National award-winning writer and director has been giving blockbuster cinema for the last four decades. His work in Hindi, Tamil and Malayalam cinema is recognised globally. However, understanding the changing audience, he feels that he too, should bring a certain change in his storytelling, to compete with young filmmakers.
Films such as 'Kanchirvaram' (Tamil), 'Virasat' and 'Hera Pheri' (Hindi), 'Kaalapani' and 'Thenmavin Kombath' (Malayalam) have been some of his popular works. Priyadarshan is known for making layered stories, with constant twists. He feels that is what the audience likes.
"When it comes to commercial films, I feel that people want to listen to a lot of stories, instead of listening to only one kind of story and to create dramatic situations, you need more character and the canvas has to be bigger. So, I write my stories like that. Even for comedy films, you need to create situations and characters. That practice I have been doing for 40 years. However, I feel I have to change my writing now because I have to compete with the youngsters," says Priyadarshan, whose recent Malayalam film 'Marakkar: Lion Of The Arabian Sea' won three National awards.
The filmmaker came back to Hindi cinema with 'Hungama 2' after almost eight years. His previous Hindi directorial being 2013 film 'Rangrezz'. The Padma Shri awardee says that every industry has its own style of working and he didn't observe any change in Bollywood while working on 'Hungama 2'.
"I have never seen any change in people's attitude in Bollywood or Tamil or Telugu. Ofcourse Telugu cinema folks always like their movies to be more commercial and not very realistic. Their audience also accepts it and expects it. In Malayalam, people like to look at their movies in very simple and straight narrations," he says.
Citing the example of filmmaker Anurag Kashyap, Priyadarshan seems impressed with the content-driven approach of many filmmakers.
"Even in Hindi, there are some nice stories done by a lot of these new actors and directors. Actually they have brought the movie standard of Bollywood much better now, I feel. People like Anurag Kashyap and others are attempting something new and it is a great encouragement for the industry," he says.
The filmmaker. whose comedy films are still considered one of the best, now wants to do some light-hearted real films.
"When you do humour, you mostly do it for children and people who like to just laugh. I have been doing humour but I would also like to do some films which are light hearted and realistic. As I said before, my style of writing is different, so I am relying on other writers now," he says.