AJ: I want us to talk about your personal life a bit later, but for the moment can we talk about Parinda, the film that set you apart as a ...
AJ: I want us to talk about your personal life a bit later, but for the moment can we talk about Parinda, the film that set you apart as a filmmaker in India? Parinda has themes of brotherhood, betrayal, lost values and valour. You cast the top stars of the time, including Anil Kapoor, Jackie Shroff, Madhuri Dixit and Nana Patekar. How did you go about developing the screenplay?
VVC: The first lines I wrote were the most commercial and cliched lines I could think of. Two young brothers come to Bombay. The younger brother is crying because he’s hungry and the elder brother tells him: ‘Don’t cry. I’m your brother. I’ll protect you.’ When I was writing the script, I reminded myself about what François Truffaut once said. These are not his exact words, I’m paraphrasing but he said something like: ‘I build the edifice of my film using the pillars of commercial cinema and then one by one, I knock the pillars down. And if the edifice still holds, I know I have a script.’ So bearing his words in mind I took a smuggler, two brothers, a murdered friend and used all the elements of a popular Hindi movie...
