Spontaneity, gut feeling are fundamentals of my direction: Badhaai Ho director Amit Sharma

MUMBAI: The director is like the manager of a film who brings talent under one roof and extracts it to create good content, said film director and producer Amit Sharma while addressing fellow and budding content creators at the fourth edition of The Content Hub 2020 organised by indiantelevision.com earlier this month.

Sharma is the director of Ayushmann Khurrana-starring Badhaai Ho and is currently directing Ajay Devgn for an upcoming project called Maidan, which is scheduled for later this year.

While guiding content creators, he shared his experience of filmmaking and said that he believes in ‘NG cuts’ (not good cuts), which majority of the time, are useful for the film. He, playing a scene from his last directorial, explained the audience how a narration or storytelling should be done and how every director has their own journey to tell the story.

He also told the audience, “I never say cut as when you don’t say cut, the actor keeps improvising and this eventually helps to get the different moods of the character that the actor is playing.”  

Sharma said that he has never liked reading a script and has always visualised a scene before taking a final shot. “I don’t read scripts because I remember the story of the film with dialogues, full stop, and commas mentioned in the script. I also don’t make storyboards; don’t write my shots as it’s all in my mind,” he said.

In fact, he even leaves home with a blank mind. “I usually don’t have any idea or agenda while leaving from the home for shooting. Rather, during the shoot, I enact the scene to my actors along with the screenplay.”

Sharma, being a keen observer, points out that it’s important to feel the film from the perspective of different departments such as sound, art and DoP. The film is a team effort with music, actors’ performance and writers, among others.

Giving his mantra to the audience, Sharma said, “Spontaneous is the word that works for me and believing in gut feeling, which helps me create a scene or film. These two phenomena are the basic fundamentals of my direction.”

For him, it’s important that the scene affects him emotionally because only then will the audience also feel the same. “I like to play with the emotions of the audience in a good manner. My work is only done when the audience leaves theatres with either teary eyes or happy faces,” he added.

Before concluding, he proudly mentioned that extracting performance from the actors is something that is his forte.