NEW DELHI: Actor Shah Rukh Khan says that there is a need to take to more positive themes in Indian films and to make them much shorter if India has to go global.
Khan who was here to participate in the ‘In conversation with Karan Johar’ session at the two-day Hindustan Times Leadership Summit on ‘Imagine the India that Can Be’, said this was also in keeping with the changing trends of seeing films in multiplexes, which could hold more shows in a day.
Addressing a press meet along with Karan Johar, Khan said that screenplay-writing was being treated as a science all over the world except India, where it was still seen as art.
Filmmakers treated the audiences in the same manner as three or four decades earlier, whereas viewers were much sharper now and screenplays could be crisper.
There was also need to “marry technology with technique” or get the right kind of manpower for handling the modern technologies available, he added.
He also stressed the need for aggressive marketing at international film festivals, adding that a film shortlisted for the Oscars needed full support despite the controversies that surrounded every selection. “Controversies are good, because they show there is a lot of diversity in our cinema, but once a film is selected, we should back it up,” he asserted.
He felt films should now start concentrating on more positive aspects of the country and not merely on the negative or regressive aspects, since there was much reason to celebrate in India‘s growth. He said Chak De was not about hockey or against cricket. It was first and foremost, a film about women empowerment and any sport would have been fine for the theme.
Answering a question, he said he had always acted in films of which he liked the storylines and did not care who made them, but he said almost all the newcomers with whom he had done films became big filmmakers afterwards. “I cater to what the people would like to see. I am not the master of my own destiny,” he said.
Johar said brevity was not his strong point and his shortest film had exceeded three hours. He may, therefore, find it difficult to cut them down to two hours as Shah Rukh had suggested. But he generally agreed that films should be shorter.
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