“Take cinema seriously,” said Farooq Sheikh at a recent event in the city. Clad in a crisp white kurta pyjama, the renowned actor spoke on the need to monitor the kind of content being shown in films today and emphasised on how the audience should compel filmmakers to improve.
“Society treats cinema leniently. When you walk into a theatre, you should walk out keeping something with you, in your mind and heart. But these days, how many movies do you think stay with you once you’re out of the theatres?” he said.
The actor, who is known for his performances in several notable films like Chashme Buddoor and Shatranj Ke Khiladi, is not impressed with the way cinema is being “handled” by filmmakers today. “Out of all the recent songs, I don’t remember 99 per cent of them as most of the times it’s not the song I hear, but the performers simply ‘screaming’ out the lyrics. Sometimes you can’t even recall which song is from which movie as all of them look more or less the same,” he said.
The aspect of films that disappoints him the most is the lack of meaningful content. Comparing today’s cinema to the scripts written in the past, the actor said, “It’s sad that people who wrote excellent literature from our country are no more a part of our subjects in films. Today, filmmakers are making anything with a big promotional budget and selling it. And that’s because audiences are buying that kind of content. Earlier, filmmakers could not risk making a bad film.”
In present times, when directors spend crores on promoting their films, citing examples of Satyajit Ray, K. Asif and others, Farooq stressed that it’s not only money involved that should ascertain a movie’s success. “Satyajit Ray once told me, ‘Farooq, whenever I start my next film, I start from zero.’ And he actually did that. He never really had a huge amount for his films. He wrote for his movies, directed them, handled the camera, and decided on the makeup and costumes too. And this was the man who bagged international acclaim and took Indian cinema to the world at large. So you don’t need a lot of money to make a successful film. You need good content. Today that content is missing,” he says.