Films create culture, says Abhay Deol

One of the biggest hits of Abhay Deol’s career was the Zoya Akhtar directorial ‘Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara’ and in a recent interview, the actor shared that the experts within the film industry didn’t believe that the film would work as it didn’t have a villain. Abhay said that the chatter within the film industry at the time suggested that the audience wouldn’t care much about ‘Hrithik Roshan’s inner conflict’ in the film.

“When we were making ‘Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara’, so many people in the film industry were asking, ‘Who is the villain? There is no villain. What is inner conflict? Who will come to watch Hrithik Roshan’s inner conflict?’ We were hearing this kind of chatter,” he told ‘BBC News Hindi’. In the film, the three primary characters are going through their internal struggles as they travel through Spain.

Abhay added that with the kind of packaging that it got, the film could become successful despite the naysayers. “That is how it was fresh. These kinds of actors made this kind of film on this budget and it worked. But the film industry didn’t have much faith that it would work,” he said.

In the same conversation, Abhay also spoke about ‘Manorama Six Feet Under’ and said that the film hardly got any screens and had a smaller marketing budget, which was one of the reasons why it didn’t make much money at the box office.

Abhay said that ‘films create culture also’ and said that if the audience is fed the same kind of film, it doesn’t give them much chance to experiment with their viewing choices. He added that over the years, audiences have been groomed into liking a certain kind of film, which is seen as the mainstream film.