Box-office satisfaction always comes first: Mahesh Manjrekar

Mumbai, Feb 17 (IANS) Mahesh Manjrekar, who returns to direction with the "City Of Gold", says a film cannot be made without money therefore its box office performance is vital for its maker.

"Box-office satisfaction always comes first. If I do three films for creative satisfaction and my producer bears loss then no producer will ever stand by me," Manjrekar told reporters Wednesday after the first look of "City of Gold" was unveiled.

"Films cannot be made without money. I tried making films without money, but it's impossible. You can even make a film without camera, but not without money. So commercial success of the film is very important," he added.

The actor-director, whose last film was "Deha", says he quit direction because he was unable to understand the grammar of song and dance movies.

"Four years ago, the kind of films people wanted me to do, I was incapable of making such films. I lack the intelligence to do song and dance films. So I took a break and ventured into acting," Manjrekar said.

He feels that over the years the taste of viewers has changed and they are now open to different kind of cinema.

"Actually, the time has come when people are open to a different kind of cinema. Ten years back, it was beyond anyone's imagination to make a film like 'A Wednesday' or 'Taare Zameen Par' and get a producer for them," he said.

"But I was writing films with a hope that time will come when people will accept my type of film. I also tried learning the skills of copying directly from an English film, but was unable to grab the technique of it," added the director who won critical acclaim for Amitabh Bachchan starrer "Virrudh".

His "City of Gold" is a crisp, stylised and hard-hitting film based on the 1982 mills strike and highlights the trials and tribulations of workers and their families.

"I used to stay in Wadala (Mumbai) and I have seen these people from very close quarters. In the 1980s, docks and these mills were the sources of income for middle class people. There were around 250,000 worker and another 500,000 people surviving on it. They didn't have luxuries, but they were happily living," said Manjrekar.

Satish Kaushik, Seema Biswas, Karan Patel, Siddharth Jadhav, Ankush Chaudhary, Sachin Khedekaar, Kashmira Shah, Sameer Dharmadhikari, Vineet Kumar Singh, Veena Jhamkar, Shashank Shende and Anusha Dandekar forms the cast of the movie.

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City of Gold