2019 is proving to be a golden year of Malayalam cinema... As an actor, I have always classified films as either good ones or bad ones... I had five films that released this year in the cinemas and our audiences liked every one of them.
There are always at least five good films at the end of the year to get nominated, but generally speaking nowadays, it's more of the independent films that are recognized.
I respect Malayalam films the same way I respect Bengali films. I think Malayalam films have not compromised on the essence and have kept their own statement and are coming up with very good themes.
Won't the new 'Suggested for Mature Audience' protect our youngsters from such films? I don't believe so. I know many forty-five-year old men with the mentalities of six-year-olds, and my feeling is that they should not see such pictures, either.
Some critic complained about how many small films are released in New York... it annoyed me. Those small films that are lucky to get two weeks are often my favorite films of the year.
I think films would get a lot better if people paid leaving the cinema. There's a whole business plan of opening terrible films in hundreds of cinemas and then closing them when the word of mouth gets out.
Instead of signing 10 films a year, I'd rather do a couple of films where I can give my best performance and am appreciated by audiences.
Cinemas gained new young audiences who wanted films made for them.
Foreign capital to build new cinemas will help modernize China's aging cinema infrastructure, attract Chinese consumers back into cinemas, and increase demand for U.S. films.
We have always wanted to give back to cinema, and we couldn't possibly think of a better way to do that than facilitate films which we believe will make Malayalam cinema proud.
There were a lot of people dreaming about making films, and they would finance maybe 6 films a year. Because they were funded by the government, the films sort-of had to deal with serious social issues - and, as a result, nobody went to see those films.
The third line of cinema today is neither art nor commercial but categorized as good and bad cinema. I think two films - 'Main, Meri patni aur Who' and 'Main Madhuri Dixit Banna Chahti Hoon' were the base films for this new line of cinema.
There is no good or bad cinema, there are films that connect either less or more with audience.
A good deal of my effort goes into the selection of films, because these things cannot be just predicted, so I am careful about the movies I finally do. Next year, too, I will have four or five films where I play different roles.
I watch all kinds of Indian cinema. There are many good films in Bengali, Marathi and Malayalam.
Now, after the communist take-over in 1948, the amount of feature films produced dwindled to three a year, while the school was, you know, every year another three, four, five students.
I'm a big fan of silent cinema and I think that before I got into the canon of European arthouse cinema, the first interesting films I liked as a kid were German expressionist silent films.