Shahid Kapoor: Cinema in our country has gone through several phases of its own – Times of India

Shahid Kapoor has come a long way in his near-two-decade run in the Hindi film industry. As an actor, he has strived hard to find his rhythm and the roles that he feels can justify his potential as an artiste and a creative worker. In a recent chat with Bombay Times, Shahid discussed the kind of cinema he has grown up on which has made a lasting impact on his mindspace and the way he approaches his craft.

Shahid said, “I have grown up on films which had stories, which we barely focus on. There was originality and there were well-fleshed out stories. I watched a lot of my father, Pankaj Kapur’s works. My mother, Neelima, was a classical dancer and the exposure I had to the exponents of classical dance and music was of another kind and sensibility, thanks to her. I absorbed and assimilated these things in my system and they subconsciously have shaped my thinking in many ways. I grew up on a lot of cinema that was made in India. I have watched films featuring Amitabh Bachchan, Dilip Kumar, Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan and so on. The thing is that cinema in our country has gone through several phases of its own. You make what the audience wants to see but as a creative thinker and as an artiste, you also want them to see your version of a story. There were fewer films made with that kind of freedom of thought. They were freed from the boundaries or set limits that most other films followed or adhered to. There was a strict measurement of what could be made. While it had a lot to do with what the audience wanted to watch, it also had a lot to do with the fear of trying something new. When people do that, they limit themselves and the audience. Without experiencing something, how do you expect to know whether they will like something or not? What choice does the audience have? When I came into the business, the kind of content I was naturally more drawn to was seen as risky. Gradually, of course, I worked in films like Haider, Udta Punjab, Kaminey, Jab We Met which were closer to the kind of cinema I liked as an artiste.”

The actor believes that in the last decade or so, things have opened up a lot and evolved in many ways. Elaborating on it, Shahid said, “In the last 10 years, formats, platforms have evolved and emerged. The audience grew, cinema travelled beyond boundaries, the world became smaller. Language barriers were transcended and experimental cinema did better than anyone expected it to. In the last two years, content from different languages has been consumed in such high proportions. People have consumed content across a variety of subjects on OTT platforms for a small subscription. As opposed to entering an ice cream store and choosing between mango, vanilla and chocolate, they now have many new options and they’re happy about that.”