A Quote by Naseeruddin Shah

You can't make a film for your personal satisfaction. That is why I detest the cinema of people like Mani Kaul. — © Naseeruddin Shah
You can't make a film for your personal satisfaction. That is why I detest the cinema of people like Mani Kaul.
More than my other films, Uncle Boonmee is very much about cinema, that's also why it's personal. If you care to look, each reel of the film has a different style - acting style, lighting style, or cinematic references - but most of them reflect movies. I think that when you make a film about recollection and death, you have to consider that cinema is also dying - at least this kind of old cinema that nobody makes anymore.
I'm not coming from film school. I learned cinema in the cinema watching films, so you always have a curiosity. I say, 'Well, what if I make a film in this genre? What if I make this film like this?'
On the outside, America looks like this great melting pot, but on the inside, there's this segregation in American cinema. Why does a Latino film have to be for Latinos? Why is a black film just for black people? Why?
For people to understand, you can't speak 'cinema.' Cinema doesn't have alphabets, so you have to go to the local language. Even in England, if they make a movie in London they have to make it in the Cockney accent, they can't make a film with the English spoken in the BBC. So cinema has to be realistic to the area that it is set in.
There is a host of directors - Sujoy Ghosh, Neeraj Pandey, Ashutosh Gowariker, Madhur Bhandarkar, Mani Ratnam and so on - who make some great cinema. I would like to work with them all.
Indian cinema needs all ingredients like emotion, action, sentiment and humour; it's not easy. It's easy to make a Hollywood film, as it goes with a pattern. Our cinema needs a lot of commercial ingredients. That's why I don't do many films.
I know why I make films -cinema is a mode of expression that allows you to express all the nuances of a thing while including its opposites. These are things that can't be quantified mentally; yet they can exist and be juxtaposed. That may seem very contradictory. Cinema allows you to film these contradictions.
You should always make it like it's your last film. That's my personal belief. Every filmmaker is going to have another belief... That's the only way I know to try to make a film that might be good. You got to take it real seriously like it's your last thing.
With independent film, simply because they don't have the money to make a big-budget film, they're forced to make a story that's important to them, that they would like to see on film, a personal story that people can relate to, about people, where you can see the love of the characters.
In a film festival, people come to watch because they are interested in cinema. It's not like watching a premiere show or being in any cinema hall, where you are not with like-minded people.
For me, as a film goer, I like nothing more than to sit in the cinema, have the lights go down and not know what I'm about to see or unfold on-screen. Every time we go to make a film, we do everything we can to try to systematise things so we're able to make the film in private, so that when it's finished it's up to the audience to make of it what they will.
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.
I think the tools were always available, for decades and decades, to make your own film and be creative. I don't think people had to wait for YouTube to do this type of small project. YouTube, I think it's great. I have this idiotic satisfaction. And I think there's a bit of that in YouTube. You share, true, but it's centralized, and it's already sort of controlled. I'm more for something that's not a centralized medium. Like doing your own film and screening it yourself. You cannot control people doing that.
If you want to sell a film, you have to make it in an exaggerated way. Otherwise, you have to make it for your own satisfaction.
Film students should stay as far away from film schools and film teachers as possible. The only school for the cinema is the cinema.
I want to make a film that is commercially successful because that means that the larger cinema-going audience around the world like the movie, which is my goal. That's my job, to make films that people respond to.
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