perspective, so no one is ever really wrong. I am the person who angers people so I don’t have time to get angry! (laughs)

Why do you have a bed in your office?
I feel the place that you work in should be an extension of your own personality — what you believe in and like. Should any person come here even if he has never met me, just by the décor of the office he would already know what kind of person I am. My resume is in the office decor. I never thought of it as a bed. People want to see it as a bed (i) so the obscenity is in their eyes and not in the object there.

What do you have to say to people who ask, “Where has the real Ramu gone”?
I have answered this question many times, but what I have realised is that people never listen because they have already made up the answer in their heads. They are comfortable saying, ‘Ramu has lost it!’ And I don’t want to disappoint them, so yes, I think that is what has happened to me — I have lost it (laughs).

People ask why RGV can’t make another Rangeela or Company today…
People say it as a reaction to their impression of those films. Recently, I went through Francis Ford Coppola’s IMDB biography and I was shocked to see that he made some 40 films out of which I don’t know some 30. Now if someone tells Coppola why don’t you make Godfather again, as if he doesn’t know that… (laughs).

You seem to be an enigma…
I don’t think it’s easy to know me but people have made up their minds. I would like to believe that I have changed. If I look back at some earlier films of mine, I wonder how the hell did I make that film? Or how could I have fallen in love with that person? A lot of people like Company lot. I don’t like that film at all because today I have much more knowledge of the subject compared to what I had at that time, so I compare it to that.

Where will MBSLBCH air?
We haven’t decided on the platform, but right now I am making it for my YouTube channel called RGV Talkies and GAT will be the first one there. All the digital films I make, will be released there. As far as monetisation is concerned as long as there is some kind of product, there will be some revenue coming in. We will be doing partnership deals and associating with other places.

How do you keep getting funding?
First of all, anybody gets funded for a good idea. Nobody sees anybody’s face and gives money, na? Of course, unless you are an actor. Eventually, it’s all about an idea. If you come with an idea and someone sees the potential in it, that’s how it happens.

Amitabh Bachchan has been one of the strongest influences on RGV. But he discovered far more about the person after working with him, realised that there is something about him that he hates too. Read an excerpt from the book
MID-DAY (December 2, 2015)


Chapter 12: When I called Amitabh Bachchan an idiot

From the time of being awestruck with him in Zanjeer, Deewaar, etc., to consciously understanding his screen prowess post Khuddaar, my biggest desire cinematically was to do a film with him, which I eventually realized in Sarkar. In the run-up to the making of Sarkar, in my several meetings with him, I started seeing a very different side of him too. Behind the obvious power and intensity, was a sensitivity and vulnerability. Listening to his thoughts made me see his incredible versatility both as a human being and as an actor. By that time my proximity to him had blunted my sensibilities as a viewer of his star performances, and the filmmaker in me got greedy and dumb enough to experiment with him as an actor, resulting in Nishabd and Aag. It's not so much the quality of those films that I am talking about here, but the idea of casting him in those roles.

Amitji's make-up man told me on day one of the shooting of Nishabd that the film wouldn't work, because no one was going to accept Amitji in a role like that. Whether that was the reason or not, I myself as a viewer probably wouldn't want to see him in a role like that. I think Nishabd is Amitji's finest performance as an actor, mainly because of the sheer complexity of the role and the subtle nuances of reactions it demanded, which most of the so-called art-house actors won't even begin to understand, let alone portray. But the question is, does one want to see Amitji just as an actor? I for one don't, unless the acting is coming from a certain larger-than-life perspective.


Similarly in Aag, there will be a difference between a viewer's reaction and my reaction to his performance. As a director, I judge an actor by seeing what he does with what is given to him. The viewer sees the final effect of that in the context of the film and hence, he cannot have any idea of how I could have screwed it up in the screenplay or edit, or of the various other blunders I could have committed. People seeing the film react to the effect, whereas as a director I know the cause.

