Siddharth Roy Kapur, who after successful stints at Star TV, UTV Motion Pictures and The Walt Disney Company, founded Roy Kapur Films in 2017, and is the name associated with some of the biggest and most impactful movies of recent times including The Lunchbox (2013), one of the most internationally acclaimed Hindi films of recent times, Dangal (2016), the highest grossing Indian film of all time, and six titles that were officially chosen to represent India at the Oscars — Rang De Basanti (2006), Taare Zameen Par (2008), Harishchandrachi Factory (2009), Peepli Live (2010), Barfi! (2012), and Last Film Show (2022). The former president of the Producers Guild of India and a member Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, he is one of the most interesting film producers working in the Hindi film industry today.

What is the most interesting bit about being an Indian producer today? And what is the most challenging part?  

When you are trying to work with both art and commerce and trying to get them intersect in the best possible way, there are complexities that are challenging yet very interesting—right from figuring out if this is the right material to spend one or two years of your life on, whether you have the right talent in place, whether the commercial viability of the project is making sense, what platform should it be on…should it be a theatrical or on OTT, what form should it take…should it be a movie or a series, to navigating through the entire process to ensure that you act as the best creative catalyst possible to drive the entire project and make the creative people feel safe and secure so that they can produce their best work, and also help it achievecommercial success. You are juggling with so many balls in the air, that it is always challenging, and always exciting.

But you have to do all those sans any safety net. It’s a huge risk. Is there a blueprint?  

In a way, the beauty of the business is that there is no one formula for success. You have to keep anticipating what the audience might want in the future even when they have not shown you any signs for the same right now. And often the riskiest thing is to take the road most taken as that can lead you to a path of becoming one more of the same. Unlike other businesses it is not that structure; you can’t follow a binary. In filmmaking, the basic decision around whether to greenlight something or not, despite all the sciences involved, boils down to a gut-level decision.  
Yes, there is a basic blueprint—you know that there is a likelihood that if there are stars there will be a certain level of awareness and box office, you look at the past track records to know that certain genres work better and which ones work better on which platform, etc and you are able to come to a rough economic viability of a project. But until the product—the web series or the movie—is in the market you never know how the consumers/audience is going to respond to it and therefore what kind of business would it do.

With so many star-led films failing at the box office—a ‘Salman-Khan movie’ doesn’t guarantee his fans flocking to the theatres. Is the definition of ‘commercial cinema’ changing? 

Today, it is about creating a really compelling cinematic experience; your movie should make the audience feel the need to watch it on a big screen. Whether it is a big-ticket release like a Kalki or something as genre-breaker as Animal or a really heartwarming film like a 12th Fail that people want to enjoy as a shared community experience. It is as easy and as difficult as that. 

You brought up Animal, it faced a lot of criticism for apparently ‘promoting’ toxic masculinity. But these days we are hailing South cinema, and Tamil and Telugu movies are replete with instances of toxic masculinity and problematic portrayal of women. Do you think we are viewing South cinema from a different lens? 

You are probably you are right. There is a possibility that Hindi audience might give certain allowances to South cinema with the presumption that those might be part of regional sensibilities and hence don’t judge them as harshly as they do in the case of Hindi cinema. But you have to respect and accept the audience reaction; but if it is not affecting the box office and is just coming from some critics or is just a part of some social media chatter, it can be ignored. In the case of Animal, it was a massive box office success. So, I am not sure if such judgements are coming from the mainstream audience or if it is only the critics who are viewing these movies from a certain lens.

But as a producer, is it ever a concern, especially in a world that seems to be too prone to get offended? 

I think it has to appeal to you first—if you try to do under the presumed assumption that I don’t like it but the audience will like it, the end product will not be authentic. Everyone has to take their own call. Whether you like Animal or not, you can’t deny the conviction with which the story was told or acted and that was only because there was complete belief in the project from all—you can question the sensibility behind it but never the conviction, and that usually always wins out. It is very important to have complete conviction in the material first and then let the chips fall where they may.

You had co-produced Last Film Show, Pan Nalin’s Gujarati movie that went to the Oscars. How difficult it is to produce such a film?  

It is always more difficult for such intimate and delicate films to get a wide release, but you produce those for different reasons. Last Film Show was not an expensive film to produce, it was a beautiful story to tell, and it got the kind of acclaim it did. So, we achieved much more than we thought we would. But is it a harder proposition to back such movie? It always is. Because the path to take is not very clear, these are not star-driven films, they are not high-concept film with a well-defined genre, these are all about the experience of the film. And even if there are successes, producing such films will never be easy.

Do you think suddenly there is a fresh interest towards Indian content internationally? If so, are foreign collaborations in funding and distribution something India should look at? 

Sure, that is happening already. We had The Samuel Goldwyn Company release Last Film Show in the US and Orange Studio, Paris backing it. For The Lunchbox, Guneet Monga had stitch together several foreign distributers. But if I had to be brutally honest. Indian cinema is yet to crossover. Yes, there was Dangal in China, The Lunchbox in the US and Europe, last year RRR sort of became a part of the cultural conversation, we had Last Film Show at the Oscars, we have multiple wins at Cannes this year—but these are more of exceptions than prove the rule. Outside India, our films are watched mostly by the diaspora audience, which is a huge population nonetheless. But we need to challenge ourselves to break into the mainstream in a way Korea has managed to do in the recent past. That’s the next step. 

Indian cinema has such a long history, but why do you think our cinema still doesn’t have the kind of reach Iranian or Korean enjoys? 

In a way we are victims of our own success. We have such a large captive audience, both in India and outside, that we never felt the need to reach out beyond that. This is unlike Iranian or Italian or French cinema whose local market is quite small, so they had to actively reach out to the world. But today’s generation of content creators are a lot more outward looking than a few generations ago. Now, we have directors who are schooled in the style of filmmaking that is not too specific to India and can reach out. And I think in the next 10 years Indian cinema will reach the world audience beyond the South Asian diaspora.

As you mention ‘a style not to specific to India’, according to you how much local is too much local, especially since one of the main draws of Iranian cinema was its hyperlocal aspect? 

I believe that the more hyperlocal the content the more the prospect of it to reach a global audience. But I am talking about the grammar of film making, the subjects have to be hyperlocal for the audience to feel the homogeneity of humanity across borders and relate to it. But as soon as you break into a song-and-dance, or have an interval point, or have a runtime of 3 hours, you alienate the non-South Asian audience who are not used to that structure; these become barriers. It is also about the sensibilities with which the story is told…we tend to be more melodramatic.  

But then, it might not work for the Indian mass audience, especially since Indian cinema, unlike European cinema, might have had its roots not in cinema but in folk theatre… 

Yes, that’s why you can’t reverse engineer this. You have two first decide the audience you are making the film for. I don’t think we can ever say that we are making this movie only for the world audience and we don’t want it to work in India. For example, Dangal is a movie I produced. We had made it for the Indian and south-Asian audience around the globe. That such a hyperlocal film became such a huge hit in China and resonated with the people there was sheer luck and the artistry of the filmmaker; we didn’t plan it. You have to make a movie for your audience, otherwise it will not be authentic. And then you need to identify the ones that you think has the prospect to travel and provide those with the right kind of platforms to achieve that success.  

Do you think now with South cinema becoming ‘pan-Indian’, and Indian films making their international presence felt, do you think in near future we will have cinema beyond borders—beyond the north-south and India-world cinema divide—given the grammar of each is different? 

That would be the holy grail! I am sure such a film will emerge at some point. But can I define that film today? No. That has to be seen.