In his blog, Shekhar Kapur recalls his last conversation with film director Anthony Minghella (Cold Mountain, The English Patient) who died on March 18 aged 54 of cancer
On Sunday, two days before Anthony Minghella went in for an operation on a tumour they had just discovered, Anthony called me to see if I would direct a short he had written as part of a film a called ‘New York – I love you’, where a bunch of directors make short love stories based in NY. Anthony was supposed to direct it himself but given his sudden illness could not do so. He told me his film was about the value of life, and how people sometimes just throw away their lives unable to look beyond into the real beauty of it.
Anthony was completely alert and aware of his own mortality at this time, and as long as I had known him, he had valued life in a creative and compassionate way.
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CNN’s Anjali Rao interviews Indian film director Shekhar Kapur in front of a live audience:
AR: Shekhar, we just saw you in Dharavi, which is one of the biggest slums in the world, which is going to be the location for your next movie, “Paani.” Why is this such an important story for you to tell? You’ve wanted to do it for such a long time.
SK: I mean water is the biggest issue internationally. Most of the wars in the world are now being fought over water. Water is gonna be the new oil. It’s gonna be the new oil. It’s happening everywhere. Cities are running out of water everywhere, and when a concentrated body of 20 million people run out of water, there’s going to be an immediate war.
AR: You’ve compared this film to “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” in terms of how much money you expect it to take at the box office. “Crouching Tiger…” took US$128 million in the US alone. That’s a pretty tall order for “Paani” don’t you think?
SK: I’ve got to get the funding for that. No, but it is. You it’s time that everybody… it’s a musical, it’s in English and Hindi and it’s going to be…It’s time the largest filmmaking country in the world made a film that the world over becomes a major international commercial success. And the only reason we’ve not been able to do it is because we’ve not come up with a story that everybody says, yeah that’s a story we want to hear.
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Vir Sanghvi in the Hindustan Times on the recent Jodhaa Akbar and Rani of Jhansi controversies says it’s almost impossible to deal creatively with a historical account without stirring up a storm
Such is the the climate of intolerance in today’s India that it is almost impossible to write a book or make a movie without having to cope with a mob of protestors who claim that you have offended their caste/community/religion/region/city/grandparents/favourite pets.
Two such protests erupted last week. The first, and more publicised, of the rows related to Ashutosh Gowariker’s Jodhaa Akbar which is still to be released in Rajasthan because of fears that so-called Rajput organisations will vandalise cinema halls where it is shown. The second, and less known, relates to Rani, a fictionalised biography of Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi by the well known author Jaishree Mishra. Apparently the book is insufficiently respectful to the late queen and the Mayawati government has assured the protestors that it will be banned in Uttar Pradesh. Both protests raise several issues which have been insufficiently addressed so far. Here are some of my concerns:
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