The Romantics (Netflix), a four-part docu-series, captures the cinema and times of Yash Chopra and the eponymous studio he later formed. Ever since it released on February 14, the series has been trending. Over two-and-a-half years, Los Angeles-based director Smriti Mundhra (Indian Matchmaking, A Suitable Girl) trawled through 400 hours of archival material dating back to pre-Partition cinema and pictures and interviewed over 35 people for the series. Vanita Kohli-Khandekar spoke to her about cinema and making a dent in Hollywood. Edited excerpts:
We, as Indians, don’t celebrate our cinema at all. There is always a sense of embarrassment. The Romantics is a celebration of Hindi cinema. Is that where you were coming from?
When I was in film school (Columbia University School of the Arts) we discussed the great auteurs of global cinema. We analysed those films, the intentional cinematic language and in what way it was reflecting the country’s history and the zeitgeist of the times. We were doing this with Japanese, the French New Wave and Italian films. I thought we must do this for our own cinema. We are large contributors to the global cinema canon, not just in numbers and language but also in terms of cultural impact. We have crafted a unique cinematic language through our films and that is not something to be embarrassed about. It is something I wanted to learn more about. That motivated me.
How much has the fact that you are Jagmohan Mundhra’s daughter impacted this?
I grew up with Hindi cinema. This was very much amplified because my father was a filmmaker and before that he was an exhibitor (the first one) of Hindi films in the United States. When I was growing up in the 80s, 90s and the early part of 2000s, travel wasn’t so accessible, social media wasn’t there. We weren’t as connected to our mother country. Movies gave us that connection. That is how I learnt about our festivals, how to speak Hindi. For people like us who are part of the diaspora, movies were never just entertainment. When I was in film school and making my way through my career, I wanted our films to be looked at with that same respect.
India has several studios. Why did you choose YRF?
In storytelling you can best explore the universal through the specific. Who is the person/people who are going to carry through the story and reveal all the aspects of this world? I didn’t want to do a survey of Hindi cinema. I didn’t want to do a highlight reel with greatest hits of Yash Raj Films. I wanted to do an actual story. Yash Chopra and YRF (Yash Raj Films) seemed like a great prism through which to examine this story. Yes, there are many production houses and studios, but few have had the longevity of Yash Chopra’s career. Few filmmakers’ careers have started in the aftermath of Independence and Partition, then came all the way through the corporatisation of the 2010s and through YRF the story continues and goes beyond. The story does not stop in the 1980s or 1990s. I thought Yash Chopra and YRF would allow me to cover a lot of ground in terms of genres of films, in terms of decades and historical events.
(The documentary starts with pre-Independence India and the cinema then, from Chopra’s Dharmputra and Waqt days to Deewar, Trishul and his last films Veer Zaara and Jab Tak Hai Jaan.)
What has The Romantics meant for you?
We live in a crowded landscape of content. People are being served content from all over the world. You never expect that you are going to make something that will break through. I felt confident that we had made a good show. But we could not have anticipated how emotionally people have connected to the show. The impact on my career is early to tell. But my appetite has become ravenous for telling more and more stories on Indian cinema. I would love to do something on South cinema. And there are icons of our industry.
Who?
The number one on my list would be Amitabh Bachchan. It would be amazing… similar to why Yash Chopra was so appealing to me as a protagonist. His career and life tells us about the country and the lives we live in.
How difficult was it getting YRF, who are usually recalcitrant, on board?
It wasn’t difficult per se. They agreed to do this project before any of my recent accolades. It was before Indian Matchmaking had come out, before my Oscar nomination (for St. Louis Superman). When I approached them I was a filmmaker who had made one acclaimed documentary; that is it. What helped is that I had done a lot of research. The idea was to put Yash Chopra and Hindi cinema in a bigger historical, cultural, economic context. They responded to that ambition and vision.
Do you wish you had done it after Pathaan? It is a huge hit from YRF that isn’t mentioned at all.
News reports what is happening right now. Documentaries and other types of storytelling offer the benefit of perspective. The Romantics gives you perspective on the history of the studio. I don’t want it to come too close to the present day. We don’t know the larger perspective on what is happening in the present.
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