EXCLUSIVE! Shekhar Kapur on Masoom 2, OTT boom & Manoj Bajpayee: ‘His real rise started with OTT’ | Firstpost at IFFI 2024

Festival director Shekhar Kapur talks about Masoom 2. He informed  that the shooting will take place in 2025. It took him 10 years to write the script.

In an EXCLUSIVE interview with Firstpost, Kapur talks about the Masoom 2, his grand-mother, memories of his Delhi house and most importantly OTT boom and how it helped actors like Manoj Bajpayee.

Edited excerpts from the interview:

Cinema is changing and what is your opinion on this with the digital platform taking over?

Good content sells. Just look at 12th Fail. It did well in theatres and it did even better on OTT. So, I feel one is not competing with the other. One is complementing the other. OTT had brought in more directorial writing and talent than what cinema could have done in so many years.

More from Entertainment

'Jugnuma' Movie Review: Manoj Bajpayee-Deepak Dobriyal’s terrific performances stood out in this beautifully restrained way of storytelling 'Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale' Movie Review: The final goodbye of Julian Fellowes’s beloved British soap

Cinema in theatres is cost heavy since it’s individually financed mostly. In OTT the cost of failure is not so high.

In films now there are all characters which play an equally important part. In the past a woman’s role was mostly ornamental. It was more about just glorifying the hero. What do you have to say about this beautiful change?

 Let’s go back to the forties and fifties. There was a movie called ‘Fearless Nadia’. It was different. But all the regular cinema showed women waiting for their husbands to come home and if he was having an affair, the woman would beg him to come back home. Then suddenly came this ‘Fearless Nadia’ and Hunterwali and not just with the educated classes, but the mass audiences loved her.

Then Shyam Benegal gave films like Ankur, with him the female actors got a lot of meaty roles. Now of course a lot of filmmakers are going that way.

 OTT is also responsible for a lot of change in the way we look at actors. Do you agree with it?

 Yes, say somebody like Manoj Bajpayee, I introduced him in Bandit Queen, then came Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya. But his real rise started with OTT.

 He came here (IFFI 2024) to promote Despatch. The audiences were so happy to see him that they screamed and applauded. Now he is one of the most sought after actors in the entertainment industry. Basically what supported him for all these years is OTT, more than feature films.

 You are going to do Masoom 2, how much of a connection will it have with the audiences now?

 There will be a lot of changes in understanding the sensibility of today’s audiences. It took me ten years to write it. Two incidents happened. My parents were refugees from Pakistan and in Pakistan my parents had experienced two big earthquakes. When they came to Delhi, my mother wanted to build a house, but my father wasn’t interested. Just the way I am not interested in real estate. But she insisted.

So, somehow they put together some money, bought land and built a house in Delhi. I was then studying in London during that time. My mother was very clear that she wanted to build a house that would survive an earthquake. So, if you go to my Delhi house, you can see that it is the only house in the city built on stilts.

Many brokers call me from Delhi to sell the house for 80 crores. If you see, almost everybody in India is a migrant. In a nation of migrants what is home? Home is about memories. Because I have been writing my film for ten years, you get to know your characters and then they become your friends. You meet so many eighteen and nineteen years old kids undergoing therapy and they have not disclosed it to their parents.

I met a girl the other day who was also undergoing therapy and I asked her if her parents know about it. To which she said that it is only her grandmother who knows about it. I want to show the relationship between grandparents and grandchildren because that is a very important part in our life. My scripts are written over time and I allow it to marinate well, I research it and I talk to doctors. So, basically in a nation of migrants where does your identity lie now?

So, Masoom 2 is going to be a completely different with different characters.