Screenwriter Gazal Dhaliwal shared how this is a common practice in the film industry and talked about filmmakers' hunger for 'power'.
Screenwriter Gazal Dhaliwal, best known for the Netflix show ‘Mismatched’, recently lashed out at filmmaker Sandeep Reddy Vanga for taking the sole credit of writer for his latest hit film ‘Animal’. Penning a note on Instagram, Dhaliwal mentioned how some filmmakers have a “deep-seated need of power” and not give credit where it is due.
She mentioned on Instagram, “I do want to share a seemingly-small insight I draw about the person behind the film from a seemingly-small fact. Specifically, from the point of view of a screenwriter.” She also shared a screenshot from the ‘Animal’ credits which mentions Sandeep Reddy Vanga is referred to as the "Writer, director, editor” of the film.
Dhaliwal also stated how it is a common practice in the film industry for filmmakers wanting to have the ‘writer’s’ credit as well due to their hunger for ‘power’.
She continued, “There is a particular kind of filmmaker who claims the ‘Writer’ title in the top credit of their film, even when there are other writers who have written the Screenplay and Dialogues of the film. It happens a lot, by the way, in our world. These filmmakers have a deep-seated need for power. Even though being a director is the most powerful anyway… for some reason, it would seem that claiming the ‘Writer’ credit is what gives them the biggest high.”
Dhaliwal further shared that Vanga could have taken credit for writing the story of ‘Animal’ and could have credited his brother Pranay Reddy Vanga and Suresh Bandaru for the screenplay, and Saurabh Gupta for dialogues.
Nonetheless, Animal, starring Ranbir Kapoor and Bobby Deol in the lead roles, is being criticised for its portrayal of violence and toxic masculinity. Revealing what she found ‘disturbing’ in the film, Dhaliwal recalled a scene where Ranbir’s character Ranvijay tells his love interest Geetanjali (Rashmika Mandanna) that women were always attracted to alpha men. Hence, the Beta men, who wanted to grab a woman's attention, had to write poems to seduce them.
Dhaliwal wrote, “The protagonist, claiming to be an alpha male, tells the girl he likes that evolutionarily, women would always choose the alpha man to mate with. So, then the beta men were like – and I paraphrase – what should they do? After all, they had desires too. And that’s how, says this alpha protagonist condescendingly, ‘poetry’ came to be – so that the beta men could seduce women by cooking up words. And I couldn’t help but think – how small, how very petty of this alpha male, who is cooking up words to seduce the woman.”
She signed off, “By the way, a poet, as we all know, is a ‘Writer’. Which also happens to be a credit some filmmakers find difficult to share.”
Her post attracted a lot of comments. Filmmaker Tanuja Chandra also wrote, “Loved reading this.”