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Emraan Hashmi says shooting Adolescence in India would be a ‘logistical nightmare’ for producers. But he wishes makers become ‘audacious’ and take chances with films like Animal.
Adolescence received praises from Karan Johar, Alia Bhatt and Janhvi Kapoor.
British drama Adolescence ignited conversations on social media for its theme, emotional depth and signature one-shot style camera work. Bollywood celebrities like Karan Johar, Alia Bhatt and Janhvi Kapoor too heaped praises on the show, with Anurag Kashyap calling out Netflix India for how they would have probably rejected a script like that or turned it into a 90-minute film. He also stressed on the how Indian studios have stopped taking creative risks and are apprehensive of funding original content.
At a time when Bollywood’s dry run and sad state of affairs – further affected by actors’ meteoric fees and entourage costs – has become the talk of the town, Emraan Hashmi exclusively tells News18 Showsha that the Hindi film industry indeed ‘lacks that risk-taking ability’. Echoing Anurag’s sentiments, he says, “Adolescence has worked mostly because of its subject matter – the pitfalls of growing up in these times and social media. But inherently, it’s such a risky project because it’s just four episodes where each one is shot in a single take.”
Reiterating how producers in India would back out from a project like that, he states, “If you put that across to a producer over here, I would say that nine out of ten of them would tell you, ‘Are you out of your mind?’ It would be a logistical nightmare. 13 minutes into a shot, someone may goof up and we would’ve to do the entire thing again. What would happen to the budget? We would need a director, who leads the team, to be audacious and mad enough to make a show that way.”
According to Emraan, a big part of the problem also stems from the lack of ‘directors and producers who back mad vision’. “The only projects – shows or films – that are new and audacious in their DNA will work right now. Everyone is playing it too safe, if you ask me. Everything is a rehash of something that has been done before. No one’s taking a risk,” says the Tiger 3 and Ground Zero actor.
And that’s precisely why he lauds the makers of Ranbir Kapoor starrer Animal. “People had criticism for Animal and it received a lot of brickbats. It’s an audaciously different and new kind of a film. But the problem is that everyone wants to do something like that now and then there will be a bloodbath! I don’t think people should follow trends anymore. We should rather be trendsetters, which a lot of directors and producers aren’t,” Emraan points out.
Offering a glimpse into the scripts that he has been reading these days, he tells us, “Most of the scripts I read are stuck somewhere in time. I read scripts which I’ve already done before. I’m like, why can’t you see me or a film from a fresh perspective? I know that it’s easier said than done. I definitely do say no more than yes. We should at least put out something we believe in rather than something that’s run-of-the-mill. The probability of that working is more.”