Professional Report - Smoke Free Movies

dividers were sponsored by Wills. So this kind of schizophrenia in the government…in one breath you
condemn it, pass a law to ban it, and in the other breath, you fill your environment with hoardings and have it all
over the place.
Do you feel that Hindi films have glamorized smoking?
Portrayal of smoking has been in a very cartoon-book way, the bad man smoked, the good man did not. But
even there, people you drank and smoke were bad people. Of course then there were the anti-heroes who did
not find smoking and drinking so bad. The earliest memories are of Dev Saab, and Rajnikanth down south
smoking cigarettes in a particular style. But I don’t think that could have such a devastating impact. That’s my
personal understanding.
According to WHO, almost 8 lakh people die in India of tobacco related diseases. And the impact is specially
on the young.
How many of them die because of religious belief…that drug is the most dangerous drug. They should conduct
a study of that. Religious belief has killed more people than any of the drugs like cocaine, heroin, alcohol or
nicotine. I assure you more people have been killed by that drug called God and Belief than anything else.
When companies approach filmmakers for in-film advertising, how does it happen? Do they approach the
director?
So far nobody has approached me from cigarette companies.
What’s the process…for other products like Coke…?
They come to you and say that we have a product and if you find a place to flash it we would pay you X
amount of money and they make sure that for the amount of money they pay you, that much of presence is
there on visible on the screen. It’s mutually agreed. Recently, Subhash Ghai’s film got a lot of brickbats. But he
just took money from Coke and used it blatantly. But in these times filmmakers are looking for any extra buck
that comes from anywhere with revenue streams drying up, filmmakers are looking for alternately revenue
streams.
Talking of smoking, or tobacco consumption – be it bidis, cigarettes, pan masalas, etc – what are the kind of
situations in which it would be shown. As you said negative characters would be shown.
Mostly. A man before raping a woman would smoke and drink. To say he’s a bad man…look he smokes, look
he drinks. A villain…hiding behind a lamp-post, give him a cigarette to show he is a bad man. The wife at home
always pulls away the cigarette from her husband’s mouth. So Indian cinema has been very faithful to middle
class values. And adhered to “tambaku is a bad thing” , ‘alcohol is a bad thing”. And if the amoral generation
has kind of steered away from the prescribed values, it’s just used to demonstrate some kind of rebellion for a
short time, and then learning the hard way that’s the wrong route to take. But Indian cinema is like a toddler.
That’s why it’s accused of being stunted. It has not moved away from that. It’s not gone haywire and finally
come around like American cinema has. America having gone to the other extreme is perhaps wanting to
come back to its conservative values. The World Trade Centre incident has created havoc with its sense of
certainty. Perhaps that’s why they feel there’s more and more a need to hold on to certain tangible values. So
he goes back to the memory of his grandfather and grandmother. He says ‘oh those were the days my friend’.
So, that’s full circle, after having gone into the lives of promiscuity and indulgence, AIDS having played havoc,
now they talk about single partners, not multiple partners. Unlike that, Indian cinema has not even ventured out.
But as a filmmaker you have been pretty experimental…you have done films like Arth. What’s been your
experience, have your films featured smoking as an act of rebellion?
Cigarette was part of a man who drank, smoked. For example an angst-ridden character. A person who cannot
cope with the challenges of life. Takes recourse to alcohol. These are the kind of crutches you lean on.
Inevitably these characters pay a price. Since my products have been pitched to the people of India, not to the
elite only, one has within the permitted area taken certain steps.
Now you have a lot of movies being pitched at urban audiences, the elite. Do you see that there is a likelihood
of showing this…in edgy kind of films that have suddenly started being made?
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