Karan Johar: Crossover phenomenon needs to be encouraged, leveraged

Karan Johar

Filmmaker Karan Johar, who will presenting the upcoming 2.0 for the Hindi speaking audience, said the crossover in Indian cinema should happen internally. During a press conference on Saturday, Karan said he is happy to have collaborated on "2.0" and "Baahubali", which he had also presented, but he cannot claim the credit for vision, creativity and execution of these two movies.

When asked if the success of Baahubali and 2.0 will pave way for more pan-India films, the filmmaker said, "Crossover in cinema should happen internally in India. We keep talking about crossover and that our films going out of the country but the true crossover is like Baahubali. It's a film made in Telugu which worked very well in North, West and East, everywhere."

"2.0 has that vision of working within the country. We have to encourage those crossover movements. Films in all languages, whether it's Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu or Malayalam, has to work all across (the country). That is the true vision. This is quintessential crossover movement phenomenon that needs to be encouraged and leveraged," he added.

The Ae Dil Hai Mushkil filmmaker does agree that south cinema is ahead of Bollywood in terms of budget and technology. Karan credits filmmakers in south for encouraging the crossover movement and believes it should happen in Hindi cinema as well.

"South industry has been a pioneer of this movement of meeting narrative and technology for like decades. They get their stories, emotions, scale and technology bang on. Some of us get stuck in a rut and we don't get out of that rut. We believe that we are in a safe spot, we are not. They have taught us, and in many ways made us feel inferior in a good way. I say that with positivity as it encourages us to do much better," he said. "We have had very few big eventful films, mainly by Sanjay Leela Bhansali, who have given us beautiful cinema spectacles. Now you will see a plethora of them, thanks to South industry.'

2.0 director S Shankar said for him script comes first and then technology. "Whatever technology a script demands I am using that. I go by script. For '2.0', new technology is used. In the film, we have cell man, the huge bird, and to set that up it took a lot of time," he added.

Karan is confident that 2.0, featuring Rajinikanth, Akshay Kumar and Amy Jackson, will be a cinema delight for the audiences. The film releases on November 29.

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