On the other hand, if somebody argues that Amitji had no business doing those films without knowing what he was getting into, yes, he was guilty of misplacing his trust in me, but he was not guilty of not doing his best.

I gathered from my association with him that being the ultra-professional that he is, once he agrees to do a film, he completely succumbs to the director's vision or lack of it. The end product can sometimes look a mess, but the inside secret is that he would always have given much more than was expected of him.


When he stands on the steps looking at Aftab taking Jiah away in the climax of Nishabd, his close-up shot calls for an extraordinary understanding of human emotions and hence, it is a far superior performance compared to him saying 'Tujhe bhi karne nahin doonga' in Sarkar which he would have done hundreds of times before. But sadly the effect of that line in Sarkar will become cinematic history whereas the Nishabd close-up shot might go unnoticed.

The point I am trying to make is that he has never ever failed as an actor and he never will. It's only directors, myself included, who frequently fail to capture his art in the right context.

Karan Johar's favourite films of his are Kabhie Kabhie and Silsila, which I don't care for much compared to my favourites like Deewaar and Zanjeer. I don't like to see him in films like Last Lear, Black and Bhoothnath. But that's what he is all about. Amitji is an artist, who can and will allow himself to be moulded and shaped in any which way one wants, and he will leave the final result in the hands of the director he is working with.

In all my association with him, I can recall any unpleasantness on only two ocassions. One was when I was shooting the confrontation scene with him and Kay Kay, who played his son in Sarkar, and he disagreed with me on a certain reaction I wanted him to give. Inspite of my trying to explain, he insisted that I do it his way and I had to relent. But after the shoot, late at night he called me and said, 'Ramu, I have been thinking about it and I think you are right. Let's do it again.' Once I re-shot it and showed him the edit, he was very impressed. The good thing about it was that he developed implicit trust in me after that, and the bad thing was that it was misplaced it in the context of Aag.

The other famous or rather infamous incident was when I tweeted something very abusive about him on Twitter. I called him an idiot (the politest translation I can find for the actual word I used) for not continuing to do certain kinds of roles. After seeing him playing old-man, Alzheimer's-patient kind of roles for many years, I flipped on suddenly seeing the vintage Bachchan again in Bhuddah Hoga Tera Baap. In that frame of mind, and under the influence of three-four vodkas, I tweeted, 'Amitabh bachchan is a c*****a for not doing more roles like this and directors like me are l****s, for not realizing this.' Understandably, all hell broke loose. People and media gave me so much flak without even bothering to understand what that tweet meant. They just went by the words used without seeing them in context. The only man who immediately understood it to be a compliment was Amitji himself.

All things said and done, there's just one thing I hate about Amitabh Bachchan and that is his birthday. Every birthday of his reminds me that he is getting older and older and I hate that.

I just wish that God would realize that Amitabh Bachchan is a rare art form that even he himself can create only once in a million years and so just put him on a pause button and make him live forever.

Excerpts reproduced courtesy Rupa Publications India Pvt Ltd.

Ram Gopal Varma promises to come back from the dead with the third instalment of Sarkar
Sanyukta Iyer (MUMBAI MIRROR; November 28, 2015)

MUMBAI MIRROR (November 26, 2015)

Ram Gopal Varma is gearing up for his next release, and he's dedicated it to some actors, a porn star and a few gangsters as they have "contributed" to his life in one way or the other.

The filmmaker recently took to Twitter to share the news about his autobiography, Guns and Thighs. "I dedicated my book to Ayn Rand, Bruce Lee, Urmila Matoandkar, Amitabh Bachchan, pornstar Tori Black and a few gangsters," updated Varma, to his many followers.

"The dedication to them was in accordance with their tremendous contribution in my life one way or the other," the filmmaker added.

Earlier this month, Varma shared the cover of his book and mentioned that the book has some startling revelations about Varma calling Bollywood megastar Amitabh Bachchan an idiot; his own journey with the underworld and his affairs with women. RGV has previously penned a Telugu book titled Naa Istam.