The audience is your best friend
Hello dear readers and apologies for being away for a couple of weeks. The burden of releasing a 3D film in three languages had finally done me in and I was running around like the proverbial headless chicken. However, all is well that ends well. Haunted is super success and 3D is here to stay. At the risk of boasting a bit, the film had the biggest opening of any horror film ever, so being the headless chicken kind of paid off.
With every film come the usual “Now what? What will the audience say? What will the critics say? What will the fraternity say?”
The audience, I have learnt, is terribly honest. They have paid for the ticket and have invested in your movie and so they don’t go to dislike a movie but instead they go there to like it. The audience is your best friend really.
The fraternity? They have no choice but to wait for the verdict of the audience.
The critics? Now that is a section of the “Now what?” that I have quit caring about. They are powerless to make a movie run and they are not powerful enough to make it flop! Period!
The last word on critics and I don’t want to go on about that. Enough has been said. Yet, something very sad happened to me during the screening of my film Haunted and I wish to write about that here.
Now 3D is nascent technology in India and we tried our best to give the best 3D and to that effect the audience has loved the 3D but in the press screening there was a glitch.
Something went wrong in the hard disk that had the digital 3D version and so halfway through the film it skipped back to the beginning. Obviously the audience was a little interrupted. This happened twice. The film stalled for a minute and then started again. Everything from there ran smoothly.
A friend of mine from the film media called me and asked me if there was something wrong in the show. I was shocked as the show was still going on and how did he know sitting far away from where the show was being held.
He was a little sad too as he told me that some people from the media were tweeting from inside the theater that something had gone wrong and were actually using that glitch to ridicule my effort.
Criticism does not sadden me, ‘cause it is a part of the creative process. Insensitivity saddens me.
The least I expected was encouragement for doing something new and if that is not coming then it’s fine too but ridicule was something else. At least let the show get over before you decide to tweet about how “funny” it was.
I read somewhere that in the entertainment business people are just too much in a hurry to write your creative obituary. Well, they will have to just deal with our successive resurrections!
It’s a journey from the alone to the alone, get used to it or get out!
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