MILAN LUTHRIA ON BIOPIC TREND IN BOLLYWOOD : WE MIGHT BE REACHING A SATURATION POINT

Director Milan Luthria, who is known for his great work in The Dirty Picture, which was based on the life story of South actor Silk Smitha has a strong feeling to share about the making of Biopic. The filmmaker,who was a part of panel discussion at FICCI Frames event along with Hansal Mehta, Nandita Das and "Dangal" fame writer Piyush Gupta, believes the enthusiasm the audience shows towards the biopic genre will soon come to an end. He feels that it is the "laziness" that makes a lot of directors/writers to work on a biopic.

In the discussion Luthria said, "People chase it (a genre) without even knowing why are they doing it. I feel there might be laziness in writing. It is difficult to chart out a road map.... Start out the story with a new character. Reference point always makes things easier for writers. Earlier, we did not have buyers for biopics, like for The Dirty Picture. Today, the acceptance level is high. But I am afraid we might be reaching a saturation point."

On the other hand, other member of the panel discussion, director Hansal Mehta who has worked on true stories like "Shahid" and "Aligarh", said that the subject of a film should be entertaining and engaging.

Mehta further added, "Did I care if Dangal was a true story? To some extent, yes. But do I care that it was an entertaining story? Yes I do. Like how true was (the story of) Shahid. He was not alive to tell me the story. We have always cried that we do not have good stories, but we need to work hard to find them. If we are making biopics with the thought that everyone is making it, then it will be the dead end. We will screw it up if we just make it. There has to be a lot of potential in the story to bring it up on screen. Even in case of Aligarh, people were not telling us everything, but we had to make the story engaging"

However, Milan Luthria still believes that a good biopic will continue to do well.