Word: kapur
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Great directors are typically typecast as impractical, creative visionaries. They aren't supposed to care about numbers. But before he became a director in the early 1980s (after some limited success as a Bollywood actor and director of TV ads), Kapur worked for Burmah Oil in London."There aren't too many feature-film directors who began life as accountants," observes Blanchett. Today, Kapur is as comfortable at a business conference or giving a speech about fossil fuels as he is attending a film festival. "Actually, I believe that all creative people are schizophrenic," he says. Kapur's interest...
...This is no idle theory for Kapur. He's backing it with money, having persuaded New Age guru Deepak Chopra to help him set up Gotham Studios Asia, a business that will bring comic-book heroes such as Spider-Man and Batman to India, with new story lines in which brown-skinned superheroes battle figures from Indian myths in places like Calcutta. Kapur says he sold Chopra on the idea by telling him "that in five years we will notice a cultural change in the world, where Western pop culture will start to stagnate and a hybrid form of culture...
...years ago, when Kapur left Bollywood for Hollywood, America still struck him as the center of the creative universe. With a virtual monopoly on budgets and technical skill, L.A. was clearly the place to be for a foreign director with a single art-house hit, Bandit Queen. He was an immediate success. In 1998, Kapur directed Blanchett in Elizabeth, about the life of England's 16th century monarch. The movie was nominated for seven Oscars, winning one. Its magic, says Blanchett, lay in Kapur's slightly demented reinvention of period drama. "Elizabeth could have been incredibly musty," she says...
...Blanchett did indeed become a star, in movies like The Talented Mr. Ripley and Lord of the Rings. But Kapur's progress was less stellar. He made money, sure. On the Asian Rich List of the London Sunday Times, his wealth is estimated at $7 million. But his output was limited and oddly conventional. He directed the disappointing historical epic The Four Feathers (2002) and helped produce Andrew Lloyd Webber's striking but lowbrow Bombay Dreams (2004). Naseeruddin Shah, star of Monsoon Wedding and Kapur's 1983 debut Masoom (The Innocent), acknowledges Kapur's gift, calling him "the only Indian...
...Kapur insists that accusations of selling out are wide of the mark. Just because he understands how money works, he says, doesn't mean his concern is merely making a pile of it for himself. In fact, he adds, in the past few years his problem was too much cash: "With the amount we had on The Four Feathers, it's very difficult to retain creative control. There were meetings, meetings, meetings, when what I needed was to pay more attention to the script." It's not a mistake Kapur intends to repeat: his Mandela movie is already...