Illegal DVDs harm Bollywood, scream insiders. But when you copy Hollywood without qualm for cheap remakes isn’t it the same thing? Films are failing because people are saying no to bad cinema

Anurag Kashyap

This guy came to me with some of the most talked-about films of last year. On pirated dvds. Not Hindi, not Hollywood, but world cinema. Films that you normally don’t have access to, unless you are travelling abroad all the time. So, with great excitement I put him on to a lot of filmmaker friends, who I thought should be watching it or would like to watch it.

The next day, I received an sms from a filmmaker, one of the very few I respect immensely. It said, “The number of individuals within the film fraternity that are propagating piracy by purchasing, renting or copying illegitimate dvds is staggering. Stop indulging in it! Don’t be the hand that feeds it”. His intention is honorable, like all those who care about filmmaking as an industry. Yet, I beg to differ with him on this issue.

You see, I condone piracy. Had there been no piracy, I wouldn’t have been able to see the films I saw in the small town of Tanda in Faizabad when I was a kid. I have seen films at two rupees a ticket in makeshift theatres courtesy a battered vcr playing a copied vhs on a beat-up TV. If it weren’t for piracy, I wouldn’t have read Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekov and other Russian greats reproduced on bad quality paper. This was at a time when one had no money, no vcr or television, only a lust for books and films. Piracy probably exposed me to a world I didn’t know of.

Every industry person, who rises at ficci gatherings, blaming piracy for the dipping fortunes of Indian cinema, and who can afford to buy original dvds is still borrowing them or renting them or being gifted them. If piracy is to blame for our bad quality cinema, how come other countries ravaged by the same menace are producing better cinema and box-office? For instance, a couple of years ago, before the piracy boom in South Korea, the film Shiri grossed $9 million in the domestic market. Post-piracy, the 2004 film Tae-gu-kgi grossed $30 million. In Japan, House moving castle has crossed the 200 million dollar mark domestically, in spite of piracy. People go to theatres because of the power of cinema.

The reason for our sorry state is that we not only borrow ideas, but the style, looks, attitude, labels, culture, setting, and milieu of Hollywood — even its language. Then our seniors say they hate the term ‘Bollywood’.

The fact is, we are cheap remakes of Hollywood, and deserve to be called Bollywood. So, if we can pirate their software, then why not dvds? There are other core issues
intrinsic to this debate. Why don’t we have stronger copyright laws, and why don’t our filmmakers fight for stronger copyright laws? Why can’t we option rights, which basically means that we acknowledge source material before we make it our own by paying between 200 and 500 dollars, eventually paying about two percent of the budget to the author of the source? No one, including me, can claim not to have indulged in it. At present, I am working for two directors on two films that are completely based on some Hollywood flick. I do it even though I do not like it.

I have my own logic in doing those films. I charge extra amounts of money for working on scripts that have been thought out by somebody else. So, when I feel ashamed of it, I can look into accusing eyes and say, “I did it for the money, so I can pay for my two indulgences – graphic novels, and original dvds.” Another ready excuse is, “You have to be in the system to fight it.”

Why is it that we do it — this ‘soft’ piracy? Where does the root of the problem lie? How does the system work? What is the system? The answer lies in how a film is made in this country.

Unlike other filmmaking nations, we don’t begin with a script or an idea. We begin with a star. Who is that star? The star, most of the time, when he was a toddler, thought that everybody’s parents made films or were part of films. His friends think the same way. At school, they are treated as special kids, because they are film-kids. They grow up watching every film in trial shows, attending premieres, discussing, ‘your dad is in my dad’s film with his aunty in it’ (mothers don’t play heroines, you see!). Their aspiration is to be as popular, if not more, than that ‘uncle’ who used to visit them.

These stars often can’t deal with the real world or relate to it. (The first generation could, which is visible in the films they made). When these kids grow up and became stars, their role models are not people but roles played by actors THEY are awed by because they don’t have an access to THEM — a Mel Gibson in Mad Max, a Rambo, Rocky or Spiderman.

Crying Foul: Kashyap

‘I’m working on films based on Hollywood flicks. I charge extra to work on some- body else’s script’

So how do you attract THAT star? Simple: take the dvd of the film he wishes he were in. Once you’ve the star, distributors are interested in you. Now all you need is a hacker like me who can adapt it, lend it an ‘Indianness’ by creating a love story and song situation, take away the cuss words and the bloody shot, and pre-sell the film.

Since the buyer goes for a film because of the star, the producer doesn’t care about the story or its originality. It’s such an irony that we release films the same week as the first copy comes out. Distributors decide to take delivery or reject a film by the ‘heat’ they think TV promos of the film have earlier generated. The exhibitor is party to this act, buying films based on their glossy wrapping.

The audience is not party to this deal, so it doesn’t bother to come to the theatre. It prefers to wait at home to see it on TV or the cable, or on a pirated vcd.

That is how we lose Rs 500 crore annually and yell for an industry status, complain about the annual national budget ignoring the film industry and blame piracy for what we lack.

There is no point of view in this industry, no milieu to speak of, no objectivity, no perception, and no acountability for what we make. There are either a lot of very rich kids playing an expensive game with expensive toys and getting away with it, or a lot of us who aspire to be them. And then there are those people living on the edge with a bagful of original ideas and a heart full of passion. But then, all doors are closed to them.

I call the third kind the ‘outsiders’. They are outsiders because they threaten to do away with the security blanket in which the film industry system is comfortably tucked in. The outsiders are rejected not because nobody wants them but because no one understands them, since they don’t have a reference point to what they have to offer.
These outsiders believe that there is so much cinema to be made from what they (read we) live through that they don’t need to pirate ideas like some anti-piracy filmmakers. Yet, the outsider’s quiet confidence is seen as arrogance, while the insider’s self-proclamation of greatness is seen as confidence. So, in a so-called industry where no one seeks originality or patronises it, in an industry of pirates why should we not let our kind co-exist? Let’s get together and help our cause.
Let piracy prevail.

The writer is the director of Black Friday and Paanch