Touted to have hurt religious sentiments with its portrayal of Ravana, the film ‘Adipurush’ seems to have come under the scanner. The film’s teaser was released recently, and people have objected to it. Arun Mandola, who has done a number of mythological and historical roles in his career, says that this controversy was bound to happen.
“‘Adipurush’ created hype but the teaser was extremely outdated. All scenes are copied from Hollywood films like ‘Game Of Thrones’, ‘Planets Of Apes’, ‘Jungle Book’ etc. Apart from this, the director failed to understand the Indian audience. As I said, Bollywood failed to understand the new Indian audience and they used bad CGI. Also, they are playing with Hindu people’s sentiments, and they are taking advantage, and this is absolutely wrong. People should take strict action against any wrongdoing,” he says.
The actor says that Bollywood really needs to up its game. “Bollywood is stuck with old content and old picturisation and they always copy Tollywood or Hollywood. They don’t do so much hard work and want ready-made content. If you see Hollywood, it has lots of historical or superhero films like Vikings, and Spiderman but Bollywood has only romantic or action-based projects and those projects are also copied. They are not calculating what is required by today’s audience. As per my calculations, the future audience will want creative projects, not saas bahu or drama shows,” he says.
Talking about people part of a historical or mythological project, he says, “Historical and mythological shows are not everyone’s cup of tea. It’s extremely challenging because the costume is ten times tough to wear, sometimes they weigh up to 10 to 15 kg with heavy jewellery. You need 20 times extra body language. Apart from this, the language in the dialogues is 5000 years old. You almost feel drained when you do these projects.”
