Panaji: Film Bazaar's 'Master Class with Vidhu Vinod Chopra: a dialogue between Filmmakers', where he was interviewed by Sudhir Mishra about his past projects and his thought process, became a lot more interesting when filmmaker Shekhar Kapur asked Vidhu a couple questions. Excerpts from the interview:
Shekhar Kapoor: One needs a huge creative ego to get a film made, and you have to be creatively arrogant. What about personal ego? Do you find sometimes that personal ego interferes with creative ego or does it add to the creativity?
Vidhu Vinod Chopra: Shekhar, in all honesty I have been fighting that battle for a long time. And Anu who I've been married to for the last 20 years has been a great help. Khalil Gibran had once said, "I use hate as a weapon to defend myself, if I was strong enough I wouldn't need it." I think my insecurities, which emerge from the fact that I came from a village, went to a school where I didn't know English, didn't know who Shakespeare was, or who Hamlet was. Somebody once asked me about Sigmund Freud and I said he was a German filmmaker. So I came from a place where I wasn't uneducated, but illiterate. I would listen to my father and read Ghalib for my education. And during the early stages of my career, because I was so insecure I used offence as the defence mechanism. Now I think I can take it, I'm not as bad as I used to be. I think personal ego should be in the gutter, and creative ego is something that drive us all.
Shekhar Kapur: I need to learn personal ego from you. I know if Vinod doesn't use cuss words for me, he doesn't love me anymore.
Vidhu Vinod Chopra (laughs): I was angry with Rajesh Pandey, who has been working for me for 20 years, last month. During that time I didn't say anything. But he did something for which I abused him and he said, 'Aapne ek haftey se gaali nahi di, mujhe samajh mei aa gaya ki aap mujhse naraaz hain.'
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