NMK: You have been working in Hindi films for over fifty years and the Hindi film industry has gone through many changes. What are the key changes you have observed?
JA: You could say we have come out of the feudal era and entered the corporate and industrial one. If you look at the directors and producers of the 1960s and 1970s, and before that era too, they were far more rooted in Indian culture and language. I’m talking about the black and white classics of the 1950s and the early 1960s where the films had a certain authenticity. The film directors were ‘desi’ in the way they looked at the world, while the upside today is that the current generation has a wider world vision and the downside is their roots are no longer that deep.
Let us not talk of an average Hindi film, it was bad then and is bad now. But if you see some recent films, we have improved on the form though lost out on the context.
NMK: What about the change in dialogue? It is definitely less melodramatic and closer to spoken language.
JA: You can see that flowery dialogue has mostly disappeared from Hindi cinema. Meaningful cinema is being made…
