Unfazed by ups and downs
Madhur with his Heroine Kareena Kapoor
Friendship and camaraderie in a marriage can blow away the biggest storms that a relationship goes through. You just sail though tumultuous rocky weather without imminent shipwreck. Madhur Bhandar-kar is a great example of this. Severe allegations and court cases thrown at him by a struggling starlet through the last few years didn’t dent his fortress.
“I don’t believe in elitism. I don’t think the audience is this dumb person lower than me. I am the audience,” Quentin Tarantino has said, says Madhur, quoting his hero. Touted as one of the directors who explores social issues. He is unfazed by rumours and link-ups. What, according to Madhur, keeps his marriage from breaking when the newspapers have linked him with Raveena, Tabu, Mughda Godse?
“I dated my wife for four years before we got married, she is more a friend to me. She understands the ups and downs of filmmaking. She knows me since I was a nobody. So the liberty she gives me is what keeps us going. She watches me shooting enough to know what goes into it,” Madhur tells me.
Madhur’s best films have strong women protagonists. He seems to have a deep understanding of the conflicts and paradoxes that make a woman. How is he able to be so empathetic?
“The emotional aspects of a woman attract me. Women protagonists are even more equipped to emote as they deal with society at many levels. Women are stronger than men. For me, attraction is not about beauty. A woman’s knowledge is a magnet. I enjoy achievers, strong women are attractive to me. I grew up in a female-dominated home where my mother and sister have been strong influences and they inspired me. It was a poor family and we went through difficult times. My mother held the home together through dire poverty. She came with me to Rashtrapati Bhavan to receive my fourth National award. She was in tears.”
Madhur’s protagonists are very conflicted, and I’ve always connected with his idea of ambition, frustration and the pain of ageing stars and models, who become inconsequential and are ousted as they age. “The glamour industry is very transient, Nisha” he says. “To maintain sanity, a person should not take success or failure seriously. Ups and downs are imminent. But it is difficult to survive if you take anything too seriously because nothing is forever. Values change. Changes in human relationships actually challenge me. I enjoy seeing human equations change. When I see success, there are more friends; if I am not successful, I lose friends.” We laugh together at the shallowness of society.
“I am a school drop-out,” he volunteers. “I’ve never been to any institution. I don’t come from a film family. I’ve seen famed actors being made to sit on the fourth row if their film did badly. But I’m a good observer: I go to Siddhi Vinayak temple and observe people in traffic. As a human being I feel the film industry is very superficial, it is not real. My sanity is because I know there is no reality in glamour, and so I show actual reality in my films. No permanent friendships, no permanent enmity, that’s the philosophy of the film industry.”
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