It's kind of true that they just start making the same movie over and over again. It's also true that the times dictate what kind of movies get made and what kind are not. So I'm always looking for something that's a little fresh and something that I haven't seen before.
Whether it's a popcorn movie or some really intellectual sociopolitical movie, I think to some degree they're all influenced by the social climate that we're living in.
People didn't suddenly wake up one morning and unanimously say 'I'm fed up with midbudget dramas. I'm only going to see action tent poles from now on!'
People are always asking me why they don't make Westerns like they used to.
Kung fu films have to move with the rest of the world. You couldn't keep on doing sword fights in historic films. People wanted superheroes. They wanted something fast and new.
Our film industry as well as the audiences are now open to unconventional pairings and subjects, which has aided my journey greatly.
'Deewar' has been remade so many times, 'Trishul' has been remade so many times. But 'Don' - no one has gone into this area as often as they have gone into these other movies, and I think it fits into the modern sensibility of movie viewing quite well.
I see an incredible abuse of close-ups in many films these days. Why is that?
You have some great films every year, but for the most part, no one is making films with heavy messages or themes. People are afraid of doing that.
It gets harder and harder to make movies about human beings. These movies are like an endangered species. Everything is 'simplify, simplify' now. How many movies have sub-plots anymore?
In the '90s movies were so serious, and so stylistic and slick that I could not identify with them.
The taste of a multiplex audience in Amrawati is very different from the taste a multiplex audience in Nariman Point, Mumbai.
Movies are extremely imitative of one another. Whatever works, people will try to do it.
But it's just that the whole country is making generally lousy films these days and has been for quite a while. That's the big problem that we all have to think about.
When I wrote 'Hatchet,' I knew that I was not re-inventing the wheel. That was never my intention. My goal was to make an '80s-style slasher flick that actually holds up. Basically, I wanted to make the movie that I wanted to see and pay no mind to current trends or conventions.
I've been seeing superhero movies as long as I can remember. I don't think they're going anywhere.
I tend to watch a lot of lower-budget movies to find out what's doing down there and find out who's coming up.
Everyone loves the seventies because that's when movies were character-based, and you saw great characters and you saw very interesting filmmaking. There are interesting movies being made now, but it's harder and harder to make them.
If you make action movies, the critics will savage you, and then your movies are outdated the following week with the new wave of special effects.
What I can't figure out is why we're not making more R-rated movies, actually.
In my opinion, the vast majority of scripts written - as well as most movies that are released - are not very original, well-written, or interesting. It has always been that way, and I think it always will be.
Studio movies are looking more like independent movies and independent movies are looking more like studio movies, and I think cinema is better now because of it.
I think it's very important that films like Bad Hurt don't get lost in the mix of the sci-fi-kill-everything-on-the-screen-blood-dripping-down-the-walls sort of the world of the cinema that we live in.
We are moving into a phase where what was once alternative cinema is becoming mainstream. I like being in that space.
I was making a lot of independent movies before the independent movement.
