Advait Chandan, director of Laal Singh Chaddha, has discovered one thing in his career as a filmmaker– he loves helming the stories he writes. In 2017, Advait made his directorial debut with Secret Superstar starring Aamir Khan. While the film was a commercial and critical success, his second movie Laal Singh Chaddha with Aamir Khan did not perform well at the box office.
Even though he cannot control a film’s destiny, the 35-year-old director has found that working on his own material makes him feel more confident. In Secret Superstar, he was the writer and director for the film, but the official Bollywood remake of the Hollywood classic Forrest Gump, Laal Singh Chaddha, was written by actor Atul Kulkarni.
During his interview with PTI at the event of the ongoing 53rd International Film Festival of India (IFFI), the Secret Superstar director said, “I feel I really enjoy the process of directing something I have written. I enjoy that because while writing I have visualised the scene. I enjoy that process. On Laal Singh, what I missed was that process of writing.”
He added that when you write the story you know the world inside out, you know the reasons behind every moment. “I feel much more confident when I have written the film because I can figure out what the actor is thinking. When I’m going with somebody else’s script, there can be a different way of looking at it,” he added.
Being born in Mumbai, the city of dreams and growing up as a movie buff in the ‘90s, Advait said joining the film industry was an obvious career choice. After completing his schooling, the director took the plunge into advertising, which led him to Aamir Khan Productions where he served as an assistant director for the 2007 film Taare Zameen Par, starring child actor Darsheel Safary and Aamir Khan.
He made Secret Superstar a decade later and followed it up with Laal Singh Chaddha, one of the most anticipated films of 2022. However, many criticized Aamir’s portrayal of a man with a low IQ in the movie.
As a 16-year veteran of mainstream cinema, Advait said he has figured out a way to deal with negativity is by “worrying about things you can control.”
He said, “People, who are spending so much money to watch our films, have all the right to criticise. But my only job is to tell a story with passion and give my 100 per cent. In the case of ‘Secret Superstar’, I cared about the story and told it.”
Although Laal Singh Chaddha was not his story, he fell in love with it when he read it. “The reactions – be it praise or brickbats — I can’t control them. It’s like I can’t control the weather. I only worry about things that I can control,” he stated.
According to the director, writing is like therapy for him, and he has already begun working on some ideas. In the near future, he hopes to direct a film that he will write himself.
Additionally, he claimed that if somebody offers him a film like Dangal, he obviously won’t leave it. “But ideally, I would like to direct something that I have written… I’m writing a few things and they are falling into place,” he added.
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