With the unforgiving heat of a global warming summer upon us, let’s look back at a blockbuster that made its money back but somehow didn’t end up with its director, the unimpeachably singular Tarsem Singh Dhandwar, whose career was put on pause in this country. While movies are now drained of color, his cinema was alive with it. He had a healthy attitude towards plot contrivance and never let the impossible stand in his way. He once gave one of my favourite quotes ever in an interview: “And for me, having traveled a lot, I always have to find out—when you show a movie to people, they just say, “Would you buy this?”
That’s one of the reasons you have origin films—like Superman or whatever—that takes so long in the West whenever you start to originate one, because you have to set up that this guy can fly because he is from another planet, has a nemesis, you can make him grounded when you give him Kryptonite, and all that stuff. You watch a Hindi movie, and they just say, “Hey, this guy can deflect a bullet with his ring because he is Amitabh Bachchan, so next question.” Literally, it is all about what each culture takes—to take as a MacGuffin and where they want the money spent.
We could all stand a little of that cavalier style these days.