The bottom line of comedy is to be funny, and the bottom line of drama is to be truthful. You can be truthful and funny, but if you're not truthful in a drama than the audience leaves you.
Badlapur' is a drama, a character-driven story. It is not so much about plot.
Good story' means something worth telling that the world wants to hear. Finding this is your lonely task...But the love of a good story, of terrific characters and a world driven by your passion, courage, and creative gifts is still not enough. Your goal must be a good story well told.
If I could remake any Eighties project, it would be less an action flick than a character-driven drama with a rich story to tell.
You have to do three things really well to make a successful film. You have to tell a compelling story that has a story that is unpredictable, that keeps people on the edge of their seat where they can't wait to see what happens next. You then populate that story with really memorable and appealing characters. And then, you put that story and those characters in a believable world, not realistic but believable for the story that you're telling.
In a film, there are dramatic moments and a bunch of different moments that lead up to a dramatic moment. On some songs, I try to paint the picture of before that drama happens, so by the time you get to the end of the project you've experienced infatuation and intimacy before it dives off to drama.
When an acting teacher tells a student 'that wasn't honest work' or 'that didn't seem real,' what does this mean? In life, we are rarely 'truthful' or 'honest' or 'real'. And characters in plays are almost never 'truthful' or 'honest' or 'real'. What exactly do teachers even mean by these words? A more useful question is: What is the story the actor was telling in their work? An actor is always telling a story. We all are telling stories, all the time. Story: that is what it is all about.
I don't look at stories in genres. A good story is a good story, no matter what planet it happens on, whether the characters are mice or human or whatever. That's how I look at it.
Honestly, when you're writing you try to stay on the story, on the character's mind, trying to throw stuff at them. There is danger, and the scares have to kick in the right places with the drama. And you try not to do too much to try to create those moments. Those moments create themselves.
I try to look on the sunny side of life. If something dramatic happens to me, I always try to recount it as a comedy tale, rather than a victim's story.
In my mind, a bubble or over-hyped cycle is driven by something good happening, which is used as a baseline for the next good thing.
Love every role to be new, and I always like to bring a freshness to every character I play, but that comes down to the script. So, it's important that it's a good script with good, truthful characters and truthful subjects.
As a filmmaker, it's not my intent to trigger or shape national discourse. My task is to make as powerful and understandable a film as I can. What happens next is what happens next.
The story [for the western genre] is everything. Whether it's a book or a screenplay, the story drives everything. And if you just go out and try to make one by putting on boots and jumping on a horse and riding off... If you don't have the material, the characters and the things to overcome and conflicts that give life to drama, you don't have it.
The whole point here, and the seed that JJ Abrams laid in my mind is, is the power of curiosity enough? What happens next? That dramatic construct is what has driven soap operas and serialised novels over the course of history.
I'm astonished by how much journalists stay with the story, try to get to the truth of the story, maybe give years of their life to it, maybe go over to Syria, maybe lose their life. Then, the next day, it's a new story.