Manoj Bajpayee starrer 'Joram' hit the theatres last year in December. Though the movie earned international fame and recognition, it failed to pull audiences to the theatres on its home ground. In a recent interview, the actor expressed his displeasure at the audience for not showing up at the theatres. He said that people don't watch 'real cinema' but spend money on mainstream films.
In an interview with Jist, opening up about Joram’s box office performance, Manoj Bajpayee said, “Inmein se kisi ne nahi dekhi hogi (no one here must have watched the film). I am telling you, yeh yetharth hai (it is a possibility). We had purposely released Joram in very few theatres because we wanted to gauge if the audiences’ brains work the same way as we think, or if they only want to watch other kind of films. People who went to watch the film really liked it, they themselves are promoting it by word of mouth, telling ten other people to watch it. But the majority of people don’t believe in such films, and even if they do, they want to watch them for free. The same people will take a loan to watch other kinds of films, they are okay doing that, it’s their taste. Our fight is about this. We want to see how interested they are in watching the kind of films we want to make.”
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He also said there are two kinds of cinema. ''One is where it is a medium for art, and the other kind of cinema only entertains you — you pay for the tickets, you dance and sing songs, watch action, and it’s over. You go home and forget about it, wait for next Friday. But I look at cinema as an art medium, where we want to use it to tell our stories in the best possible way so that the people who watch the film like it and the stories we tell remain in their mind for a few days. That is cinema for me. For the majority of the audience, cinema is only a medium of entertainment. They just want to whistle in theatre halls or hoot when they see a fight sequence. Now people are also bursting crackers in cinema halls,'' added 'The Family Man' actor.
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Manoj said that he isn't scared of it because he is convinced that what he is doing is the right cinema and it is doing justice. ''If we don’t make this kind of cinema then it won’t last for too long. Cinema can’t last with films that are meant only for entertainment,'' said the National award-winning actor.
Manoj also revealed that 'Joram' was released on only 350 screens and tickets for the film were also cheap, but still, people didn’t go. He added, ''We weren’t even looking at earning in crores, we wanted to take a risk. Per day the film earned around 15-19 lakh, which is very good compared to the big films which have 5000-6000 screens. If you look at the ratio, Joram is quite a successful film.”
Written and directed by Devashish Makhija, 'Joram' also stars Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, Tannishtha Chatterjee, and Smita Tambe.
