Saawariya Left Bhansali Lonely — and Guzaarish Was Born

Sanjay Leela Bhansali says his films create the world he lives in. His latest, Guzaarish, is about the pain and isolation he faced after Saawariya — and he is characteristically unsparing in describing it.

"I didn't realize how tired I was until the film was over. Then my body just gave up," he told IANS. "With Guzaarish, I've left more than just a portion of myself behind. In it, I've lived the pain of facing the isolation of failure after Saawariya." It was, he said, the toughest time of his life: "Suddenly, everyone disappeared, and that included the people who had worked with me on Saawariya for two years."

Out of that suffering came the film's subject. He began reading about mercy killing — studying the issue for nearly a year — and concluded, he says, that every human being should have the right to die with dignity. On the sets, specialist Indu Tandon introduced him to quadriplegics "paralysed in body but liberated in spirit," including a young man named John Julius, who became the film's inspiration and befriended its star, Hrithik Roshan.

Bhansali is equally frank about his critics. Aamir Khan's well-known reservations about Devdas and Black? "That's because he cares about my cinema. If he didn't, he wouldn't spend so much passion talking about it." On the charge that the child actor in Black was treated brutally, he rests his case on the principal of the Helen Keller Institute, who told him the film achieved in one release what the institute hadn't in 60 years.

Guzaarish is also the film for which Bhansali composed the music himself — "the songs came from deep within me" — and he counts Amitabh Bachchan's appreciation of the score among his proudest rewards. The film's magician-turned-quadriplegic, its Anglo-Indian milieu (a legacy, he says, of the schoolteachers whose red wine in crystal glasses offered an alternate reality to his Gujarati chawl childhood in Bhuleshwar), and Hrithik's physical transformation — learning magic tricks, gaining weight for a man fourteen years in bed — all serve the director's stated creed: "My films are my world."

"For me, the joy of crossing the boundaries of mainstream cinema is what making films is about," he says. "I've great faith in the audience."

Based on an interview with the Indo-Asian News Service.