‘Still trying to understand what love is’ - Imtiaz Ali

Imtiaz Ali

One might expect the director must be very romantic at heart who has given us romantic films like Jab We Met and Love Aaj Kal. But this assumption is not true with Imtiaz Ali. He rather says that he not even remotely, not even close to be romantic. The strange thing is that he had a love marriage. He says, “I did. But honestly, I tend to be very hard-hearted and pretty unromantic in life.” Imtiaz later adds that he is confused about what love is and trying to explore and understand it with his films.

“All I want to do is discover love. When I was young, I thought that there’s a quality called ‘love’ which is common for everyone, and unchanging. But as I grew up, I understood that there’s no uniform love. And that confusion led me to make movies and explore love. I was and still am very confused and therefore, I don’t use it in my personal life. Not even in my movies will you find anyone saying ‘I love you’ a thousand times,” he adds.

What he is doing currently? “I have lot of stories floating around in my head, but I need to pick one. I don’t know what form it will take or which one’s going to become the reason to make a film,” adds the director.

Will all his further films evolve around love? “Some of them are romantic, some aren’t. But all the stories have something to do with a man-womanrelationship. I can’t think of anything that does not involve a man-woman relationship,” says Imtiaz.

Talking more about love and films Imtiaz added that according to him the number one Bollywood romantic hero is Dilip Kumar. However on the front of film commercialisation he said, “it needs to recover cost, but he’ll never make any compromises just for commercialisation.”

The director is currently busy reading scripts; meanwhile he is also planning for the Tamil version of JWM. What inspired him to think of the Tamil remake? “When we were shooting for Jab We Met in Punjab, my cameraman, sound recordist and their whole unit was Tamilian. They’d say, “Agar Tamil mein hota toh kaisa hota? Train Chennai se Madhurai ja raha hota.” So, that was at the back of my mind, and coincidentally, some people from the Tamil film industry approached us to make a remake. I hope it turns out better than JWM,” said Imtiaz.