A Quote by Bhushan Kumar

The universality of 'Saaho' is what appealed to me as a filmmaker. — © Bhushan Kumar
The universality of 'Saaho' is what appealed to me as a filmmaker.
There's always to me a universality - one of the things I learned early on as a journalist and a writer is that there's a universality in specifics. The more specific you get, the more universal it can be.
When I started in comics, people were always trying to classify me as either/or. Either a writer who appealed to women or a writer who appealed to guys. This need to categorize was just exhausting.
Hitler's oratory moved people and appealed to their hopes and dreams. But his speeches malevolently twisted hope into some gnarled ghastly entities, and appealed to the latent, darkest prejudices of Germans.
For me, whether or not a film has some kind of massive budget or is an independent film, or however it's getting made, it's always about the filmmaker and, hopefully, being a vessel for the filmmaker's vision. That's what really attracts me to projects.
By the time I finished 'Poison,' the New Queer Cinema was branded, and I was associated with this. In many ways, it formed me as a filmmaker, like as a feature filmmaker I never set out to be.
We've been fighting our whole lives to say we're just human beings like everyone else. When we start separating ourselves in our work, that doesn't help the cause. I've heard it for years: 'How do you feel being a black filmmaker?' I'm not a black filmmaker, I'm a filmmaker. I'm a black man, I have black children. But I'm just a filmmaker.
The action scenes you'll see in 'Saaho' are all real - it's going to look fantastic.
Some black filmmakers will say, "I don't want to be considered a black filmmaker, I'm a filmmaker." I don't think that. I'm a black woman filmmaker.
The version of cosmopolitanism that I favor is exactly about balancing universality and difference. Many people who believe rightly in universality, want, wrongly, I think, to impose their vision of the world on others. They think not just that there are universal truths but that they already know what they are. And they don't think they have anything to learn, as a result, from others. They don't converse, they try to convert.
I'm a film director. Gay is an adjective that I certainly am, but I don't know that it's my first one. I think if you're just a gay filmmaker, you get pigeonholed just like if you say I'm a black filmmaker, I'm a Spanish filmmaker, I'm a whatever.
For me, it's always filmmaker and then character and then story. They're all equally important but if you don't have a great filmmaker, you will not have a great film unless you just get lucky.
I was working on other things and I wanted to make a film, and I had some ideas brewing in my head. Brandy's [ Burre] circumstance was such that I didn't really know what was going to happen. That was obviously a surprise, but I knew she was in her mid-to-late thirties and she was starting to really think about her life in a way that really appealed to me, appealed to the women that I know in my life.
With filmmaking, I for so long was like, oh, I need permission to go out and be a director and be a filmmaker. And I read Robert Rodriguez's 'Rebel Without a Crew.' He just went out and did it, man. In his book, he even says just put your name on a business card and say you're a filmmaker. Congratulations, you're a filmmaker.
My character in 'Saaho' is completely contrasting to my character in 'Baahubali,' and I am quite excited about it.
For 'Baahubali,' I gained eight or nine kilos for the warrior look. But for 'Saaho,' I didn't need look like that.
The worst thing that could happen to a filmmaker is growing up wanting to be a filmmaker.
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