What's Love Got to Do with It, Shekhar Kapur's Hollywood production, marks his return to the world of film. The drama Elizabeth: The Golden Age, starring Cate Blanchett, was the director's most recent full-length motion picture. Although he claims to have been away, he insists that he is still engaged with Indian cinema.
“I haven’t made a film in India since the Bandit Queen (1994). I don’t know why people call me a Bollywood director unless you consider Mr. India (1987) and Masoom (1983) a Bollywood project. I don’t know what describes Bollywood,” Kapur tells us when asked about the long gap in an exclusive interview.
The 77-year-old continues, “It’s been 30 years since I made a film in India. (In this time) I have been making films outside. I’ve been doing theatre outside (of India). I have done theatre in Germany. I’ve done a big series on William Shakespeare. I teach at MIT. I have had absolutely no time. I have been a part of the World Economic Forum. I am an environmentalist. So, life was busy. Then I found time to make a film, found a script, and made -- What’s Love Got to Do with It?”.
Emma Thompson, Lily James, and Shabana Azmi act of the cross-cultural film project. The film explores the complexity of love, marriage, relationships, and intimacy.
“Working on it was another exploration… Nothing is about defining things. When you see the film, you realize that at the end, the characters realize that we have to forgive, and have to be compassionate. Because relationships are not about saying, ‘I love you’... Love is a mystery. It’s a question of exploring that sense of mystery”.
The director acknowledges that the idea of arranged marriage in the age of Tinder became a significant motivation for him to make the movie. He says, “We all are looking for intimacy in our lives. When we are born, we are put on our mother’s chest. That’s the first act of intimacy that a baby feels. When we die, we want to hold somebody’s hand. In between, we complicate things, like if I put my hand around my friend’s shoulder, you are dating. We developed these keywords which interfere with our desire and our need to be intimate”.
He adds, “In the film, one fundamental question is how do you know if it will work if you haven’t had sex before marriage? When I was 18, I was a chartered accountant. I came back to India and my mother took me to meet some girls. The question in my mind was how do I know if it will work unless I have had sex? What is sex on the first night was a disaster? There’s an exploration of how it might work the other way. I’ve asked them all my life”.
He also included his memories of Lahore in the movies. But the interchange of art between the nations continues to be constrained by border tensions. He says, “Art always transcends international boundaries, and it should do. Not that I can’t appreciate an artist. That is another culture of another nation. So art transcends international boundaries, definitely,” he ends.
