Ishaan Khatter on Phone Bhoot: 'I am a huge cinephile and I want people to come back to theatres'

In an EXCLUSIVE interview with Firtspost, actor Ishaan Khatter talks about his experience of working with Katrina Kaif for _Phone Bhoot_ , how cinema has helped in his personal growth, the difficult times during the pandemic and his future project Pippa which will be releasing soon. Edited excerpts from the interview: Cinema now is very close to reality and we are losing out on the fun element. What is your take on that? I feel everything goes through phases and I can see things shifting for films, especially Indian films. Even if you see the trailer of  Bhediya , it feels like a larger than life fantasy film. It has a new cinematic language and yet they have an Indianness at the core. I think it will be an exciting new phase with the comeback of these kinds of films. It’s time to have community experiences which are larger than life and entertaining. Hopefully those films are making a comeback for good. How much fun did you have shooting for Phone Bhoot? We had a great time and three of us were at ease, Kat (Katrina Kaif) is very chilled out and there was a lot of tomfoolery buffoonery on the sets and hopefully it translates to the film.

The pandemic has changed a lot of the cinema viewing experience as an audience. As a craftsman, did the pandemic period help you in enhancing your craft? The craft can only sharpen by acting and doing different roles. My primary job is acting and I think the more you act, the more you discover and explore. For me it was actually slower than what I had expected. There was not much work happening. And there were a lot of delays too. But it gave me a lot of time to learn about the social conditions and what people were going through. It was like we were thinking, living and believing in what’s happening around us together. And that’s something that is very important because we are entertainers and at the same time we are holding a mirror to society. I think cinema has the power to help you have a cathartic experience, to help you empathize and perhaps feel some kind of change inside and learn something from the experience. Its merit is that at the very end it is entertaining and it was cinema alone that brought a smile to people’s faces. Since we were all going through that together and it was like a shared feeling and hopeful the films will come out now will be a little wider in that sense because we are now catering to the universal feeling that we are all going through. On people coming back to theatres for the big screen experience… For me the cinema experience is like having a good time with the movies. I am a huge cinephile and I have seen a lot of personal growth in me through cinema. I think the community experience of watching a film in a cinema hall is very special because you don’t only have a good time. But hopefully you learn something about yourself. I used to do a lot of first day first show and I am waiting for that to come back too. I believe that the cinema experience is unparalleled. Your future projects. I have Pippa coming out soon after Phone Bhoot. It is a period war drama. We make very few war films and I am very proud of this film of mine. A lot of hard work went in researching and delivering the story in the right manner. And we spent a lot of time with the army to portray them in an authentic way. And above all it is a coming of age story within a war film which is unique. The story is on the liberation of Bangladesh about how we helped another country get liberated. At that time, it was very much genocide. It’s a very powerful film and I am very proud of the work. I have other interesting projects too that I am working on, but I don’t have the liberty to share them now.

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