Vikramaditya Motwane believes that it is time that the censor board adopts the grading system. He informs us that his third directorial venture has been shelved as the script was written when the Congress government was in power
It’s a busy year for him as a producer. AfterNH10 with Anushka Sharma, it is nowHunterrr releasing tomorrow. Vikramaditya Motwane has been on promotional rounds for quite some time but that doesn’t make him any less excited to talk about the unconventional subjects he has chosen to invest his money, mind and energy. “I believe in the story and director of the movies I associate with. I like to be honest with the project, no matter how challenging or unconventional that is,” he said while he was here to promote his “coming-of-age” film Hunterrr.
The film narrates the story of a sex addict and the journey of his life. It was reported that the censor board asked the makers to “clean the language” of the film to make it fit for the release. Motwane dismissed the rumours and said, “The censor board is a bit out-of-tune with the country right now. In terms of the moods, opinions and ideologies of the country, they are out of sync. But I’m hopeful that soon they’ll improve on this aspect.”
He also added that the reason behind the ongoing turmoil within the censor board can be due to change in the governing body members. “It has not been an easy transition for the new members with new guidelines and also a new government. I think Pahlaj Nihalani took things a bit too seriously but I believe eventually good sense will prevail. In case of Hunterrr, sense has prevailed and we are not unhappy with any of the cuts. In an ideal world we would have wanted the movie to get a clearance certificate with no cuts and beeps but we are not unhappy,” he added.
Things become very difficult for the makers of a movie when the film is either stalled or has to go under the scanner. While the last venture of Phantom NH10 had to go through the advisory committee screening where it was cleared with minimal cuts, Hunterrr was cleared with minimal cuts in the first screening itself. He said, “In case of NH10, we had to push our release date which is a very big deal because for any movie the release date is locked months in advance. I feel that we do not need censor, we always want people to see the movie the way we had envisioned it in the first place. Any kind of cut is an imposition to our creative freedom.”
He cited examples of the countries where censorship doesn’t exist. “We do not give enough credit to our audience for having common sense, which is a bad thing. I didn’t see anyone from the audience raising an objection against pk or NH10. If people want to watch these kind of films then why censor themIJ”
The 38-year-old producer confirmed that his third directorial venture Bhavesh Joshi has been shelved because it “does not fit the current scenario.” He said, “I think time has changed. It was a film which I wrote when the government led by the Congress party was in power and about things that were wrong then so the context has changed. It is very difficult to go back to the script. It requires rewriting.”
Motwane believes that good content will invariably lead to good word of mouth and this works brilliantly for the film. He said, “Word of mouth is the most important barometer due to which the film works. A film backed by good promotion and marketing can do well only for first few days but then it’s the word of mouth which takes it further. You can see that in the case ofQueen which had less than two crore collection on the first day but it managed to collect more than 60 crore at the box-office.”