Although I’m not from India, I watch (with subtitles) a couple of Bollywood movies every few months. Some may be blatant knock-offs of Hollywood films but most are “original” ideas and concepts. When you watch a Bollywood film, regardless of what genre of film it is, the movie will almost always have a romance and musical aspect to it. It’s the classic Bollywood stamp. For those who have never seen a Bollywood movie before, I would highly recommend you watch one or two as you may be pleasantly surprised at how much you’ll enjoy it.
Directors don’t tend to be held in such high esteem as the actors and actresses they employ to perform the roles in their films and to some extent you can understand why. After all, you don’t tend to see the director, even at the film premiere or the awards ceremony, but you nearly always see the stars and they’re unquestionably the ones you remember when you talk about a movie with your friends and family. However, that doesn’t mean that the role of the director should be overlooked.
While they may not want the kind of lifestyles that the actors and actresses lead, jetting around the world for their latest premieres and doing thousands of photoshoots; giving them some kind of recognition must be nice for them. Don’t get me wrong, the best directors in the world are making plenty of money from their films to stay happy and many have become superstars in their own rights, like Steven Spielberg, the man behind films such as Jaws, E.T. and Jurassic Park or George Lucas, the creator of the Star Wars franchise; but a lot of Bollywood’s top film directors, unlike their Hollywood counterparts, have been overlooked for years despite playing a huge role in turning the industry into the global phenomenon that we know today.
The problem that Bollywood directors in particular have had to deal with, is the sheer demand for content. Whether you’ve directed one or one hundred films, the audience are constantly wanting more with an estimated 1,000 Bollywood movies released each year. The problem that many directors have encountered, and the one that has either made or broken them, is that the Indian audience tends to want multiple genres packed into one film. For example, they won’t want to attend what is solely a thriller; they will want to see action, comedy and romance all rolled into one.
Many have managed to get that balance just right, giving the audience what they want and building up a reputation, in Bollywood at least, that would rival that of Messrs Spielberg and Lucas. One of whom is Ramesh Sippy, the creator of the action thriller, Sholay, released in 1975. This film featured action, adventure and comedy and even featured Amitabh Bachchan as Jai and Amjad Khan as one of Bollywood’s greatest villains, Gabbar Singh.
One of the earliest directors in Bollywood history to be able to claim to have ‘cracked’ the Indian cinema scene is Mehboob Khan. Born in Gujarat in 1907, he directed one of Bollywood’s most iconic movies, Mother India in 1957. Such was his passion for cinema, he actually ran away from home at the age of 18 to find work as an actor. He later turned to writing and eventually directing, where he finally became a household name.
Mani Ratnam, the director of Roja and Bombay is another huge name behind the camera, as is the creator of Mr India, Shekhar Kapoor.
None of these, however, are as big names as Satyajit Ray. Born in Calcutta in 1921, Ray directed 37 films before his death in 1992 and has even been given the nickname of ‘God’ by Indian film lovers. One of his most popular films was Shatranj Ke Khiladi, although it was The Apu Trilogy that helped him burst onto the scene. He was awarded an Honorary Award at the Academy Awards in 1992 for “his rare mastery of the art of motion pictures and for his profound humanitarian outlook, which has had an indelible influence on filmmakers and audiences throughout the world”.
A lot of these names are unfamiliar to North Americans but they are legends in India and the Asian sub-continent. In the last ten years or so, Bollywood films have started to reach European, North American, and South American shores. And in the next decade, it’s very likely that Hollywood might even be influenced by Bollywood.
