Interview: Sujoy Ghosh
Flying carpets, conniving genies, gregarious ringmasters, taunted princes and beautiful women… In locales such as New York or Bollywood, such characters do not seem out of place. In fact, no one would probably flinch if they ever come across any one of these not-so-unsavory characters.
Fittingly for Bollywood up-and-coming filmmaker Sujoy Ghosh, all those characters will be in one place on October 28th, and that place is inside New York City’s Paris Theater, where Aladin will kick off the sixth annual South Asian International Film Festival.
For Ghosh, he is tickled by the opportunity to premiere his biggest film ever in the Big Apple. It was as if he had a genie bottle of his own, rubbed it, was given a wish, and it were granted instantaneously. Of course, the genie bottle is just a myth of Larry Hagman lore, but Ghosh is definitely excited to share his on-screen modern rendition of a famously mythical tale of a kid named Aladin. In a recent interview with Reuters, Ghosh said his version of Aladin is merely relying upon modern media to re-tell an age-old story.
“It is my take on the old fable. The main character in this film is called Aladin and he always gets bullied in school. People make him rub lamps and expect him to make a genie appear. He keeps telling them that he can’t, but one day, in the process of this bullying, he happens to rub a lamp and a genie does appear,” Ghosh told Reuters. “So that is my take on the whole fable, where you remain true to the core of your story, but you give it a different format, in terms of marketing, presentation, visuals, etc. So I would like to think it is a modern take on this age-old tale.”
Yet, despite the film being a modern interpretation, Ghosh told Reuters it was definitely a challenge to put a new twist on the story of Aladin, though he fell short of revealing just what, exactly, that twist is.
“Since the core story is the same thing, it is about how you present it. You have to present it in a manner that will keep the audience captivated because everything has been done before,” he said in his interview. “That was the challenge before us, but I do think we have managed to achieve that, and we have managed to give something new to the audience.”
Aiding Ghosh in conquering the challenges of directing Aladin was the use of special affects, which the filmmakers said aided him in putting together a quality film with a strong storyline for his target audience.
“The special effects can only support the story. They can make a good story better; they can’t make a bad story good,” he said. “The reason the special effects were talked about is because of the kind of audience we are targeting, which is between ages 15 to 24, and their summer movie is something like a Jaws or a Spider-Man, so we have to try to achieve a certain benchmark. Visually, it has to match up to a certain Hollywood standard.”
In pursuing that benchmark, Ghosh acknowledged Aladin was on a different scale than his previous works, which included Jhankaar Beats (2003) and Home Delivery: Aapko … Ghar Tak (2005), but is still consistent with his overall directing style.
“It didn’t make too much of a difference to the way I directed the film. When we were shooting, we knew it had to be a big film because of the production,” he told Reuters. “But yes, it is a different film from my earlier ones — just the scale and genre is totally different.”
Meanwhile, Ghosh is just happy to be where he is right now, awaiting the world premiere of Aladin at next week’s South Asian Independent Film Festival – a mere two days before it releases in India and the rest of the United States for general audiences.
Starring Amitabh Bachchan, Sanjay Dutt, Jacqueline Fernandes, and Reitesh Deshmukh, Aladin screens in wide release on October 30th.
