Professional Report - Smoke Free Movies

image and you say no, we’re sick of this image of smoking and drinking, so for god’s sake have a pastry. You
know…at times it can also be like that. It is a complex process. It’s a combination of many things.
It’s said that actors don’t know what to do with their hands and they say let’s have some action and therefore
they smoke…
Let them do dumbells! Jokes apart, it’s true. I can tell you about my experience with smoking. It saved me from
a lot of things. If I’m sitting with five people and I’m not enjoying their company…I just light a cigarette and
completely cut myself off. Whatever they’re saying, I just keep smoking…it creates a room for me. If I’m not
smoking I’ll have to say ‘yeah…and then..?’ and I’m not liking it…There’s a kind of escapism that happens. I
know that smokers get away with that. And it happens with actors as well. If you’re a smoker, you tend to take
out a cigarette and make some time…the whole scene happens in the business of lighting up. This is a
personal thing, it’s nothing to do with propagating smoking or going against smoking. I’m completely against
smoking…I’m not against people smoking. I got out of it easily. The day I stopped, I stopped. I don’t get the
urge to smoke. But what I feel that it’s not worth it…
Do you feel that in certain genres of films cigarette smoking tends to go down better than in others? For
instance, in family dramas, the tendency is to say that you can’t have the good guy smoking. And on the other
hand, say in films like Satya, which you have written, would it be the other way round?
Satya follows a realistic pattern. It follows the life of people who live in a certain condition. Smoking is very in
there. As a portrayal of realism you show smoking…surely you can’t show people in white satin moving in
‘galis’…that’s the reason Satya had a lot of smokers. Cinema follows real life and real life follows cinema. It’s a
circle. You can never say which came first. Maybe some people got inspired by that smoking and started
smoking…I don’t know. But also then, the answer doesn’t lie only with cinema. It lies in a lot of things – the way
people get educated. In a country like ours where education level is abysmal – people need to be told about
the good and bad sides to everything and then they should decide…
I remember a scene in Satya where the focus of the scene was on Manoj Bajpai and he is toying with a
cigarette in one hand and a pack in the other. You tell me how that happened. Was it deliberate?
In Satya there was no in-film advertising. Because it was a film made by people who were not known. Nobody
knew that there was a film called Satya being made. It was made by people who were nothing in life. Manoj
Bajpai was a nobody, I was a nobody, only Ram Gopal Verma was the big hotshot…nobody knew that it would
be a big hit. We just started to make the kind of film that we believe in. So anything…Manoj that time was a
smoker, and he is still a smoker, I don’t know…so he must have taken out a pack as an actor and played with
it. There was nothing calculated about it. That you keep this brand in the frame. Today, if anybody like Manoj,
who is now a big name, does something you can suspect. But in Satya you can’t…he was a nobody.
You said that Satya was a realistic portrayal of a certain kind of society. Cinema to a certain extent is a
reflection of society and also an exaggeration. If you hadn’t shown smoking in the film, do you think it would
have detracted from the quality of the film?
No, I don’t think so. If you take out cigarettes from the film, it would still work. But there is something that is
natural. For instance, in a coffee shop, if I show two people sitting with a glass of milk, it wouldn’t be natural.
When you follow a pattern of realism, there are reflections of it. Smoking is very much a part of our day to day
lives. It has nothing to do with propagating it or going against it. We just follow it as a reflection of reality. If at
that point of time I decide no, as a conscientious man, I must take out cigarettes, and replace it with orange
juice…it wouldn’t be natural. When such restrictions are imposed, it’s really stupid. You have to let people take
that decision for themselves.
But are you against the idea of having anti-smoking messages in your films.
A film has a certain path to follow. It has a story – within that it can comment on 3,000 things. But those 3,000
things should be inherent to the storyline. It should come from the story rather than forcing it in. Ideal situation.
I’m not talking about the business side. In film advertising is like a huge monster at this moment. People are not
making films, they are making in-film advertisements. But ideally as a creative person, I don’t like
messages…then there’s no end to it. My hero will turn around and say don’t smoke it kills you; then next time
he will say don’t have more than 2 children, that also kills you…and he turns and says, don’t drink and it can go
on.
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