Want to make a fun, happy film next: Karan Johar

Karan Johar is one of India's most successful, most prominent and definitely most articulate filmmakers. His last film marked a turning point in his filmography or his body of work but was overshadowed perhaps by the political controversy surrounding the film's lead actor in Mumbai.

In an interview with CNBC-TV18's Anuradha Sengupta, Johar spoke on a range of issues including his films going forward and his most recent release My Name is Khan.

Q: Going forward where Karan Johar's body of work or his filmography is concerned, is it going to be seen by people as before and after My Name is Khan?

A: No, nothing so drastic. It was really me, my state of mind that made me make My Name is Khan, me, my state of mind that made me make Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. Right now if you ask me, I am elated in a certain way, I feel liberated creatively and I want to make something that is fun and happy.

I feel like I may want to go back into a certain song and dance routine film which everyone said I took a kind of step away from with My Name is Khan. But if you ask me today, I want to have fun on set. Like I felt My Name is Khan has emotionally drained me and then post the release even more so.

I just feel now I am in a headspace that I feel that I am not young anymore entirely. I am going to turn 38 next month which with the way the world is moving so fast, with the way the youth headspace is changing with every passing year, I think I want to hold on to that in some way or the other, make a really young film now because I don't know if I will be sane enough to do it in a few years.

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Q: What are some of the things that you didn't do in My Name is Khan, which you would have done otherwise?

A: It was a conscious decision to treat the syntax of the film unusually. I think just the way the scenes came about, the character, the protagonist, who was a different protagonist as compared to my other works.

Even the treatment syntax, the way the film was shot in tandem with my director of photography, Ravi Chandran, the way Shibani Bathija wrote the scenes – I think everything was different. I just wanted to deconstruct what I had done earlier and very defiantly so, which is the one thing that I regret. I made this film in defiance and that is the only thing I am upset about.

Q: So this defiance was 'I will show you that I can do things differently'?

A: It was totally that and that is not something I am proud of and I apologize because that has shown up in the film. I just took it to an extreme – I was just very fed up of hearing words like mush, bubblegum, family, NRI and I kept saying you are judging me and my talent unfairly and I have been slotted unfairly.

So there was one point in my life and I said like I just felt that even in the directors of the industry there was a certain vibe that is he a commercially viable filmmaker but he doesn't understand cinema.

Q: Tell me what portions of the films suffered you think because you were defiant and because you were trying to prove something?

A: Very honestly the flood portion of the film which is I believe – now when I look at it objectively and I know that a week or two weeks after enough and more criticism came out of that sequence and I was like maybe they are right. It is not rocket science to figure that out. It was something that Shibani and I both were breaking our head with that sequence on paper, we knew we needed something large to happen so the protagonist could have access to the President, that he would be noticed and we kept thinking that this was a little bit of a stretch but there was nothing else that we could come up with.

Shibani gave her heart and soul in trying to execute that on paper. I was always worried about that sequence and that is the one big lesson I learnt on this film that what doesn't instinctively work for you on paper, no matter what you do, just think of an alternative, never try to make something work on celluloid because that effort, your strong and creative endeavour will eventually get caught and that is what happened.

I think that when I looked at it, I knew what we had done was a salvage operation not a good one. It was something that we had saved to the best of our ability because had you seen what we had on the edit, you would have been traumatized like my editor Deepa Bhatia - who I believe has been the hugest force I have had on this film – just looked at me and turned around and she said, do you want all this?" and I said, "No, it is not working."

So we chopped off 10 minutes, it is there in the deleted scenes in the DVD. What you have seen is just 5 minutes. We had 10 more minutes of things that were just cinematically wrong.
What do I say, I don't believe a filmmaker must ever apologise for anything he or she believes he or she has done wrong on celluloid.

But it is important for a filmmaker to acknowledge their scene failure and their script failure, their loopholes, their execution failure and I have done just that. I have stepped back, looked at my work and said I like 70-80% of this, I do not like 20%. I said before anybody is going to throw this in my face, I am going to throw it back to them. But look I am not saying sorry but I am saying point noted.

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Q: Can I tell you what bothered me in your movie besides this and maybe some other parts? I thought Kajol's character was so beautifully etched and she is just so wonderful, she comes to screen and it is magic and this maybe a spoiler in case you haven't seen the film. When she confronts Shah Rukh Khan after her son's death, I feel that you as a filmmaker and perhaps your writer have let that wonderful character down. It was almost as if he needed a trigger to go on and embark on his journey across America with the intention of meeting the president and she had to say it.

A: Her breakdown and her outburst is based on a true story. It has happened. A wonderful, compassionate love relationship that had a death in their family and I won't mention names because it came up in our research – I don't think any of us can understand the loss of a child and what it can do to a mother.

I just think at that point of time, the way it was written, I don't think and I don't agree with you on that, I would have agreed with a lot of other things but I believe that the way I constructed that scene, the way she performed it was completely justified work for me emotionally. I think it is the most emotionally un-understandable emotion for anyone to understand how a woman would react in that circumstance.

I thought this extreme reaction and what she was saying, blabbering, bursting it all out, things that were just coming out, venom because somewhere subliminally I think this woman believed that she had covered up the Hindu-Muslim angle within herself because she was trying very hard to be modern and bohemian because that is the character she was.

But somewhere when this happened, she had to blame someone. I thought this woman just blamed him for everything and went down to even scratching the communal surface of their marriage. And I felt that that is what she did and that is how I felt it, that is how we wrote it and that is how I expected her to perform it and that is how I believe she did.

Q: You didn't feel that you were doing the character she had been to us up to that point an injustice?

A: No, I was giving it a reality because I felt that this woman who is all bohemian, modern, dumped by her husband, brought her child up in San Fransisco, falls in love with a man who has Asperger's syndrome, all that. But when she loses the most important aspect of her life – her son – she just breaks down and comes down to being a regular human being. And that is what I thought she had become. She had just become like a flawed person who just blames people for things that may not be true. So she blames her poor man.

Q: That is the Karan Johar signature that is there in all your movies which is the compromise that all your characters need to make with society?

A: I believe maybe that is because I am like that. I agree with you that there could be a point of view to Mandira. We've debated about it, people have asked me in the past which I don't understand or comprehend, why didn't Rani love Abhishek? That was again something that was a character out of the so called domain, society and tradition of our country. I said she wasn't turned on by him maybe, she wasn't attracted to him.

Is it a flaw for a woman not to be attracted to her good husband, for not feel the sexual energy with her completely fantastic, good man husband, so why blame her? I know women who came up to me and said, she had a good-looking husband, he was very good to her, he was not cheating on her. What kind of a woman is she that she wasn't in love with him?

I said she was a woman who just didn't. There are women who don't. There are women out there who have the best husbands, they don't feel it. That is something that the society just doesn't understand. It is all about this country because eventually we are a conglomerate of such unusual different emotions that work on a daily basis. That sometimes you address something, you go against it and sometimes you completely play it safe. I felt that at this situation, this is what maybe Mandira would have done. So I felt like I was completely justifying, I am not taking it away.

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