Biopics aren't the problem! Lazy films that are like Wikipedia entries are, say Siddharth-Garima | Exclusive

Audiences coin "biopic overload," but Siddharth Singh and Garima Wahal defend the genre if it surprises, citing their Shivaji Maharaj project as pure storytelling. From Pune, they urged makers to go beyond facts for emotional depth like Bhansali's Gangubai Kathyawadi.

Q. It’s said that an increasing number of biopics are being made, often about people who aren’t very old. Do you think this trend is spiralling out of control?

Siddharth: I think it’s the audience’s perception. This happens a lot with Bollywood. It is the people’s thinking that there are too many biopics nowadays. The problem is not with making a biopic, because if it is a story worth telling, then why not?Garima: The problem is not making a biopic as it should be made, they are making a Wikipedia entry and not a film. Why are you making a Wikipedia page, tell me something that I don’t know.

In today’s time, everything is on the internet and people are aware. If the biopic is about a sportsperson and the makers want to narrate their story, then present it in a way that I don’t realise it was a biopic until the very end. But this bandwagon is done and dusted.

Now, nobody wants to ride the biopic wave unless it is a story of a hero, a guy/girl who struggled against odds and made it.Siddharth: But the category of ‘biopics’ is created by the audience. For example, if we are doing a film on a boxer, we don’t call it a biopic. For us, it’s a story, right now, we are writing a film on Chatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, even though it is a biopic, but we never call it a biopic amongst ourselves. It is a term coined by the audience. A movie is more than that, even if a biopic. Like how Bhansali made Gangubai, of course it was a biopic, but it was made so differently that it can also be a story of a girl marred by consequences.