Director Dibakar Banerjee, who is known for his non-conventional movies ‘Oye Lucky Lucky Oye’ and ‘Love Sex and Dhoka’, new movie ‘Shanghai’ released today. Though the movie has received critical acclaim many feel that the movie is a risk as movie is mostly for classes and the masses won’t be impressed with it.
But Dibakar Banerjee is of an opinion that ‘Shanghai’ isn’t a risk as the cost of the movie is very low and all he has to recovers is Rs. 4.75 Crores for the movie to be profitable.
“‘Shanghai’ was not a risk. We kept the cost of production low and we did our marketing so intelligently through tie-ups that today we have to recover only Rs.4.75 crore from theatrical release to become profitable. The sheer number of prints that we are going in for is 1,200. So financially, it's all good,” he said to IANS in an interview.
The director strongly feels that unless movie makers are brave and make movies with out of box thinking there won’t be any new grounds broken in Bollywood.
“Until and unless you step out of your comfort zone and try something new, no new grounds will be broken, no new films will be launched, no new stars will be discovered, people won't get to see new stories and our industry will not be injected with new blood. And when you don't do that, you keep shrinking: When you do that, you keep expanding,” he said.
“Look at the last six, seven, eight years. Before that, you knew how Bollywood only had flops and flops. Ninety percent films were flopping. In the last four years, have you seen any of that? We like to talk a lot about negatives; so, yes, there were some flops, but look at the number of successes we are having. Big budget and small budget films - how many hits did we have last year? From ‘Dabangg’ to ‘Delhi Belly’ and many more. New people, new directors, new actors, new voices, new writers and new stories are giving us a new lifeline. This renaissance or whatever you may want to call it, this resurgence of Bollywood is part of that,” he added.
The movie ‘Shanghai’ stars Abhay Deol, Emraan Hashmi and Kalki Koechlin in lead roles and has released today.