Shekhar Kapur interview: On ‘Masoom 2’, censorship and AI

“Is home a memory, an emotion, or just four walls?” The quandary returned to trouble Shekhar Kapur during the COVID pandemic when the world was shutting down. The celebrated filmmaker, who describes himself as a nomad and is fondly addressed as Ibn Batuta by his close friend Shabana Azmi, found refuge in the Jones Estate of Bhimtal, which he discovered during the recce for Masoom in the early 1980s. At the serene retreat, his “constant search for identity” began to take shape as a spiritual sequel over the next three months.

A product of Partition, Kapur says the concept of home has haunted him forever. “My parents were refugees from Lahore. When they came to Delhi, my mother wanted her own space. She would forever say “mainu ghar chahida hai”, and my doctor father would remind her that they had just lost their home.” Kapur remembers when construction started in Maharani Bagh; his mother, who had seen two massive earthquakes in her lifetime, would tell the young architect to make it earthquake-proof. “We were perhaps the first in Delhi to have a house built on stilts. Now that my parents are gone, my sister lives there, and I wander from one city to another. The kind of calls I get, it seems the home has been reduced to a piece of real estate. I would joke that an earthquake will not shake the house, but the tremors in real estate prices just might. All this spurred me to write. After all, we are a country of migrants.”

The pangs of Partition, Kapur clarifies, didn’t make him bitter but rendered him forever restless. At 24, Kapur says he decided that he would not have a career. “If the idea of a film comes in front of me, I go to the sets; if a musical excites my imagination, I take the stage. Right now, I am as excited about working on a Korean musical on the life of Beethoven with K-pop stars as working with Naseeruddin Shah and Manoj Bajpayee on Masoom-2.”

Bestowed with Padma Bhushan this year, Kapur was in Delhi to hold meetings for the International Film Festival of India in his capacity as festival director. As someone who has witnessed his uncle, Dev Anand, take on Indira Gandhi during the Emergency, Kapur is in a position to reflect on the intermingling of cinema and politics. “I was around when he forged the National Party. He was a brave man, but I have had my own philosophy. I am not a political animal, but I do feel that if you are living in a democracy, you have to engage with the democratically elected government.”

Kapur says there are issues, but democracy is an open door. “Let’s keep talking. I tell my friends who complain about censorship that I had to argue for a year to get Bandit Queen released during the Congress rule. I was also showing an Indian reality. For a long time, the U.S. has been seen as a free society, but today I guess I can express myself better in India than in the U.S.”

Kapur finds a kind of intellectual tribalism in the upper echelons of society. “No one section of society can claim that it understands or represents India completely. Freedom of expression can’t exist in a vacuum. It needs to be accompanied by freedom from hunger, freedom to educate, and freedom from poverty.”

Creative expression is facing a big challenge from artificial intelligence. Kapur says AI is a democratic technology, but it can’t make you a better storyteller. “If we are predictable in our creativity, AI will catch up. For instance, if we want every Game of Thrones season to have similar character graphs and ambience, AI can do that job. People at the top will lose their jobs as AI will cause the pyramid to collapse. However, the highest form of creativity emerges when we put ourselves in a state of chaos. Life and love exist because there is uncertainty. We can explore the uncertainty between does she love me, does she not in myriad ways by putting ourselves on the line, a machine can’t.”

Discussing his struggles with content and form, Kapur notes that among his three illustrious maternal uncles, he was emotionally closest to Chetan Anand, known for directing classics like Neecha Nagar, the only Indian film to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes, whose basic theme echoes in Kapur’s jinxed project, Paani. “Like him, content comes before style for me. You might say Mr India was an exception, but there again, the style was derived from a strong emotion. I saw the space through the 11-year-old in me. And I followed the same process in Elizabeth.”

He firmly faced the detractors who equated his restlessness with laziness. Kapur says he seeks “to climb a new mountain every time,” and sometimes, when he discovers that he is charting the same path, he is open to cutting short the adventure, as he did with projects like Joshilay and Barsaat. “I believe art is an intuitive idea, and you can’t interfere with your intuition. If you don’t have your own intuition, what do you have?” he wonders.

What about Kapur’s perception of love? A nomad at 79 sounds a bit crazy. “To me, settling down is a very middle-class idea,” he chuckles. “For me, love is about dissolving yourself into something. I have felt the strongest bond with my daughter Kaveri. But is the search for home liberating or provoking more and more quests? Elizabeth poses the same question towards he end. Did she become a prisoner of herself, or was she liberated from herself? I am not sure, but I like this idea of not being sure. It drives me to try....”