Key Points

The director-producer spoke with IANS at his office in the Khar area of Mumbai during the promotions of ‘Inspector Zende’, and said that he looks for entertainment in films, and for him, an entertaining story is the one which is gripping, and doesn’t let the audience miss a beat.

He told IANS, “Cinema per se has to have some sort of entertainment. Entertainment does not mean only joking or fooling around. It also has to be engaging. If you look at some beautiful films that were made in the past, the recent one is ‘Oppenheimer’, David Attenborough's ‘Gandhi’ or ‘Lincoln’. These are highly entertaining films, but they are, by entertainment, I don't necessarily mean that there are jokes or that they are funny in any other way”.

He further mentioned, “They are gripping and they are engaging. So as long as you can tell somebody's bio in a gripping way, in a modern storytelling, because today's audience is somebody who is going to consume them, I think that's a balance that one needs to strike. And once you kind of achieve that, then the effort is to kind of try and make it happen and tell it in the right way”.

Earlier, the director-producer had shared that he has grown-up listening to the stories of Inspector Zende, the Mumbai cop who nabbed the Bikini Killer, Charles Sobhraj.

He earlier said, “Unfortunately, everybody knows the villain. Everybody knows the guy who did the bad job. But the guy, who actually went and caught him, is relatively unknown. Now, we are getting a chance to tell his story”.

“That is a great satisfaction that me and my team have. Whether it is the writer and director of this film, the way that he is telling the story is extremely interesting”, he added.

- IANS