Shekhar Kapoor Speaks To Subhash K Jha About His Tryst With Shakespeare

Shekhar Kapoor Speaks To Subhash K Jha About His Tryst With Shakespeare

You have just completed a dazzling episode of a series on Shakespeare for the TNT channel, How  was the experience?

It’s called Will. I  am producing the entire series. It’s a 75-million dollar show. We’ve to create 9 more episodes of Series 1. If it’s successful it goes to Series 2.

You direct all the episodes?

It’s not possible for one director to do the entire show. But I’ll be definitely be directing some of the episodes. Since I am the producing-director I’ve to make sure that the entire series has the same qualities that you saw in the pilot which I  directed. So I’ll definitely get in there and direct some episodes.We start shooting on 1 September and on 1 January 2017 it starts  telecast all over the world.

I hope it comes to India?

Of course it will.

The young actor Laurie Davidson who plays Shakespeare is an amazing talent?

You know where I found him? In acting school! I must tell you the search for Shakespeare was no less arduous than my search for Elizabeth.

How different was  it shooting for television?

Well ,I am a feature-film director. But luckily for me, as you  saw in the trailer everything had to be done on the scale of a feature film. But television doesn’t have the same budget as a feature film . So I found means to get the same scale into the medium. I promise you when you see the series you won’t think it inferior to a feature film. Will looks like a 100-million dollar film.The pilot alone was  shot in eighteen days.

You have an amazing team with you on this project?

Yes, one day we were sitting down together and I realized we had  18 Oscar winners with us.And everybody was firing  all cylinders. That’s how it was possible to shoot a one-hour pilot-episode of television that  looks like a feature film.I had the best skills in the world and we prepped for four months. I can’t do the same in India.

Why?

When I mention a huge scale here everybody starts talking about the huge number of shooting  days.

You’ve taken the ultimate colonial revenge. Attenborough came to India and made Gandhi. You went to Britain and made Shakespeare?

I did that earlier with Elizabeth.If you talk to filmmakers in the UK and the US they will tell you, ‘Shekhar is at it again. He has reinvented British history.’

What went wrong in your collaboration with Aditya Chopra and Yash Raj Films for Paani?

Aditya Chopra is a very very successful filmmaker. He wants to stay within his zone of success whereas I am a bit of an adventurer.He is a much more  practical person than me.Everything that I’ve succeeded in doing in my career has come from not being practical .Everyone  in Bollywood  is playing money games…200 crore kiya, 300 crore kiya..It’s all about numbers.I am still very hopeful I’lll make Paani. If not with Aditya Chopra then someone else