Does It Make Any Sense To Make Biopics Now?
In ‘Sanju’, Sanjay Dutt beats an author because he puts Sanjay Dutt up with Mahatma Gandhi. You may want to beat me coz I’m putting his biopic with Gandhi’s biopic. Not just that, I’m putting that biopic up with Bose’s and Sardar’s too. But before you beat me up, hear me out once.
A lot of you may have issues with ‘Sanju’ — it is his mouthpiece, there’s no objectivity, it whitewashes his history, etc., All of them are valid and do have some effect in the long run. But when you talk to the audience. Most never talk that way. They describe movie whether it was awesome, cool or fun. I guess, all they care whether they had a good time.
And that’s where my problems with biopics start. Their very format won’t allow you to have a good time. You may ask who am I to say this? I haven’t made a single movie. You can hear this issue being reflected on by the maker of one of the most famous biopics, Gandhi.
“No man’s life can be encompassed in one telling. There is no way to give each year its allotted weight to include each event, each person who helped to shape a lifetime. What can be done is to be faithful in spirit to the record and try find one’s way to the heart of the man…” — Richard Attenborough, Gandhi
Yes, movies cannot encompass a life in one telling. There are many obstacles don’t allow them to do that. The first major obstacle is time. The movies are usually 90 minutes long. Even the epics are at most three hours long. How many major incidents and characters be covered in that?
It’s fine with normal stories, which usually have 3–4 major characters and one major incident. But with a biopic of a great person, especially if the person is complex and has lived a varied life, there are a huge number of major incidents one after another. So, how many incidents can you delve into in detail?
After a point, they just have to rush through events. Instead of a story it just becomes a reportage. Check how rushed some major events feel in ‘Sardar’.
(Sequence of Events: Gandhi leaves Congress over Partition. Then the talks with British fail. Next shot, Gandhi’s back in another meeting deciding their leader. With no explanation of his return, whatsoever.)
A lot of filmmakers get around this by focusing on only one incident in the famous person’s life.
But then some film makers don’t want to do that. They just skip over a lot of important phases of a person’s biography. For example, in ‘Sanju’, he’s established as a promiscuous man who’s slept with about 300 women. He got married thrice. And third time was a charm. How did that happen. What did he find in Manyata? What Manyata found in him? Isn’t that an intriguing story to know? And that’s just one character. There are so many aspects of Sanjay Dutt that are potentially great stories. They had shown him acquiring guns but how did he start mingling with the underworld dons. How far did he go on that path? What kind of interesting people led him there and met him there? That’s the second biggest obstacle of biopics — Characters.
Any great person’s decisions make sense only in context. That is the people and conditions around him too are quite exceptional. And there’s just not one person, there’s a huge number of interesting people around any great person. Recall most of your favorite movies — How many major characters can they establish well? Most movies exhaust at five, maybe six. And that’s when the movie is about only one incident.
Often a person’s life isn’t about just incident is it? It is one major incident after another. Sometimes it isn’t even about an incident. It is about a phase in a person’s life. You can appreciate a person at a particular point because you have journeyed with him through all the phases.
What I’m getting at is life is often episodic. And the only story format that does justice to it is a series. Each season could represent a phase of life of that person and we can get ourselves many good stories well told instead of one good story, at best, and multiple superficial stories at worst. Any Biopic that’s worth doing is worth doing as a series.
Check these samples of Bio drama series:
Thanks for your attention so far. I’ll leave you with the thought — Imagine how much better Gandhi, Sardar, and Sanju would have been in this format.