I've more than 50 hits in Bengali cinema and it's a great feeling to have them released separately in the form of albums that are independent of the movies.
Bengali movies are a great form of cinema too. Interestingly, they work with lower budgets.
The Prosenjit-Rituparna jodi is a huge contribution to Bengali cinema as we have delivered several hits.
I seriously think Bachchan is more Bengali than any one I know. He's a true Bengali dada. And I'm not saying that because he has a Bengali wife or has spent time in Kolkata. There's more of Rabindranath Tagore's legacy in him than anyone else.
Studio movies are looking more like independent movies and independent movies are looking more like studio movies, and I think cinema is better now because of it.
Truth is, you make albums, and some of those songs are hits, and some of the greatest hits albums have songs that weren't hits. You have a career, the reason why we're still around 10 years is that we do have successful songs.
As the acting class was going on, I just realized I just knew more about cinema than the other people in the class. I cared about cinema and they cared about themselves. But two, was actually at a certain point I just realized that I love movies too much to simply appear in them. I wanted the movies to be my movies.
Today's cinema is a global art form, it is impossible to make movies for a market the size of France, representing no more than 4% of the world's total.
In a sense I feel very much a part of the cinema now in a way where when I come back to the theater now I feel like a visitor. The cinema is really what I enjoy. I want to do more independent movies.
Everywhere I go today, people talk about Bengali cinema. I completely refuse to accept that Bengali filmmakers are not making good films.
The thing with 50 Words of Snow is that it was literally back-to-back from Director's Cut [also released in 2011]. It was more or less that I got to make two albums in one hit. I was already in this space in my mind to be writing and making an album.
There is something about live albums that I enjoy so much more than studio albums from all of my favorite artists. When I am listening to them live, I get to connect so much more to their truth than in studio albums.
There's 40 or 50 songs that nobody's heard that I've done in between albums. There's a whole evolution from Midnite Vultures to Sea Change that's never been released.
In the rest of the world we had had two albums that were successful, so those two albums' hits and this new four-single package made up an album called Wham! The Final, which is basically greatest hits. We couldn't have done a greatest hits over here, because we'd only done one hit album.
The success of 'Dhruva' has given me more satisfaction than any of my previous hits, simply because the audience accepted the film even though it was experimental. I really hope this kind of acceptance makes experimental cinema the new mainstream cinema.
Cinematically, anything like 'Khawto' in Bengali cinema hasn't happened. Yes, you get such films in Hollywood, a few in Bombay. In Bengali literature, you get such stories in the works of Samaresh Basu and Buddhadeb Guha.
Never seek financial independence in independent cinema since independent cinema doesn't make money.