MUMBAI: For the first time in four years, Whistling Woods founder Subhash Ghai took a master class with 400 students post the screening of his evergreen film Taal.
Ghai shared the stories behind the making of the film through scene-by scene narration and enlightened the students on how to make a great film with given resources, budget, talent and technology.
Specifically speaking on the topic “How to handle a crisis” and how to come up with better results, Ghai also shared his experience of rewriting the character‘s traits when it came to casting. In this case, Anil Kapoor was to play a role which was originally written for Govinda as a dancer than a musician.
“Every technician and actor must know his limitation of excellence if they want to be on top… even if you decide to be the 1st assistant director or chief assistant forever. Our generation is the victim of misguided motivation to become a complete film personality. Script writing and directing are two different forms of talent and we should not live in dreams to become a Raj Kapoor, Manoj Kumar, Aditya Chopra, Karan Johar and so on, unless we are multi-talented and have full command over each department. Great directors never wrote a script but shared their vision with specialised writers and translated it on the screen,” averred Ghai.
Ghai said that he thoroughly enjoyed making Taal because it was a huge challenge for him to create a pure musical film with a thin storyline and work with actors who were not big stars at that time.
“I knew that A. R. Rahman would justify the journey of music and its sound from chapter one to chapter six of the script along with the growth of characters and each of my stars including Aishwarya and Akshay put their level best to get of the final result while playing such complex roles,” Ghai said.
Talking about proven good writers, he expressed strongly that they must be paid a percentage of the film’s budget like in Hollywood, so they are encouraged to have a respectable position. However, writers must stop dreaming to be directors since direction is surely a different art and craft.
“I am proud of my students and faculty, most of whom are moving ahead in the right direction and discovering themselves as experts in their art and I am sure that they will learn more from the industry once they join it. This will be their new beginning,” he concluded.
