Mumbai, Dec 19 The year 2015 saw many indie filmmakers like Anurag Kashyap, Sriram Raghavan and Dibakar Banerjee, shedding their “off beat” director tags and venturing into big budget Bollywood films to varying results.
It began with Navdeep Singh’s “NH10” with A list actress Anushka Sharma in the lead role, who also produced the film.
It was a huge leap for Navdeep who had previously directed the highly underrated 2007 thriller “Manorama Six Feet Under” starring Abhay Deol.
It took him nearly right years to direct another project.
“NH10” ticked all the right boxes and proved a success at the box office while also gathering critical acclaim.
Interestingly, it was not only the director who got big but also actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui who had a special appearance in “Manorama Six Feet Under”. He was seen in a parallel-lead role in this year’s “Badlapur”.
Directed by Sriram Raghavan, “Badlapur” was not a gradual progression from low budget to big commercial cinema for the filmmaker. Prior to “Badlapur” Raghvan had made Saif Ali Khan-Kareena-Kapoor-Khan starrer “Agent Vinod” which bombed at the box office.
In an interview to PTI, Raghavan had said that the bigger the film the bigger the risk of sticking true to the story and not getting swayed.
“I went bigger (in terms of budget) with ‘Agent Vinod’, but it didn’t work. The more you go bigger the more you try to accommodate everything. A big movie comes with a lot of restrictions which you impose upon yourself,” he had said.
“Badlapur” was comparatively a smaller film than “Agent Vinod” but had a rising star Varun Dhawan and a promising actor Nawazuddin leading from the front. It scored well with both critics and audience and became a huge success.
Another filmmaker who tried his hands with commercial cinema was Dibakar Banerjee who made “Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!”
While the movie still had the sensibilities of Banerjee intact, what set it apart from his other ventures was his association with a big production house- Yash Raj Films.
